SharePoint 2013 and SQL Server HA options

I put together the following table to summarize the HA options available for SQL Server 2012 and SharePoint 2013. In short - use sync AlwaysOn where possible!

The difference between sync & async has to do with performance over data integrity.  Sync will wait on confirmations from each end point that the transactions were successful.  Async does not wait.  Async will give better performance, but it's possible to have data loss. 

I'm building this out in a lab environment based on VirtualBox.  My attempt #1 was to get FreeNAS working with Server 2012 to set up the shared disk required by Windows Clustering.  I was able to get the iSCSIInitator in Server 2012 to recognize the NAS drives, but couldn't convince Windows Clustering to use it. So next up will be to see if I can get the same working with Server 2012's iSCSI built in support.

I see this as one benefit of Hyper-V over VirtualBox - Hyper-V has a virtual fiber channel feature built in.  In theory, this would let me set up a virtual SAN environment.  I've been trying the same with VirtualBox (yes, I know...but I did try switching over to Hyper-V on my Windows 8 laptop, but at the time networking wasn't working.  I should give it another try, I know...).

Anway, the table below is a summary of a TechNet article listing each of the SharePoint databases. I found the table format a bit easier to use.

Database	Purpose	Sync Mirroring	Sync AlwaysOn	Asyc Mirror/Log Shipping	Async AlwaysOn
SharePoint_Config	Configuration database	Y	Y	N	N
SharePoint_Admin_Content	CA content db	Y	Y	N	N
WSS_Content	Content database	Y	Y	Y	Y
AppManagement	Service database	Y	Y	Y	Y
Search_Service_Application_DB	Stores Search app configuration	Y	Y	N	N
Search_Service_Application_AnalyticsReportingStoreDB	Stores usage analysis data for reports	Y	Y	Y	N
Search_Service_Application_CrawlStoreDB	Stores the state of the crawled content & crawl history	Y	Y	N	N
Search_Service_Application_LinkStoreDB	Stores extracts of the content processing component sna click through info	Y	Y	N	N
Secure_Store_Service_DB	Stores Secure Store credentials	Y	Y	Y	Y
SharePoint_Logging	Stores health monitoring & usage data	Y*	Y*	Y*	N	* not recommended
SettingsServiceDB	Stores features and settings for hosted customers	Y	Y	Y	Y
Usage Profile Service App	Stores & manages users and associated info	Y	Y	Y	Y
Usage Profile Service App Sync DB	Used during a user profile sync	Y	Y	N	N
Usage Profile Service Social DB	Stores social tags and notes	Y	Y	Y	Y
WordAutomationServices	Stores info about pending & completed doc conversions	Y	Y	Y	Y
Managed Metadata Service App	Stores managed metadata	Y	Y	Y	Y
Translation Services DB	Stores info about pending & completed doc translations	Y	Y	Y	Y
Business Data Connectivity Service DB	Stores external content types	Y	Y	Y	Y
ProjectWebApp	Project Web App database	Y	Y	Y	Y
PowerPivotServiceDB	Stores data refresh scheduled & usage data	No Guidance	No Guidance	No Guidance	No Guidance
PerformancePoint Service DB	Stores temp objects & saved comments	Y	Y	Y	Y
State Service db	Stores temp state info from InfoPath, Exchange, chart web part, Visio services	Y	Y	N	N

Source: Supported HA Options for SharePoint 2013

SPC14

And, see you at the SharePoint Conference in Vegas!  I'll be at the HP Booth Sunday night, and also speaking at the Partner Theatre Sunday night, then at the booth periodically throughout the event.  If you're there stop by to say hello, or schedule a meeting with my on the MySPC site.

See you in Grand Rapids!

Accepted to speak at the DevDay conference in Grand Rapids, March 22! 

http://grdevday.org/

Hope to see you there.  There's a good line up of speakers and topics, I'll be attending some of the mobile development talks.

Office Web Apps 2013 - Unhealthy

Ran into this issue on my lab servers.  I installed Office Web Apps 2013, configured it, all good!  But then Windows Update showed a patch from 1/2/14 for OWA, I applied that, and afterwards, Get-OfficeWebAppsMachine showed that my server was Unhealthy.

