I got a new laptop yesterday.  It’s primary role will be to run Hyper-V and VMM so I can use it for user group events, various speaking engagements, writing work, etc.  It’s a pretty powerful machine:

• Dell Latitude 6500
• Intel Centrino dual core 2.8GHz
• 1 * 4GB RAM
• 7.6K 250GB SATA drive
• Long life battery

The first thing I did last night was order an additional 4GB of RAM to max it out at 8GB.  That’ll allow me to run lots of VM’s.  I had a few options on how I would build the OS on this machine.  It will be running Windows Server 2008 R2 but I also want to use it for normal stuff, i.e. Windows 7.

I considered setting up a boot-from-VHD option:

• Windows 7 native with Server in a VHD.  The problem here is that I’d like to run demo machines on the internal disk where possible in smaller demos.
• Server native with Windows 7 in a VHD.  The problem here is that the VHD would really have to be quite big and eat up disk.

That’s when I remembered I had another 160GB 7.6K SATA drive.  I’ve installed Windows 7 on the 160GB drive and Windows Server 2008 R2 on the 250GB drive.  That gives me two isolated environments.

First thing I did was check the BIOS was up to date (A16).  Then I enabled CPU assisted virtualisation and DEP in the BIOS.  Windows 7, Live Essentials, Microsoft Security Essentials, Office, Visio, Adobe Reader, Faststone Image Viewer all went onto the Windows 7 x64 build.  I went x64 so the machine could use all 8GB RAM instead of 3.4 GB.  Dell had the Windows 7 x64 drivers which I installed. 

Next went Windows Server 2008 R2.  Again, I used the Windows 7 x64 drivers.  I set up the machine as a DC with DNS (not to be done on Hyper-V in production).  I enabled the Windows Desktop Experience.  I then enabled Hyper-V.  Perfect – no issues.  I set up an internal virtual network.  I’ve given it a static IP that is not used anywhere else.  That’ll be the IP of that LAN.  I set up the Wifi NIC on the laptop and then installed RRAS and configured it to be a router.  The three “NIC’s” the wifi , wired and the internal network all route to each other.  In theory this means my VM’s can now talk over wifi (not natively possible in Hyper-V).

Why do this?  When doing user group events at the MS offices I plug my laptop into the wired guest network so I can run LiveMeeting for webcasts.  My laptop will get a DHCP address on the wired (or wifi elsewhere) NIC.  My VM’s can always run on the same IP range with RRAS will then route to the DHCP network.  I’ve not tested it yet – that’s tonight.

Next up I want to set up VMM on the parent partition and then get some stuff into the library, e.g. some ISO’s and some VHD’s.  That means building some Windows Server 2008 R2 VM’s.  My primary focus is on the deployment side: WAIK, WDS and MDT 2010 for our next user group event.  Odds are I will set up a small Windows 7 boot-from-VHD image for those emergency scenarios.  I also need to install office on the server for running things like PowerPoint and LiveMeeting for the webcasts.  So far, the parent is only using just about 1.1 – 1.2GB of RAM.  Not bad.

I stopped at about 1am this morning.  To be honest, I think I could have gone all night with it but I have a day long meeting today – oh the joy!