SkyDrive on Windows 8.1

Microsoft integrated its SkyDrive file synchronization and hosting service into the Window 8.1 operating system in a way that it is enabled automatically for users signing in to the system with a Microsoft Account.

Local account users on the other hand -- those users who prefer to not use a Microsoft Account cannot use the implementation and are also not allowed to make use of the official SkyDrive application as it simply won't install on Windows 8.1.

So what options do those users have if they want to access files on SkyDrive, provided that this is their file syncing service of choice?

They can access the data in the web browser, but that is everything but comfortable. While it may be okay for accessing the occasional file, adding, editing or removing files is everything but.

There is however a way to set up SkyDrive on Windows 8.1 if you use a local account, or if you have disabled the integrated version while using a Microsoft Account.

SkyDrive in Windows 8.1

To enable access to SkyDrive on Windows 8.1, and other Windows operating systems for that matter, do the following:

• Load the official SkyDrive website in your web browser and sign in to the service if you have not done so already.
• Right-click on Files in the left sidebar and select Copy Link from the context menu.
• Paste the link into a text document or into the browser's address bar, and copy the cid number at the end of the link, e.g. https://skydrive.live.com/#cid=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxwhere xxx is the cid
• Open File Explorer in Windows 8.1.
• Select This PC from the left sidebar.
• Select Map Network Drive from the ribbon UI.
• Type https://d.docs.live.net/xxxxxxxxxxxxxx as the folder and replace the xxx line with the cid that you copied before.
• Select a drive letter for SkyDrive.

• Click on Finish and wait some time. The message "attempting to connect to" appears. It takes some time, but you will eventually be asked to enter your SkyDrive username and password.

• Type the data in and wait again. If you do not want to enter the data in every session, check the "remember my credentials" box.
• Note: If you use two-factor authentication, you need to type in an app password here that you can create under Security Info on your Microsoft Account page on the Internet.
• If everything goes alright, you should now see the new SkyDrive folder under This PC in File Explorer.

When you click on it, all of your folders and files become available on Windows 8.1.  This works on other Windows operating systems as well. (via Flgoo)

Closing Words

While you do get access to files hosted on SkyDrive directly in the operating system, you cannot make use of other features that Microsoft implemented on Windows 8.1.

Uninstall Windows 8.1

Windows 8.1 is a pretty good operating-system update. But it's also an operating-system update meaning that it can get tripped up by hidden software conflicts that don't arise when upgrading individual apps.

Unfortunately, Win 8.1 is also much harder to undo than other operating-system updates. Contrary to what its "point release" number might suggest, 8.1 is not some minor update you can roll back through the Windows Update control panel. And it's more difficult to roll back through the other usual mechanism in Windows, a system-recovery process.

A Microsoft frequently-asked-questions page about Win 8.1 explains this in conditional language that should give a reader pause: "If your PC came with Windows 8 you might be able to restore it back to Windows 8 by refreshing your PC."

Should that work, it will allow the most orderly retreat possible. Win 8's underrated "refresh" option will put a clean copy of the operating system in place, leaving your data intact but only reinstalling apps that came bundled on the computer or were obtained through the Windows Store.

To use this option, tap or click the bottom-right corner of the desktop (or swipe in from the right edge of the Start screen), select the gear-shaped Settings icon, and then select "Change PC settings."

In that screen, click or tap "Update and recovery," choose the Recovery option and proceed with a refresh from there. The computer will use the hard drive's system-recovery partition to put things back as they were when you took the computer out of the box, plus your own data.

If, however, you upgraded from Windows 7 or an older version to Windows 8 and then added 8.1 using Microsoft's free Windows Store download, the above process is out of the question.

As Microsoft's FAQ spells out, post-8.1 "you won't be able to use the recovery partition on your PC to go back to your previous version of Windows." If you hadn't earlier thought to create a recovery USB flash drive from that partition, you're most likely stuck doing a clean install of Windows. And that in turn usually requires beseeching or paying your PC's vendor for a Windows disc, because most computers don't ship with a separate system DVD.

