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Hyper-V hyped

Posted on 5 Mar 2008 at 16:50

Jon Honeyball calls for the Hyper-V hypervisor to have a less stupid name, and David Moss looks at file synchronisation under Windows XP and Vista.

Want to change the version everyone is using? Change it on the main server and everyone gets the new app. "DLL Hell" is abolished and you have a far-better-managed environment. This trick complements other Microsoft virtualisation technologies: you could publish apps from SoftGrid into a termserve environment, then deliver the user interface via a thin-client desktop, for example.

Deploying and managing applications, users and data is going to get a lot more complex and will take a lot of learning, so make sure you have TechED USA, IT Forum USA and the next PDC in your diary. I'd wager that PDC will show the new Windows kernel, possibly wrapped into the Hyper-V Server product.

Home Server

I've studiously avoided Microsoft's Home Server product until now, on the grounds that any product that benefits from clustering and a SAN has no place in the home. (My home actually has both, but let that pass...) Then I spotted the dinky little HP Home Server in my local computer emporium, and ata few hundred quid I couldn't resist. I'm most impressed by this little box: build quality isn't bad, and the three SATA drive trays (a fourth is already filled) warmed my heart. Better still wasthe promise of the Microsoft Home Server operating system- surely this could be the beginning of something really big.

First, though, I had to get the thing running. The box runs as a headless server, so you install the configuration software onto a nearby Vista machine, which finds the HP on the LAN and connects to it. In theory, that is... My Vista desktop PC steadfastly refused to find the server. If I unplugged both boxes and put them on their own private switch then everything worked fine because both boxes failed to find a DHCP server so dropped into the 16x.x.x.x private IP address range, where communication was faultless. Connect to my main network, though, and the Vista box lost touch with the server.

I thought this must be a DHCP issue, but both boxes are DHCP clients and there's no DHCP server on the HP box. Strangely, I had no problem connecting to the HP server through a standard Terminal Server window at the appropriate IP address. HP's management software simply isn't good enough, its "can't find the server, sorry, shutting down" attitude being tantamount to saying "screw you". This software is supposed to help resolve problems, but it just farts in your general direction, as Monty Python put it. (I've seen this attitude from other HP software recently: on flatbed scanners, all-in-ones and even plain printers. How anyone could create a printer driver so unnecessarily complex as the monstrous HP Universal Printer Driver is beyond me - someone senior at HP needs a slap.)

But back to Home Server. I finally got it running by fiddling via Terminal Server, and it works well enough. Drop some files on it and they get shared, and it backs up each PC nightly- think of it as a NAS with attitude. However, it's lacking in pizzazz. Where's the centralised TV recording facility? Proper media distribution? Why only one ethernet port? Why isn't it a home firewall? What about centralised patch management? The more I looked, the more I wanted - and the less I found.

A poke around internally revealed that HP has added a pile of third-party and open-source code to the base OS in an attempt to inject some sparkle, including the PostgreSQL database engine (how the SQL Server group must be wincing). In the end, this is a slightly brain-damaged version of Windows Server 2003, from which they couldn't even be bothered to remove a lot of redundant high-end tools such as the full Server Cluster Management toolkit. It isn't clear whether this is sheer laziness or whether the Windows Update patching facility would get its knickers twisted if these tools were removed.