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I am using Oracle VirtualBox for ubuntu guest virtual servers on windows server 2008 R2. I'm in a plan to migrate(stop using virtualbox) from VirtualBox to Hyper-V. I guess many are using hyper-v virtualization and have good control over it and could help me here in clarifying few things. The reason I use Virtualbox is it's open source and the reason for migrating is that if hyper-v support any additional feature which virtualbox doesn't(and I couldn't migrate VBox vms along with all the snapshots). I have following questions to get it clarified.

  1. Does hyper-v require any licence or is limited to running particular number of virtual machines?.
  2. Is hyper-v capable to export/import VMs along with all the snapshots?
  3. Is it possible to run HeadLess VMs like it's done with VirtualBox?
  4. Does hyper-v recognize VDI/VMDK?

Anybody can suggest me anything?. Thanks!

user53864
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1 Answers1

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  1. Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 has no licensing requirements for itself, you have to license the guest operating systems just like normal. If i'm not mistaken the limit on Hyper-V R2 is 384 Virtual machines per server.

  2. Yes.

  3. I'm not familiar with virtualbox, but after googling around a bit I think the answer is yes.

  4. No, I'm fairly sure its not compatible.

One additional caveat, it likely wont matter for you as linux in general is pretty resource light, but Ubuntu isn't listed as one of the supported guest operating systems so you wont be able to load the integration components. The ICs enable the synthetic NIC and VM storage adapters, general performance enhancers. That being said I'm running Ubuntu as a hyper-v guest and it works great, its a test server and not production but I'd be willing to bet it would do fine in production.

ErnieTheGeek
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  • Thanks for your information!. I just have to confirm 3. & 4. points. – user53864 Feb 04 '11 at 04:46
  • For the point 4. I may have to use the vdi/vmdk to vhd converter tool. But for 3rd point I checked in the google and could not find anything to start vm from command line so that I can crated a batch script and put it in the startup application – user53864 Feb 04 '11 at 11:39
  • Can you describe what you want to do with the command line tools / batch script? – ErnieTheGeek Feb 04 '11 at 16:23
  • I mean to say if I could start the hyper-v virtual machines from the command line, then I could write a batch script and put it in a startup application. When ever the server restarts, the VMs automatically starts itself. – user53864 Feb 05 '11 at 04:31
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    Oh, that functionality is built in to hyper-v. you can set conditions like, Start every time the server starts, start only if running before reboot, dont start, etc. As well as wait times to load, so if you have 10 VMs you can configure them to launch 1 minute apart etc. – ErnieTheGeek Feb 05 '11 at 19:48