It’s not uncommon to see people who need a portable lab or demonstration environment looking at Hyper-V on a laptop as their solution. Windows Server 2008 runs quite nicely on a laptop. In fact, because the default install has almost no functionality it can actually run faster than Vista. There’s a few downsides to running Hyper-V on a laptop:
- Slow/small disk: Dave Northey in Microsoft Ireland has shown how to get around that if you have the budget. Choosing a laptop that supports 8GB RAM, using a solid state disk and plugging in large disk for your VM’s sorts all this out.
- Wireless Networking: Wifi NIC’s are not supported in Hyper-V. However, there is a workaround, courtesy of the Virtual PC Guy.
- Hibernation is not available: Hyper-V was seen purely as a server solution. Seeing as server operate 24 hours per day, the developers didn’t see the need for hibernation. If you’re running Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V enabled then you cannot hibernate. However, Ben Armstrong is back again with some good news. Windows Server 2008 R2 can allow you to boot up the laptop in one of two modes. One allows Hyper-V with no hibernation and the other allows hibernation with no Hyper-V. Just power up the laptop into the correct mode for your situation, e.g. normal office mode or lab/demonstration mode.