I’ve started developing a set of utilities for managing Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers (aka Intel’s integrated RAID drivers). Even though Intel provides a GUI there is a huge gap to fill, starting with a command line utility, which should be most appreciated by those running Hyper-V 2008 R2).

Here is a dedicated page to the tools.

I am doing a presentation on Visual Studio 2010/.net 4 parallel programming enhancements in the near future. [MS] released Visual Studio 2010 CTP and that’s fine. The problem was that the one and only release comes in the form of a VirtualPC image. This is not a problem by itself but it is a problem if one wants to show parallelism. You see, VirtualPC supports only single processor guests ([MS] isn’t exactly pushing for VirtualPC enhancements, is it – at the time [MS] bought VirtualPC it was on the same level as [VMWare] Workstation, now it is lightyears away). How can one show performance enhancements of parallelism with one CPU?

Part of the solution is [VMWare] Workstation 6.5 (and earlier, don’t know exactly which ones): it supports multiprocessor guests. Great. However once I’ve imported VirtualPC image into Workstation the OS was still showing only one processor even though device manager recognized two processors. Even updating the computer driver (node Computer\Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) PC) didn’t help – there were no choices. Luckily I’ve googled over this blog post: Hyper-V How To: Change the HAL on your vm. Oh, the joy, the trick just worked.

The other problem with this presentation is that Visual Studio 2010 CTP expired by the end 2008. The solution is to change date backwards (silly, isn’t it) but Workstation/Windows keep synchronizing the time with current and thus yielding all sort of activation and expiration warnings. The solution is a twofold one:

- add these lines to Workstation’s configuration file so the Workstation won’t synchronize the guest on every occasion (thanks to Virtual Time Freeze):

tools.syncTime = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.continue = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.restore = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.resume.disk = "FALSE"
time.synchronize.shrink = "FALSE"

- remove or disable guest’s network capabilities so the OS won’t synchronize as well.

Ah, the joys of presentations based on CTPs.

When you think that [VMWare] invented everything they push the innovations even further. These days I've finally accomplished Windows 7 beta download and since I don't have a spare computer right now I've though of installing it under Workstation 6.5. I have to admit that I didn't install any new OS for a while now (thanks to Workstation's excellent snapshot management system). So I created a new typical configuration and entered the path to the Windows 7 beta x64 iso file. Workstation recognized it as Vista (W7 is enhanced Vista after all, but I am sure Workstation will be updated to reflect the proper name in the future) and notified me that it will be installed using Easy Install.

I didn't know about Easy Install and I was pleasantly surprised about it. It lets you enter all the required data for the installation in the next next dialog:

and that’s it. After you put in all the required configuration data Workstation will install the OS for you, no interaction required whatsoever. That’s right, after some time you’ll be greeted by running OS. A huge timesaver even if you don’t install a lot.