Richard Siddaway's Blog

Beginning of the week I took delivery of a Lenovo W510 – i7 quad core with Hyper-Threading (Windows sees 8 cores) and 16GB of RAM.  From reviews I’d seen it seemed to run Hyper-V OK so it fitted the bill for a mobile lab.

Partitioned the disk OK and got Windows 2008 R2 installed.  Had to download a few drivers from the Lenovo (IBM) site but everything I needed was there or on the box already.  I’d ordered it with Windows 7 64bit so most of the drivers were available.

Installed Hyper-V and joined it to the domain.

Started moving Virtual Machines on to it and it started crash with a Blue Screen of Death.  Not good & I’m not amused at this point. Eventually got to the point where it wouldn’t start – continual BSOD.  Very not good – my new toy is going back if this continues!

Did some research and it seems there can be a conflict between core parking and Hyper-V.  Core parking is a power saving technology that puts cores to sleep if they are not being used. Hyper-V expects them to be there = BANG.

I booted into the BIOS screen and disabled the power management features on the CPU (and PCI bus for good measure) that enable core parking.  Restarted and everything now seems OK.

I can comfortably run a bunch of VMs and have a reasonable performance. 

Then I discovered that I had to reactivate Windows on all the VMs.  They’d been originally been running on a machine with AMD processor. New processor is Intel.  Its enough of a change to trigger reactivation.

All done and everything seems to work fine.

Time to get Virtual Machine Manager installed and see what that actually does.