ZDNet writer Ed Bott, an author of multiple Windows books, noted that Windows 7 includes the option to make a full "disk image" backup of the entire system. "If your reader had the foresight to make one of those image backups before doing the upgrade, they can be back exactly where they left off (minus any files that were changed between now and when the image was snapped)."

I can confirm that disk-image backups work, and that too many users don't think to make one until approximately one hour too late.

As for what could make a Win 8.1 update go bad, complaints I've gotten from readers generally focus on drivers the background bits of software that let the system talk to components like video cards and other apps that haven't been updated to work correctly in Win 8.1.

That's an old problem, and so is the most likely solution waiting for the software in question to be updated for 8.1. Wrote Bott: "I would try to solve the driver problem first if I could. That's going to lead to the best outcome and the least amount of heartache."

At least going back remains an option in Windows. The rewind button remains intact, even if it's harder to access. (OS X Mavericks also lets you revert to an older version through the Time Machine backup app.) Apple's iOS 7, however, can't be uninstalled at all.

Create a Windows 8 recovery drive

Unlike earlier versions of Windows, 8 and 8.1 include simple, quick tools to create USB system-recovery drives. You can then use one to repair your system or restore it to factory condition, even if Windows itself has become unbootable.

To do this, plug in a reasonably large and empty USB drive Microsoft says you'll need from 3 to 6 gigabytes switch to Win 8's Apps view, and type "create." The first result should be "Create a recovery drive."

Follow the prompts there; if you choose the option to copy the computer's recovery partition, you'll also be able to restore the machine to factory shape from this USB drive.

How Replication Works

Once Replica is enabled, the source host starts to maintain a HRL (Hyper-V Replica Log file) for the VHDs.  Every 1 write by the VM = 1 write to VHD and 1 write to the HRL.  Ideally, and this depends on bandwidth availability, this log file is replayed to the replica VHD on the replica host every 5 minutes.  This is not configurable.  Some people are going to see the VSS snapshot (more later) timings and get confused by this, but the HRL replay should happen every 5 minutes, no matter what.

The HRL replay mechanism is actually quite clever; it replays the log file in reverse order, and this allows it only to store the latest writes.  In other words, it is asynchronous (able to deal with long distances and high latency by write in site A and later write in site B) and it replicates just the changes.

 

Replication or replay of the HRL will normally take place every 5 minutes.  That means if a source site goes offline then you'll lose anywhere from 1 second to nearly 10 minutes of data.

Normally take place every 5 minutes.  Sometimes the bandwidth won't be there.  Hyper-V Replica can tolerate this.  After 5 minutes, if the replay hasn't happened then you get an alert.  The HRL replay will have another 25 minutes (up to 30 completely including the 5) to complete before going into a failed state where human intervention will be required.  This now means that with replication working, a business could lose between 1 second and nearly 1 hour of data.

Most organisations would actually be very happy with this. Novices to DR will proclaim that they want 0 data loss. OK; that is achievable with EUR100,000 SANs and dark fibre networks over short distances. Once the budget face smack has been dealt, Hyper-V Replica becomes very, very attractive.

That's the Recovery Point Objective (RPO – amount of time/data lost) dealt with.  What about the Recovery Time Objective (RTO – how long it takes to recover)?  Hyper-V Replica does not have a heartbeat.  There is not automatic failover.  There's a good reason for this.  Replica is designed for commercially available broadband that is used by SMEs.  This is often phone network based and these networks have brief outages.  The last thing an SME needs is for their VMs to automatically come online in the DR site during one of these 10 minute outages.  Enterprises avoid this split brain by using witness sites and an independent triangle of WAN connections.  Fantastic, but well out of the reach of the SME.  Therefore, Replica will require manual failover of VMs in the DR site, either by the SME's employees or by a NOC engineer in the hosting company.  You could simplify/orchestrate this using PowerShell or System Center Orchestrator.  The RTO will be short but have implementation specific variables: how long does it take to start up your VMs and for their guest operating systems/applications to start?  How long will it take for you to get your VDI/RDS session hosts (for remote access to applications) up, running and accepting user connections?  I'd reckon this should be very quick, and much better with the 4-24 hours that many enterprises aim for.  I'm chuckling as I type this; the Hyper-V group is giving SMEs a better DR solution than most of the Fortune 1000's can realistically achieve with oodles of money to spend on networks and storage replication, regardless of virtualisation products.

