Virtualization, Virtualization, Virtualization, that is the buzz at the moment with the release of Microsoft’s Hyper-V in Windows 2008 Server. I have working with Hyper-V a bit over the past couple of weeks and my impression is both good and bad. Now I must admit that I have not really had a lot to do with Virtual Server 2005 and other virtualization technologies in the past, but I have decided to consolidate alot of my servers, considering I have had to run a lot on souped up desktops!

One thing that I am getting my head around is “Snap Shots”. I was reading a post about another Nightmare Hyper-V Story, and it was pretty close to the mark in terms of what I experienced when I arrived at work on Monday morning this week. I have been working on moving our Exchange Server over to Hyper-V and upgrading to Exchange 2007, we seemed to have things sorted and then over the weekend (Saturday morning to be exact) our mailstore server ground to a halt and was paused due to a lack of disk space on C Drive! In the midst o trying to free up some space and sort things out another network admin cut and pasted a file with an AVHD extension from an obscure location ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V\GUID Number. Freed up some space, but when trying to start the Virtual Machine it spat out some errors and would not start. Note to Self: Make sure you have plenty of disk space !

Luckily enough I had just taken a copy of the VHD File a couple of day earlier and was able to just point to that VHD File and start the machine up and it seemed to work OK. Now according to HyperVoria these AVHD Files are to do with these “Snap Shots”, now there were snap shots created a while ago but they were deleted? I am not sure why these AVHD Files are still there? Anyway from what I can gather the merging of these AVHD Files to the Parent VHD File need to happen while the VM is powered off. So on Friday Night I am going to test this theory and power off this VM and let the merge take place and see if the AVHD Filed disappear and leave me with one VHD File.

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