The Good
- It's a 64 bit virtualization story from Microsoft, at long last!!
- Uses the same file format as the Windows Server Hyper-V (VHD) and has an extended format that ran better for me - I converted my VHDs to VHDX's and performance did seem better
- Works with both my wired and wireless network connections
- Dynamic RAM allocation!
The Bad
- No audio support in the virtual machine. In theory if I use Remote Desktop Connection to log on instead of Hyper-V connect this would work, but so far I haven't been able to get it working. Not that big a deal, I really don't need the audio on my servers.
- No more Shared Folders...I miss this from VirtualPC/VirtualBox. I can use regular ol network shares, but it's easier to just set it up with \\vboxsvr\c_drive!
- Video resolutions are fixed - I can't resize the video window to whatever size I need, gotta pick from 1024x768, 1152x864, 1280x1024, or 1600x1200. While these are acceptable, I'd like to be able to use more of the width & less of the height on my 1600x1200 monitor.
The Ugly
- Can't have more than one hypervisor installed. That is, I can't also install VirtualBox if I have the Hyper-V role installed - networking doesn't work but worse, the VM won't boot up.
- Performance is not as good as VirtualBox. It's acceptable, but I'll call this ugly because I want performance to be at least as good as VirtualBox.
- Clipboard support. This gets an ugly vote because there isn't an integrated clipboard between the guests and host. There's a one way 'insert clipboard text' option available, but I can't copy text in the guest and paste in the host. Maybe I do need to get Remote Desktop Connection working!
A few Windows 8 tips:
- There was an update last Tuesday that really seemed to improve system stability - be sure you get those patches installed!
- My AOC USB monitor does not work - don't use the DisplayLink driver! Causes the display to not appear, and with Bitlocker installed I couldn't get to a system restore point :-(
Now, as for the rest of Windows 8, I don't really use the Metro stuff yet since my laptop doesn't have a touchscreen. I've figured out how to make the 'start' work, and I don't mind it...and I'm a keyboard guy so Alt-F4 from the desktop brings up the Shutdown menu, again I can live with that.