I did some Binging and found that indeed yes, there is a process to follow for patching an OWA server - first, remove the OWA server from the farm with Remove-OfficeWebAppsMachine, then apply the update, then use the New-OfficeWebAppsFarm again to rebuild the farm. 

Following a comment in a host here:  http://michaelvh.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/the-curious-health-problems-of-the-office-web-apps-server/

I enabled HTTP Activation for the WCF Services for the .Net Framework 4.5 on the OWA server.  Since I'm running Server 2012, I needed to use the Features option on Server Configuration to get this working:

 

 

Did a reboot for good measure, now Get-OfficeWebAppsMachine shows Healthy!

 



Ironing out an SP2013 install

This might save you some time...or at least it'll save me time again when I forget all the things I did to get my 2013 install done!

I started with the AutoSPInstall script for 2013 - if you're unfamiliar with this do yourself the favor and get over to CodePlex and download a copy.  It's a great timesaver.  Apart from naming all of SP's databases with prefixes, it automates the install cycle...very helpful and repeatable!

But - once the install finished, I had some issues.  My logs showed a batch of errors.

1) Certificate Validation Operation took 150003.361 milliseconds... error 8321.  See the separate post for this.  The fix was to set my company's proxy script in the registry for each of the SP Service accounts.  If you get to that HKEY_USER key, you'll know which keys to update - or you can find some handy PowerShell out there to convert a SID to an account if you'd like.  I just set this for everyone there, where it wasn't already set.  I also set an entry in my server's Hosts file 127.0.0.1 crl.microsoft.com, followed by an ipconfig /flushdns - seemed the hosts entry did the trick.

Update 1/26/14: This link really works - follow the steps to export the SharePoint root certificate & import to your trusted root certs & you'll be good to go.  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2625048

2) Error 2548/2159 errors...for this, two fixes.  1) Whack the Search Service Application, delete the databases too, then redo the service.  Then, add the Search Service account to the local administrators group...gets search working.

3) My favorite - killed myself on this and it was a real SharePoint d'oh moment...I was getting loads of 3355 connection timeout expired errors.  Do yourself a favor and skip trying to fix the timeouts - the real issue was right there on my Hyper-V Manager console.  The additions were out of date...yeah, put in the Hyper-V Integration Services DVD image, ran the AMD64 setup, rebooted, and no more 3355s.

I was getting these on another install - had the integration services already updated - the two changes I made were disabling named pipes on the SQL Server client configuration, and added the SP Farm account to the local admin group.  I vote for the former as the fix.

4) Related to all of this was a real goofy "An exception occurred" message on my publishing sites.  Once I got the Search Service working again, this error also went away.

Hope this helps you...

We don't need no stinkin Task Outcomes!

Ah, au contraire, yes you do.  I had one of those SharePoint WTF challenges today.  I'm building out a SharePoint Designer workflow against a custom list in a custom web template.  I know what you're thinking, and I thought the same, but it wasn't the case!

What was going on was, in my workflow, I have a standard approval task.  Clicking on the task in Designer opens the page where I can modify the properties of the task, like its name, allow reassignment, that sort of thing.  It's also the page where I can define the outcomes of the task - Approved, Rejected, or custom items like Wait Til Next Year or In Your Dreams for those vacation request denials.

Problem is, when I open the page, there were no task outcomes defined...and worse, when I clicked the "New.." button or "New Outcome" on the ribbon, nothing happened, nada:

Not pretty, is it?  I did verify the same workflow worked fine with an OOTB site definition, so my first approach was to look at the web template definition and list definition, and yeah there were a few things wrong...but that didn't fix this issue.  Redeployed the web template, IISRESETted, rebooted, still No Task Outcomes.

The Solution
I've decided to make the solutions succinct and clearly findable - so you Dear Reader can skip all of the fluff above and get your workflow deployed so you can get home and relax.

Go to Site Settings and in Site Collection Features, deactivate all workflow related features; then go back and re-active those feature. 

Worked for me twice, the third side I had really screwed up and got an error that a list "wfpub" in my web was already created so I couldn't activate the workflow features again, so it goes.

Have a slice for me!

CSOM in a CQWP

The post title explains it all!  I've been trying to put together some dynamic web page content based on items in a SharePoint list, using JavaScript code inside a Content Query Web Part on one of my site pages.  Shouldn't be so hard, right?