A common question I expect: there is no Hyper-V integration component for Replica.  This mechanism works at the storage level, where Hyper-V is intercepting and logging storage activity.

Replica and Hyper-V Clusters

Hyper-V Replica works with clusters.  In fact you can do the following replications:

•Standalone host to cluster

•Cluster to cluster

•Cluster to standalone host

The tricky thing is the configuration replication and smooth delegation of replication (even with Live Migration and failover) of HA VMs on a cluster.  How can this be done?  You can enable a HA role called a Hyper-V Replica Broker on a cluster (once only).  This is where you can configure replication, authentication, etc, and the Broker replicates this data out to cluster nodes.  Replica settings for VMs will travel with them, and the broker ensures smooth replication from that point on.

Configuring Hyper-V Replica

Here the fundamentals:

On the replica host/cluster, you need to enable Hyper-V Replica.  Here you can control what hosts (or all) can replicate to this host/cluster.  You can do things like have one storage path for all replicas, or creating individual policies based on source FQDN such as storage paths or enabling/pausing/disabling replication.

You do not need to enable Hyper-V Replica on the source host.  Instead, you configure replication for each required VM.  This includes things like:

• Authentication: HTTP (Kerberos) within the AD forest, or HTTPS (destination provided SSL certificate) for inter-forest (or hosted) replication.
• Select VHDs to replicate
• Destination
• Compressing data transfer: with a CPU cost for the source host.
• Enable VSS once per hour: for apps requiring consistency – not normally required because of the logging nature of Replica and it does cause additional load on the source host
• Configure the number of replicas to retain on the destination host/cluster: Hyper-V Replica will automatically retain X historical copies of a VM on the destination site.  These are actually Hyper-V snapshots on the destination copy of the VM that are automatically created/merged (remember we have hot-merge of the AVHD in Windows 8) with the obvious cost of storage.  There is some question here regarding application support of Hyper-V snapshots and this feature.

Initial Replication Method

I've worked in the online backup business before and know how difficult the first copy over the wire is.  The SME may have small changes to replicate but might have TBs of data to copy on the first synchronisation.  How do you get that data over the wire?

• Over-the-wire copy: fine for a LAN, if you have lots of bandwidth to burn, or if you like being screamed at by the boss/customer.  You can schedule this to start at a certain time.
• Offline media: You can copy the source VMs to some offline media, and import it to the replica site.  Please remember to encrypt this media in case it is stolen/lost (BitLocker-To-Go), and then erase (not format) it afterwards (DBAN).  There might be scope for an R2/Windows 9 release to include this as part of a process wizard.  I see this being the primary method that will be used.  Be careful: there is no time out for this option.  The HRL on the source site will grow and grow until the process is completed (at the destination site by importing the offline copy).  You can delete the HRLs without losing data it is not like a Hyper-V snapshot (checkpoint) AVHD.
• Use a seed VM on the destination site: Be very very careful with this option.  I really see it as being a great one for causing calls to MSFT product support.  This is intended for when you can restore a copy of the VM in the DR site, and it will be used in a differencing mechanism where the differences will be merged to create the synch.  This is not to be used with a template or similar VMs.  It is meant to be used with a restored copy of the same VM with the same VM ID.  You have been warned.

And that's it.  Check out the social media and you'll see how easy people are saying Hyper-V Replica is to set up and use.  All you need to do now is check out the status of Hyper-V Replica in the Hyper-V Management Console, Event Viewer (Hyper-V Replica log data using the Microsoft-Windows-Hyper-V-VMMS\Admin log), and maybe even monitor it when there's an updated management pack for System Center Operations Manager.

