More pains in moving Hyper-V virtual machines
Especially if you are going to move between Hyper-V and Hyper-V / Virtual Server.
First of all, if you need to move virtual machines from one hyper-v to another hyper-v, you need to do an export before you can import it back into Hyper-V. I didn't read the documentation with regards to what export does (currently don't have time), but recently, I need to make a copy of the virtual machine (no, snapshot is not what I wanted), and I used the export function and import it back into hyper-V. First, I see two virtual machines with the same name. The only thing that allows me to differentiate which is which is the creation date. I noticed that the screen resolution has changed.
I don't like the export functionality at all. If it is copying the VHD, and create a configuration file which Hyper-V can understand and import, why can't we just copy the entire folder which has the configuration file and vhd and add it into another Hyper-V machine as an existing virtual machine? I like the way virtual pc and virtual server is handling virtual machines now. Virtual Server keep failing on me, and I have to do a re-install every two months or so. All I need is just to add existing machines, and I'm good to go. Every release of Windows 2008, I don't do upgrade (as upgrade failed on me before), but clean install. But Hyper-V does not allow me to add existing machines. I have to export first. And I don't remember I need to export in vmware as well!
Moving between Hyper-V and virtual server is another thing. First, if you intend to move to virtual server (because there is not other option for virtualisation on client other than virtual server and virtual pc), don't create a IDE harddisk bigger than 129gb. Second, your virtual machine may not work well when moving back to virtual server. I had a MOSS 2007 that was created in virtual server. Moved it to Hyper-V to do my development. Yesterday, I had to move it back to virtual server as a backup demo virtual machine, just in case I'm at the mercy of broadband on mobile. Straight off copying the vhd over, the virtual machine doesn't boot. Duplicate the virtual machine in Hyper-V to uninstall the Integration Service component, and copy it to virtual server again, also doesn't boot the thing. Give up, as I'm running late.
Another plea to Microsoft. Please don't forget the virtualisation story on Vista! You are not leaving a lot of option for the minority geeks who are still supporting you! Now that Windows 2008 does not have the sleep function when installed on a laptop, I have two less reason to stick to Hyper-V, and use VMWare now!
P.S. In response to this post about why sleep is not available. I don't see why the host need to save the state of the running virtual machine. Why can't the sleep function put the virtual machines into pause state, and save the memory state of the host?