Well, turns out it isn't.  Found a nice link here with some of the steps needed:  http://techtrainingnotes.blogspot.com/2012/02/sharepoint-how-to-add-javascript-to.html - but with that code on my linked in JavaScript source file, the code still wasn't firing.

Here's what's needed.  At the bottom of the code, add in the following:
function myJSfunction {
   var clientContext = new SP.ClientContext.get_current();

}

function DelayUntilMyJSLoaded()
{
    ExecuteOrDelayUntilScriptLoaded(myJSfunction, 'sp.js');
}

_spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames.push('DelayUntilMyJSLoaded');

What these lines will do is to call my function, but only when the function is ready to be called based on having the base 'sp.js' file loaded.  If you do a view source on the hosting page, there toward the bottom you'll see something very similar.

So that's what the Host-Only Adapter is used for! (Windows Phone SDK VM challenge)

Preparing for a talk this Saturday at Grand Rapids DevDays, I wanted to demo the new capabilities for mobile development with SharePoint 2013.  The Visual Studio tooling (alas, sorry MS people, but I have one of those fruit company phones and I like it!) has a good story for Windows Phone, but for the rest of us?  Another story - white paper forthcoming.

For Windows Phone development, here's the big kicker: can't use that Phone emulator virtualized.  Nope, nada, nil, ixnay, no can do.  The Windows 8 SDK requires hardware virtualization with SLAT support - great on physical iron but not virtual iron, so that's right out.  With the Phone 7.1 SDK, same issue - first there's a big warning about not having a compatible GPU, then the phone emulator would continuously reboot to the OS and my app never came up.

So...this gets us to the point of this post, what's a virtualization developer to do?  Ever notice in VirtualBox you have a bunch of choices for networking?

I've been using VirtualBox since I needed x64 support & Virtual-PC just couldn't do it...I've used NAT, Bridged, Internal Network...but Host-only adapter?  What the heck is that for?  Out of the box it has an IP address of 192.168.1.56, what good is that?

Well, turns out this is your way in from the host to your guest internal network.  I assigned an IP in the range of my guests, assigned the guest DNS and default router, changed the VM's to use Host-only Adapter instead of Internal Network, and look at that, I'm in!  The host is not part of my domain but no worries, I need to use Forms Based Authentication anyway for my mobile testing, so we're good to go.

The only other change is to add in entries to the Hosts file on the host for the DNS entries you'll need.  I wasn't able to resolve the hosts values otherwise, and no farm in it.

I'm installing the SDK 8.0 now on my Windows 8 VM with Visual Studio 2012...got a feeling this will work, I'll let you know.

Update: Strike One.  SDK 8.0 enables Hyper-V.  Not a good thing for running VirtualBox VMs.  And there can be only one hypervisor - if Hyper-V is enabled then VirtualBox can't run.  Uninstalling SDK 8.0 and VS 2012, going back to VS2010 and let's hope SDK 7.1 behaves better.

Update: Strike Two and probably three...the good news is I can start up Visual Studio 2010, connect to my SharePoint guest VMs, get list data, prepare my app, but then when I start up the emulator - wham!  There go the VMs.  Seems the VS2010 Windows Phone Emulator is also using the same virtualization VirtualBox needs, and so it knocks out my VirtualBox VMs.  I guess the answer will be to go to Hyper-V with the SDK 8.0 version, but I won't get to that til next week.  Oh well!

SharePoint Foundation 2013 Service Applications list

Below is a screen capture of the set of service applications available with SharePoint Foundation 2013:

Available in Foundation are:

• App Management Service - used for the new Apps feature set of SharePoint 2013
• Business Data Connectivity Service - get at that external data through external list definitions
• Secure Store Service - store credentials and other data centrally and with encryption
• Application Discovery and Load Balancer Service App - created with the farm
• Security Token Service Application - used for authentication.

Here's the list of services available on the server - including SharePoint Server Search:

Here the list is:

• App Management Service
• Business Data Connectivity Service
• Central Administration
• Claims to Windows Token Service
• Distributed Cache
• Lotus Notes Connector
• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Incoming E-Mail
• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Sandboxed Code Service
• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Subscription Settings Service
• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application
• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Workflow Timer Service
• Request Management
• Search Host Controller Service
• Search Query and Site Settings Service
• Secure Store Service
• SharePoint Server Search

Plenty more when you enable Standard and Enterprise features, but I was trying to find out specifically what we get with Foundation.