Failover

I said earlier that failover is manual.  There are two scenarios:

• Planned: You are either testing the invocation process or the original site is running but unavailable.  In this case, the VMs start in the DR site, there is guaranteed zero data loss, and the replication policy is reversed so that changes in the DR site are replicated to the now offline VMs in the primary site.
• Unplanned: The primary site is assumed offline.  The VMs start in the DR site and replication is not reversed. In fact, the policy is broken.  To get back to the primary site, you will have to reconfigure replication.Can I Dispense With Backup?No, and I'm not saying that as the employee of a distributor that sells two competing backup products for this market.  Replication is just that, replication.  Even with the historical copies (Hyper-V snapshots) that can be retained on the destination site, we do not have a backup with any replication mechanism.  You must still do a backup, as I previously blogged, and you should have offsite storage of the backup.Many will continue to do off-site storage of tapes or USB disks.  If your disaster affects the area, e.g. a flood, then how exactly will that tape or USB disk get to your DR site if you need to restore data?  I'd suggest you look at backup replication, such as what you can get from DPM:

The Big Question: How Much Bandwidth Do I Need?

 

There's a sizing process that you will have to do.  Remember that once the initial synchronisation is done, only changes are replayed across the wire.  In fact, it's only the final resultant changes of the last 5 minutes that are replayed.  We can guestimate what this amount will be using approaches such as these:

• Set up a proof of concept with a temporary Hyper-V host in the client site and monitor the link between the source and replica: There's some cost to this but it will be very accurate if monitored over a typical week.
• Do some work with incremental backups: Incremental backups, taken over a day, show how much change is done to a VM in a day.
• Maybe use some differencing tool: but this could have negative impacts.

Some traps to watch out for on the bandwidth side:

• Asynchronous broadband (ADSL):  The customer claims to have an 8 Mbps line but in reality it is 7 Mbps down and 300kbps up.  It's the uplink that is the bottleneck because you are sending data up the wire.  Most SME's aren't going to need all that much.  My experience with online backup verifies that, especially if compression is turned on (will consume source host CPU).
• How much bandwidth is actually available: monitor the customer's line to tell how much of the bandwidth is being consumed or not by existing services.  Just because they have a functional 500 kbps upload, it doesn't mean that they aren't already using it.

Suggestion

 

Hyper-V Replica works by intercepting writes to VHDs.  It has no idea of what's inside the files.  You can't just filter out the paging file.  So the excellent suggestion from the Hyper-V product group is to place the paging file of each VM onto a different VHD, e.g. a SCSI attached D drive.  Do not select this drive for replication.  When the VMs are failed over, they'll still function without the paging file, just not as well.  You can always add one after if the disaster is sustained.  The benefit is that you won't needlessly replicate paging file changes from the primary site to the DR.

 

Install Hyper-V R2

Installing Hyper-V R2 is very similar to installing a Core deployment of Windows Server 2008 R2. Without the familiar GUI and with a lower cumulative experience base in the community to draw upon, this can be a somewhat intimidating process. Fortunately, it really isn't difficult and a fully functional Hyper-V installation can be built in no more time than it would take to deploy any other new Windows Server. All you need is a little guidance and a little patience for using the command line.

Planning

As always, proper planning is critical to achieving a quick and successful deployment. Because this article is more of a how-to than a complete deployment guide, you are encouraged to read the entire guide from start to finish before doing anything. We are planning to release a very thorough document in the future.

Things to Remember

• Microsoft usually has at least two ways to do any one thing. If you see a step here and you know of or prefer a different way, that's perfectly acceptable.
• When working at the command or PowerShell prompt, the [TAB] key is your friend. You can navigate through deep directory structures and enter long file names with ease by keying in the first few letters and hitting [TAB] to let Windows figure it out. It will cycle through file names and directory names. In a PowerShell prompt, it will cycle through those and in-context commands or command switches. For instance, "CD \Pr[TAB]" will get Windows to suggest "CD \Program Files". Another press of [TAB] will have it suggest "CD \Program Files (x86)".

Initial Installation

To actually install Hyper-V is very simple. You'll need to acquire the DVD image from Microsoft and burn it to a disc. Assuming that your physical host is prepared (i.e., hard drives partitioned as desired), you simply boot to the DVD and follow the prompts. There really aren't any options to set or change during the installation phase.

