Friday, February 9, 2018

Windows 10 updates and Hyper-V - beware!

So, I always have a local copy of a full SharePoint farm with a domain controller, data base, exchange server, SharePoint servers from version 2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016 on my desktop.

Its a beast with 16 cores and 100gb of ram.

The OSs of the VMs are windows server versions, some newer and some older like windows server 2008 R2.

In one of the recent updates on my windows 10 host OS, all my VMs were completely gone from hyper V.
I lost all configurations and all snapshots without any warning!

Only 1 VM survived - the one with the newest OS running the SP2016 server.

After re-adding my VMs using the original VHD drives I thought the worst is behind me.

Not so -

It seems the good guys at Microsoft went into a bit of a logic-endless-loop here...

See, they moved all hyper-v drivers into windows update.
Since it is all in windows update - there is no need for the VM integration disc anymore.
So, they removed the vmguest.iso file and the menu option to "insert integration services setup disk".
They claim it is not needed since all VMs now have the network drivers built-in and then can connect to windows update to get the drivers they need.
What about OSs that don't have the drivers? - use the legacy network drive!
But, the legacy network drive doesn't work on 64bit OS.
No problem - get the latest drive from windows update!

Well, after going around in a loop for a day and a half I was finally able to get the vmguest.iso file from a colleague (Thanks Kevin!).

I inserted it into the VM and run the installation, and once completed my network adapter showed up again.

 I guess this was done since Microsoft doesn't officially support windows 2008 anymore, the question is - why purposely kill support for this OS? You had something working, why not just keep it as it?

Or, it could have just been something they missed in the latest update.

Anyway - keep an eye out for this update, and keep a safe copy of the vmguest.iso if you got one!

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