VirtualBox - SetHDUUID COM error

Quick tip in case you have the same issue.  I use VirtualBox as my server virtualization tool - it's a bit nicer on the laptop than running Hyper-V, but that's a whole other discussion!  With VirtualBox, when you set up a template VHD image, to use that image for a new virtual server, you need to assign a unique ID to the VHD image.

Usually, no problem.  VirtualBox has two ways to do this, either the CloneHD command or a SetHDUUID command:

c:\program files\oracle\virtualbox\vboxmanage internalcommands sethduuid

So what's the problem?  I had opened up a command prompt, entered in these commands, but got an error back that the VirtualBox COM server was not running:

VBoxManage.exe: error: Failed to create the VirtualBox object!
VBoxManage.exe: error: Code CO_E_SERVER_EXEC_FAILURE (0x80080005) - Server execu
tion failed (extended info not available)
VBoxManage.exe: error: Most likely, the VirtualBox COM server is not running or
failed to start.

The solution?  Since this is an admin sort of thing to do I had opened up the command prompt as administrator (Windows 8 - type in CMD, right click Command Prompt, choose Run as Administrator)...and apparently that was the wrong answer!  Open up a regular ol' Command Prompt window and the command goes through just fine.

I'm sure this is a permissions issue - next slow rainy day I'll crack open ProcessMonitor and see exactly what VboxManage can't grab, but for now we're good to go.

Test Lab Guides for SP2013

Looking for some help setting up your SharePoint 2013 environment?  Microsoft's published a series of guides to walk you through the process of setting up a 3-tier farm, then once you have that done, you can configure Claims, Forms Based Authentication, setting up an intranet, and enabling social features:

Three-Tier Farm Configuration

SAML-based Claims Authentication with SharePoint 2013

Forms-Based Authentication

Intranet Collaboration with SP2013

Demonstrate Social Features for SP2013

Full details on the test lab guides:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/12409.sharepoint-server-2013-test-lab.aspx

Setting up Forms-Based Authentication now to get my mobile development environment ready for demo!

IIS Error 500 - app pool culprit

I was helping a coworker today with an error trying to get a SharePoint site up and running.  We were able to provision a new web app with SharePoint Central Admin, and were able to create a site collection in that web app, but when we opened up the web app we got the ol' "Internal Server Error 500" error.

What was different with this one was there were no entries in the Windows event viewer or the ULS logs, so I thought it was an issue with IIS - the IIS log did show an entry with a code 500 0 0 23 and 500 0 0 22.  The problem was not with security as I thought, whether an invalid app pool ID, invalid permissions for the app pool account, having anonymous enabled on the site, and so on...

It turned out the problem was a setting with the app pool.  If you go into Advanced Settings for the app pool, the value for Enable 32-Bit Applications was set to True, but the default and proper setting is False, as shown below.

We changed the value back to False, recycled the app pool, and no more error 500!

SharePoint Foundation Event ID 8321, solved

I have two servers running SharePoint 2013 and both were getting the same Event ID 8321 error every 15 minutes or so in the Event Viewer:

A certificate validation operation took 15004.9996 milliseconds and has exceeded the execution time threshold. If this continues to occur, it may represent a configuration issue. Please see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=246987 for more details.

I made two changes to solve this, not sure which one did the trick finally but both are worth trying.  The first, my company uses a proxy server, but I didn't have this configured on either server.  The second was to download the latest (December 2012) Root Certificates from Microsoft here:  http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35945


So far no more 8321 errors, if they do come back I'll let you know!

Happy 2013!

Updated 5/6/2013...well, turns out it was the first trick that solved this.  My company uses a proxy server to connect out to the Internet, but it's set up with a configuration script.  So...the fix is:

1) Regedit
2) In HKEY_USERS, for each SID based ID (not with _Classes) drill in to:

\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings

3) Create two keys:

AutoConfigURL, string, set the value to your config script URL
ProxyEnable, DWORD, set to 0

Reboot for good measure.  This did work for me, no more of those pesky errors.

Update 1/21/14:
Found this Support article describing a fix which adds the SharePoint certificate to the trusted certificates store on the server:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2625048

 

SharePoint Preview to RTM?