Beginning Configuration

The first part of setting up your Hyper-V host is pretty much the same as setting up a machine running Windows Server Core. What's especially helpful is that "sconfig.cmd" will run automatically at startup so you'll be immediately presented with a simplistic way to configure your system. There is nothing here that can't be done at the command-line and you're free to investigate the contents of the sconfig.vbs file to see what's going on under the hood.

sconfig.cmd

Start by renaming your server according to your company standards (option 2 on the sconfig menu). Once that has been done and the server has rebooted, configure the network card that you'll be using to manage the physical host with (option 8 on the sconfig menu). Hopefully, your server has multiple network adapters (optimally two for a standalone server and five for a clustered server). For the beginning portion, the only one you are required to configure is the management adapter. If you can't tell from looking at the sconfig menu which adapter is which, the easiest way to find out is to only plug a network cable into the adapter that you want to use (make sure the other end is in a live switch port). Click on the "Administrator:  C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe" window to get to a clean command prompt and type "IPCONFIG". Scroll through the output looking for a physical network card that does not say "Media disconnected" and note its description. Switch back to the sconfig window and look for the network card with a matching description. That's the one you want to configure. Use options 1 and 2 to set its IP and DNS as needed. Optionally, you can continue to set all IP information for the other adapters as well, but once got the server on the network, you can install Core Configurator on it which is a much simpler tool to use. Once the IP is set for the management adapter, you can now join it to your Windows Active Directory domain with option 1.

Now you'll want to step through the remaining options in sconfig to complete the initial configuration of the parent partition environment. Adding a local administrator is optional and will be driven largely by your organization's security practices. If you're going to virtualize a domain controller, it will live on this host, and it will be the only one in your organization, then being able to log on as a local administrator is absolutely vital. If the Hyper-V host is a domain member and can't reach its domain controller (perhaps because it's turned off), you might not be able to connect with Hyper-V Manager. In that case, you'll need to log in as a local administrator so you can do the necessary work, such as starting a restore of the domain controller and/or using WMIC (or, much preferred, PSHyperV) to start the domain controller virtual machine. Because of that, if your organization does not normally share the password for the built-in administrator account with all administrators, you'll need to ensure that all server operators for this unit will have some way to log in locally.

Make sure that you work through all items in option 4 so that you can remotely manage your Hyper-V server. Once you've gone through all the items here, you'll be able to use Computer Management, Hyper-V Manager, and Failover Cluster Manager from a remote Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 computer. You'll even be able to remotely run PowerShell scripts, if they're digitally signed. Follow up the remote management section with option 7 to enable Remote Desktop connections. The failover cluster feature is only necessary if you will be placing this server in a cluster. You may want to skip the Automatic Update section as that can also be configured through Core Configurator.

Now that your Hyper-V host is on the network, the final step of generic preparation will be to download and install any manufacturer-specific drivers that you'd like to use. Usually, you can just run the driver installer package like you would in a GUI environment. If any drivers require manual installation, it will be easier with Core Configurator. Now is a good time to load that package. Core Configurator does not have an installer. Download the ZIP file, use Windows Explorer to unblock it (open the properties dialog for the ZIP file and look near the bottom; if you don't see an Unblock button, then you don't need to worry about it), and extract the contents. You can either connect to your Hyper-V server at \\HOSTNAME\c$ or you can use COPY or ROBOCOPY at the Hyper-V command prompt to retrieve the files from a network share. Run "Start_Coreconfig.wsf" to start the software.

Core Configurator – Network

Hyper-V Configuration

Your parent partition is now properly configured for normal operation, so it's time to move on to getting Hyper-V fully functional. At this point, that mainly consists of setting up the virtual switch for your guests to use. Again, it is possible to do this using command-line tools: WMIC, NSVPBIND, and the aforementioned PSHyperV will all do the trick. Generally speaking, these should not be your first tools of choice. Instead, use Hyper-V Manager. If you're not sure how, we published an earlier article with usage instructions. Use it to create a Virtual Network on an adapter that you didn't set up as the management adapter. If you've only got one NIC, then you can use the "Allow management operating system to share this network adapter" checkbox. This is definitely not a preferred configuration. All traffic used by your parent partition will have to share the pipe with all of your virtual machines. The are two concerns with doing so. First, if anything goes wrong with your virtual switch or your management adapter, it will affect the other. Switch misconfigurations will knock the entire server offline. Second, Hyper-V will give all ports equal weighting. For the most part, that may not be an issue as the management adapter generally doesn't move a lot of traffic. It will be very busy during backup windows, however.

