Installing Hyper-V on a Dell PowerEdge server

A current project, along with the recent RTM, has inspired me to try out Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization technology. However, getting it installed on my Dell PowerEdge 1900 required some digging. For the benefit of posterity, here roughly what you have to do:

First, get the latest Dell OpenManage (OM) software. That’s at least version 5.4, which includes the version of their Systems Build and Update Utility (SBUU) that supports Windows Server 2008 (WS08; required to run Hyper-V). Warning, the whole OM image is 3.5 GB, and you’ll obviously need a DVD burner. But trying to get SCSI, SAS, RAID, etc drivers installed without this is not worth your time, and previous separate versions of SBUU (such as 5.3) don’t support WS08. On the plus side, you end up with a single disk that has all of the OM tools (and it’s bootable for SBUU).

Next burn the WS08 x64 boot image (another DVD). Don’t forget, Hyper-V requires 64-bit Windows!

Now boot the OM disk, select the installation/SBUU options, and then select the WS08 x64 option. There are some additional choices here, such as using a utility partition and configuring RAIDs, that you have to decide for yourself.

As an Interesting side note – the latest OM uses the Vista-era WinPE. I hadn’t seen that before, so I thought something had gone wrong when the blue Vista “curtain” background suddenly appeared after OM-initiated reboot. Not to fear: you’re prompted for the WS08 media at that point, and the installation completed without issues.

Once the server is up, perform the usual initial configuration steps. Just be prepared to do lots of reboots. Then, to get Hyper-V going:

  1. Ensure that your processor’s virtualization extensions are enabled in the BIOS.
  2. Add the Hyper-V role from Server Manager. It’ll warn you that the feature is pre-release. That’s okay, just don’t forget the next step.
  3. Download and install the Hyper-V RTM update.

Initial reactions about Hyper-V? Well, it’s way better than Virtual Server 2005. Cleaner and faster. And, so far, building new VMs (Windows on Windows) is done via a more consistent and intuitive interface than VMware Server 5.x. Stay tuned.

5 Comments »

5 Responses to “Installing Hyper-V on a Dell PowerEdge server”

  1. Jason Koppe, on July 1st, 2008 at 6:34 pm Said:

    Good post — Tom and I will be posting our experiences with Hyper-V later this summer on our blog.

  2. T, on July 11th, 2008 at 9:48 pm Said:

    Thanks Dan for the informaiton it really helped

  3. Shane, on July 30th, 2008 at 7:32 pm Said:

    Any idea where to find this mythical OMSA 5.4 (or, even better, 5.4.1)? The link here is dead, and after two days of searching all I can find is an SUU 5.4.1 iso, which is not bootable. I’ve been all over the dell support site and ftp site. I fear I might actually have to call Dell’s tech support…

  4. Jeroen Elias, on December 28th, 2010 at 4:48 am Said:

    Hi all,
    I have found the downloads for the OMSA software.
    Just go to the support.dell.com site, enter “openmanage suu” in the searchbox and hit enter.
    You may have to provide the Service Tag, or select a model.
    Anyway, it brought me directly to a page having many download links.

  5. Matt Davies, on December 29th, 2011 at 5:52 am Said:

    How did you boot the disk? im assuming that you did it after the POST. did you make it bootable? and if so, how?

    many thanks
    Matt

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