Hello world....we have a site collection with a custom master page & design that we migrated from SharePoint 2010 to SP2013 Preview.  Now that the RTM bits are available on MSDN, it's been on my list to get that site migrated over from Preview to RTM.  I did not find any doco stating this cannot be done, so fingers crossed, I tried it out.

My first try was to use the backup-spsite & restore-spsite cmdlets, to see if I could move the site from the Preview server to the RTM server.  While I was able to create the backup, when I tried to use the restore-spsite command, SharePoint came back with the not-helpful Unknown SPRequest error occurred. More information: 0x80070003 error...so no go!  The ULS logs didn't mave much in there, so I scrapped the site backup approach.

What did work was the content DB approach.  I took a SQL Server backup of the source database, which had only my site in it.  Make sure the content DB doesn't have a site with the same name as one in your target farm, including the root site, since that will interfere with the 'migration'.

Restore this database backup in SQL Server to your RTM SQL instance, or restore it to a different database name & new file names if you're using the same SQL Server. 

Next up is to use the test-spcontentdatabase command:

test-spcontentdatabase -name mydbname -webapplication http://myserver.myco.com

which will come back with a set of warnings for the database.  Scan through this to make sure none will block the upgrade.  If all goes well, mount that database!

mount-spcontentdatabase -name mydbname -webapplication http://myserver.myco.com

Once done, you'll be able to open the site on the RTM version.

Sharepoint 2013 apps: prompt for credentials

At last - I've finally been able to deploy my first app!  I am mainly focusing on SharePoint hosted app development, we'll get this nailed down first then explore the cloud model.  But for now, I'm using Visual Studio 2012 RC with the Office extensions, then when I go in to create my first app, all is well, the app gets deployed, then when I try to open the app I get prompted for credentials three times then the page comes up blank.

IIS shows a 401 error, which led me to think it was a permissions issue, tried going down that path without success.

My good friend M. told me the solution - had to disable the loopback adapter check in the registry on my box.  Do these steps then try out that app again - it'll work just fine!

1. Run RegEdit as admin.  Locate and then click the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
2. Right click the node "Lsa", point to New, and then click DWORD
3. Type in the name of the key as DisableLoopbackCheck, noting case, and then press enter.
4. Right click the new DisableLoopbackCheck key, and then click Modify.
5. In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
6. Quit the Registry Editor, and then reboot your server.

Next up will be to create an app that interacts with a SharePoint list.  I'll post code once that's working!

Steve

Creating a SharePoint 2013 App - set the App Domain

Hello world...I finally have my first SharePoint 2013 App deployed!!  It was an interesting road.  The answer is to very carefully follow the steps in this document from MSDN, in particular, to set up your App domain.

Like many of you, I first installed SharePoint 2013, then Visual Studio 2012 RC, then ran the web install to get the SharePoint 2013 development extensions added in.  So far so good!  I then started up Visual Studio, saw the new "Apps" entry in the Office/SharePoint templates for Visual Studio, and created a new project based on the "App for SharePoint 2013" project type.  Cool!

But, when I deployed my App, SharePoint came back with the error "Failed to install App for SharePoint" in Visual Studio's Error list.  The Output window didn't show much more than that.  When I looked in the ULS log for my App's project name, I found this helpful message:

An App domain must be configured prior to completing this operation

That got me thinking there must be more involved in setting up an App, so when all else fails, I decided to read the doco.  I know, crazy!!  But before creating an App, you need to configure a hosting 'domain' for your Apps.  This is for on-prem hosting, I'm sure for Office 365 there's a similar process just so your HelloApp app won't overwrite my HelloApp app.

The PowerShell command "set-SPAppDomain" did the trick.  Since the document says to also link this domain to the Subscription Settings and App Management service apps, I deleted both of these apps thru Central Admin, then used the referenced script to create them.  This does need the farm account, which in my case was already registered as a Managed Account.

$account = Get-SPManagedAccount "mydomain\myfarmaccount"
$appPoolSubSvc = New-SPServiceApplicationPool -Name SettingsServiceAppPool -Account $account
$appPoolAppSvc = New-SPServiceApplicationPool -Name AppServiceAppPool -Account $account
$appSubSvc = New-SPSubscriptionSettingsServiceApplication –ApplicationPool $appPoolSubSvc –Name SettingsServiceApp –DatabaseName O13Preview_SettingsServiceDB
$proxySubSvc = New-SPSubscriptionSettingsServiceApplicationProxy –ServiceApplication $appSubSvc
$appAppSvc = New-SPAppManagementServiceApplication -ApplicationPool $appPoolAppSvc -Name AppServiceApp -DatabaseName O13Preview_AppServiceDB
$proxyAppSvc = New-SPAppManagementServiceApplicationProxy -ServiceApplication $appAppSvc
All that ran fine.

