The World According to Mitch

Recently I sat a Microsoft Partner training class to prepare me for a new product. The virtual hard drives (VHD) and the virtual machines (VMC) were distributed to work on Virtual PC on Windows 7. Someone asked the instructor if the machines could be used in Hyper-V, so we decided to try it out. Of course it did, but there was a little tweaking required. Here are the steps that I took to make it so in Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V.

1. I created a new Virtual Machine in Hyper-V. Simple enough, I just pointed the VM to the original VHD file provided to me. (If I were in my lab environment I would probably have performed a V2V conversion using System Center Virtual Machine Manager, but that would probably have been overkill)
2. After booting into the new VM, I removed the Virtual Machine Additions. This may be a bit tricky because in all likelihood you will not be able to use your mouse; my suggestion is to switch to full-screen mode first, which will at least let you use key combinations to access the Start Menu and such.   (The Virtual Machine Additions are the tools that allow your virtual PC to interact properly with the physical PC, including drivers and such. For people familiar with the VMware world, they are the previous equivalent of VMware Tools. They are installed as an application, and as such can be uninstalled from the Add/Remove Programs screen in Windows XP, or the Uninstall or change a program window in Windows 7.)
3. After you have rebooted, depending on the version of Windows Server you have, you will likely have to reinstall the Integration Services. These are the Hyper-V equivalent of the Virtual Machine Additions. The installation is started by clicking the Action menu in the Virtual Machine Connection window of the Virtual Machine. This will attach the virtual installation CD to the VM, and from within the VM you will follow the simple instructions to install them. Because Windows 7 is by design a Hyper-V aware OS, it comes with a version of the Integration Components installed. If you are running the latest version of Hyper-V, you may be told that your Integration Components are an older version. The wizard will cleanly upgrade them for you.

That’s it! You should now be able to use your Virtual PC machine on Hyper-V. Have fun!