If you're going to cluster this Hyper-V Server, make absolutely certain that you pay attention to the name that you give your Virtual Network. It must be the same on all nodes in a cluster or virtual machines will be disconnected from the network if they're migrated between Hyper-V hosts.

Wrap-Up

At this point, you have a fully functioning Hyper-V Server. Make sure that you document everything that you've done. In most cases, there's not a lot of benefit in backing up the parent partition itself because it takes about the same amount of time to rebuild it from scratch as it does to restore it. You will, of course, need to backup your VMs. Now is as good a time as any to install backup software onto your system and get it tested. Once the configuration is as desired, use a tool such as Core Configurator to apply any needed patches from Windows Update. If your Hyper-V Server is standalone, all that's left is testing and deployment. If it will be part of a cluster, continue on to part 2 of this series. We hope this has been helpful to those who would like to install Hyper-V

Windows 8 Client Hyper-V

Set up Client Hyper-V the right way and avoid the frustrations experienced by others. 

Microsoft announced that they are ending support for Windows XP SP3 on April 8th 2014. Since that official announcement I have been receiving a lot of email from Windows XP users making the move to Windows 8 and wondering about support for something like Windows 7's XP Mode. In other words, they want to be able to move to Windows 8 and take Windows XP with them so that they have something to fall back on as they get used to Windows 8.

Well, unfortunately Microsoft did not incorporate anything similar to XP Mode in Windows 8. However, if you are running a 64-bit version of Windows 8 Professional or Windows 8 Enterprise, these versions of the operating system come with a new virtualization tool called Client Hyper-V that you can use to run a virtual Windows XP machine inside of Windows 8.

This blog post is also available as a TechRepublic Screenshot Gallery.

Of course, in order to be able to run Client Hyper-V, your system must meet several hardware requirements. For instance, the 64-bit CPU in your system must support Second Level Address Translation (SLAT) technology and your system must have at least 4GB of RAM. (There are several other system requirements that must be in place as well, but I'll cover these in a moment.)

In most cases, the procedure of setting up is Windows 8's Client Hyper-V is relatively straightforward. However, as I have corresponded with various users performing the necessary steps, I've learned that the procedure can be tricky and confusing - especially if the users were not sure how to get started or ran into problems along the way.

One of the most common problems people were encountering has to do with a key virtualization feature being disabled in the computer's firmware and them not knowing it. Unfortunately, you can't install Client Hyper-V without these features being enabled and as you can imagine the problem just snowballs from there.

As I worked through this problem, I developed a set of steps that eventually led these users to success. To save other users who may be thinking of incorporating Client Hyper-V from frustration, I decided to write an article showing you how to get started with Windows 8's Client Hyper-V the right way.

Requirements

Let me begin with a brief reiteration of the most obvious requirements. As I mentioned, Windows 8's Client Hyper-V is only available in the 64-bit versions of Windows 8 Pro and Windows 8 Enterprise. It is not available in the 32-bit versions nor is it available in Windows 8 basic or in Windows RT.

Again, your system must have at least 4GB of RAM and your 64-bit CPU must support Second Level Address Translation (SLAT) technology. Most of the current crop of 64-bit CPUs from Intel and AMD provide SLAT support.

Checking System Information

Before you attempt to install Windows 8's Client Hyper-V, you need to verify that everything in your system is ready to run a virtualized environment. Unbeknownst to many Windows 8 users, Microsoft added new information gathering features to the old System Information tool thus making it very easy to verify whether your Windows 8 system can run Client Hyper-V.

To launch System Information in Windows 8, use the [Windows] + Q keystroke to access the Apps Search page. Then, type msinfo32 in the text box and click msinfo32.exe, as shown in Figure A. If you prefer, you can use the [Windows] + R keystroke to bring up the Run dialog box, type msinfo32 in the Open text box, and click OK.

Figure A

Accessing the System Information from the Start screen is easy.

Either way you launch the System Information, once it is up and running, you'll want to remain on the System Summary screen, which appears by default. Now, scroll to the bottom of the right panel. When you do, you'll see four key pieces of information about your system's ability to run Hyper-V. As shown in Figure B, all of them should have a value of Yes.

