Windows Vista Screencast – Hyper-V Remote Management

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By now I’m sure you’ve heard about the Remote Server Administration Toolkit (RSAT) that released and your ability to run those tools on Windows Vista SP1.  Around the same timeframe, we shipped Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V RC0.  A week after that, we shipped the RC0 tools that allow you to manage a Hyper-V role server from a Windows Vista SP1 admin workstation.

Here’s a quick 8 minute screencast on the subject to show you where to get the tools and once installed, what it looks like from your Vista desktop.

Like I mentioned in the screencast, you have a few chores to make this work.  The number of steps really depends on the infrastructure you are working with, the authentication models, etc.  To run the tools, the obvious first prerequisite is Windows Vista updated to SP1.  It can be either a x86 or x64 version of Windows Vista.  The screencast above was recorded on Windows Vista Ultimate x64 SP1.

Next, you need to download the packages needed to update Windows Server 2008 to Hyper-V RC0, update your guest VMs, and install the management tools on Vista.  Get the four packages at the following locations:

Now that you have the bits, install the update to Windows Server 2008 first.  After that, you’ll probably want to update any existing VMs with the updates as well.  That is rather tricky considering the RC0 update will break the integration components and networking adaptors for beta virtual machines.  You have a couple of choices.  You could use a Legacy Network Adaptor and access the update from a share on your network, or you could build an .ISO and mount it.

As for the permissions needed to run the remote management tools, that is also rather tricky depending on the network you have.  In my case, my test environments are all in separate workgroups.  For my connection to succeed, I need to use an account that is local to the Hyper-V server.  I also need the appropriate WMI firewall ports to be open, DCOM permissions need to be set, etc.  I had planned to document those steps in detail a couple of weeks ago, but got busy with the video stuff.  Thankfully, John Howard has already done this and published it to his blog.  Here are the scenarios you’ll likely need to consider and the steps to fix them up:

As you can see, there’s work involved updating to RC0 and running the tools.  Don’t let that dissuade you from trying.  Running the Hyper-V admin tools from Windows Vista SP1 rocks.  It’s certainly going to enable all kinds of interesting virtualization scenarios. 

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