Immediately after finishing the post on performance testing of Windows Server Virtualizaiton testing, Microsoft released W2K8 release candidate 1 with a updated version of their virtualization layer. The virtualizaiton role is now referred to as Hyper-V.

I've set out to do a new round of testing with Hyper-V and W2K8 RC1. However, I ran into a problem getting connected to the iSCSI LUN on the MD3000i. I was unable to get the Disk Management tool to load from within Server Manager. At first I thought that it was an issue with how I setup the iSCSI initiator on WK8, but some google searches revealed that this was a more generic issue with the Disk Management tool. And infoworld reviewer Paul Venezia ran into the exact same problem as me during his review.

I was able to workaround this by using the DISKPART command line utility to mount the drive that resided on the MD3000i. I was using the same LUN as with my previous testing, so I just needed to use the DISK ONLINE command to get my drive up and running, but there are other commands such as CREATE and FORMAT that can be used to get a brand-new LUN partitioned and ready for use.

I was also able to boot the VMs from the previous testing, proving that they are portable. I will most likely recreate new VMs however, to evaluate the create VM wizards in this new version.

 Todd