Figure B

In order to successfully install Windows 8's Client Hyper-V, all these values must be set to Yes.

Now, if any of the key virtualization features are disabled in the computer's firmware, System Information will alert you to that fact immediately. My test system for this article is an HP Pavilion P2-1124 and when I ran System Information, I discovered that the Virtualization Enabled in Firmware had a value of No, as shown in Figure C. What this means is that the system has the capability to provide virtualization support, but the feature is disabled in the firmware. So, you just have to enable it.

Figure C

This indicates that the system has the capability to provide virtualization support, but the feature is disabled in the firmware.

In general, if either the Virtualization Enabled in Firmware or the VM Monitor Mode Extensions are set to No, you can enable those features in the firmware. However, if the Second Level Address Translation Extensions or the Data Execution Protection settings are set to No, then you will not be able to use Windows 8's Client Hyper-V.

Enabling the Virtualization support

As you can imagine, there are a wide variety of interfaces and naming conventions when it comes to accessing and changing the Virtualization support in a computer's firmware, so you may want to begin by investigating the technical support section of your computer manufacturer's Web site to learn more about the specifics of your particular system's firmware

As I mentioned, my test system for this article is an HP Pavilion P2-1124 and the only setting that needs to be changed is the Virtualization Enabled in Firmware. However, if on your system the VM Monitor Mode Extensions are also set to No, you should be able to enable them in the firmware. Again, check the technical support section of your computer manufacturer's Web site.

To access my HP computer's firmware Setup Utility, I must press the [Esc] when I am prompted to do so as the system is booting up. I then saw the Startup Menu and selected the Computer Setup item, as shown in Figure D.

Figure D

On the HP Pavilion P2-1124, I see the Startup Menu after pressing [Esc].

Once in the Hewlett-Packard Setup Utility, I pulled down the Security Menu and selected System Security. When I saw the System Security dialog box, I used the arrow keys to change the Virtualization Technology setting from Disable to Enable. This procedure is illustrated in Figure E.

Figure E

In the Hewlett-Packard Setup Utility, the Virtualization Technology setting is on the Security menu.

To put the setting into play, I pressed [F10] and then selected the Save Changes and Exit command from the File menu. I then encountered an Are you sure prompt and selected Yes. The system then rebooted.

Installing Client Hyper-V

With the Virtualization Technology setting now enabled, I can install Client Hyper-V correctly on my example system. While Client Hyper-V is built into the 64-bit versions of Windows 8 Pro and Windows 8 Enterprise, it is not installed by default. However, you can do so easily from the Programs and Features tool.

To install Client Hyper-V, you begin by pressing [Windows] + X to access the WinX menu and then select Programs and Features. When the Programs and Features dialog box appears, you select Turn Windows features on or off. You'll then see the Windows Feature dialog box and will locate the Hyper-V in the list. This process is illustrated in Figure F.

Figure F

You install Windows 8's Client Hyper-V from the Programs and Features tool.

If you expand the Hyper-V tree, you'll see that all the items in the tree are selected, as shown inFigure G.

Figure G

When turning on Hyper-V it is best to enable all of the features.

When you click OK, Windows Features will install Client Hyper-V and then prompt you to Restart your system. This process is illustrated in Figure H.

Figure H

Installing Client Hyper-V requires a Restart.

As the operating system processes the installation, you'll see messages on the screen similar to the one shown in Figure I, both before and after the initial restart.

Figure I

Once you initiate the restart, you'll see a message on the screen similar to this one.

When Windows 8 completes the installation, you'll find you'll find two tiles on the Start Screen for Hyper-V, as shown in Figure J. The Hyper-V Virtual Machine Connection is a Remote Desktop-like tool that you will use to connect to your virtual machine after it is created and the Hyper-V Manager launches the management console that you'll use to create and manage your virtual machine.

Figure J

Hyper-V places two tiles on the Start Screen

Creating a new Hyper-V Virtual Machine is a detailed and intricate procedure in and of itself. As such, I plan to cover the process in detail in several future articles. Stay tuned.