Interestingly, I had an error on this last step:

Set-SPAppSiteSubscriptionName -Name "mydomain" -Confirm:$false

Note that the name isn't the same name given in the set-spappdomain step - the above didn't like the period separator, so I used just the leftmost part of my domain.

The error, though, was another surprisingly clear error message.  PowerShell came back with an error from the SecureToken web service site (port 32843), checked to make sure the service was running, tried to delete the service app and recreate it but SharePoint wouldn't let me; looked in the logs again and there was the message:  " System.InsufficientMemoryException"

So that's clear enough!  My VM was running with 8GB of RAM - I had shut down some non-essential services like BCS, Word Automation, Visio, Access, etc., earlier, but looks like 8GB isn't enough.

After I increased RAM to 12GB I was able to do that last command, and finally I have a deployed app!!

SharePoint 2013 Hardware Requirements - RAM!

Time to beef up that laptop!  There's a posting on TechNet describing the minimum hardware footprint for SharePoint 2013: 

http://technet.microsoft.com/library/cc262485(office.15)?ocid=fwlink

Of particular note is the RAM requirement - even for a developer box SP2013 wants 8GB of RAM.  A lot of the newer laptops go up to 32GB but my HP 8540w is maxed at 8GB.  I'm installing now using my usual two VM model, one for the AD & SQL Server box, the other for SharePoint.  Once done I'll post on performance, compared to the server running in our model office lab.

SharePoint 2013 preview released!

Got TechNet or MSDN?  Get downloading!!

I'm looking forward to all of the new capabilities of SharePoint!  Will be blogging details shortly.

Great info available on MSDN - the link to download the preview version, as well as some great training & docs on SP2013:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj162979(v=office.15).aspx

Hyper-V and Windows 8 and SharePoint, part 2

Still running Windows 8 and I'm growing to like it...but let's take a look at:

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.

Hyper-V and VirtualBox with Windows 8

Well, here I am posting this on my Windows 7 laptop...I ended up reverting back to Windows 7 after a not too successful run with Hyper-V on Windows 8.  I have a pretty decent laptop, 8GB of RAM & an older generation i7 CPU (2 core, 2 threads) and with Windows 7 it runs VirtualBox pretty well. 

I have my domain controller/SQL Server box on one VM, and my SharePoint dev environment on the other.  I also have a Windows 7 workstation as part of the internal network so I can do some single signon testing.  With VirtualBox I can have all three of these machines running at the same time with decent performance - two are on an eSata SSD & the other is on an internal fairly fast hard drive.

With Windows 8, the good news is if you've used the VHD file format for your virtual machines, you're in luck - with a bit of work on changing additions & a few reboots you can definitely use your VirtualBox VMs.  If you went with the VDI file format, you're not out of luck, you just need some patience - VirtualBox offers a method to clone your VDI files to the VHD format.  Good instructions for doing this here:  http://srackham.wordpress.com/cloning-and-copying-virtualbox-virtual-machines/.  It takes a while but in the end I did have a workable copy of my VDI file in VHD format, which Hyper-V on Windows 8 could handle.  Didn't try any VMWare image conversions, good luck with that!

But that's about as far as the happiness went...when I fired up the VMs performance was slow.  I moved the VHDs around so that I was running on an internal SATA II SSD, not a rocketship drive but still plenty fast.  Got the additions sorted out, but still no luck.  The kicker was on the Windows 7 workstation machine, the video driver seemed very slow - colors didn't look great & performance was poky.  Should have taken a screen capture, sorry about that! 

So for now the answer is, I liked what I saw - our corporate hypervisor solution is Hyper-V with System Center 2012's Virtual Machine Manager.  I took one of our prebuilt VHD files & it worked great, and I was able to use my VirtualBox VMs with Hyper-V.  Performance was just too slow for now - high hopes for the next release of Windows 8 & higher hopes for the RTM release, hope it comes soon!