Running Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 on Windows Server 2008 R2

Today I got a question of somebody on how to install Virtual Serve 2005 on a server 2008 r2  setup, He is a trainer as I am, and sometimes he wants to run Virtual machines in Hyper-V, but sometimes We need to use the Virtual machines given to us by Microsoft. Thos e machines are sometimes made to run under Virtual Server and to fix all the stuff related to the incompatibility of The two virtualization platforms, is sometimes too much work for the result. So I started investigating> it seemed that there is an incompatibility issue here. ( the message box plainly says so.) I searched on the internet on how to solve this, knowing that Server 2008 r2 is quite the same thing as Windows 7. I found the following article on technet on how to run Virtual Server on Windows 7 and tried it on my setup with Server 2008.

When you want some performance in your virtuals under Virtual Server, you should consider creating a Dual Boot with one OS: https://blogs.infosupport.com/blogs/ericd/archive/2008/09/25/_1C20_Dual-boot_1D20_-with-one-installation-of-Windows.aspx

If you do not, Everything will work, but Virtual Server will make no use of the Hardware Virtualizations capabilities of your processor, because they will be monopolized By Hyper-V.

First You have to prepare the webserver if you want to use the webinterface to manage your virtuals. In the following post I described already what to install.

https://blogs.infosupport.com/blogs/ericd/archive/2007/07/02/Virtual-server-2005-R2-SP1-and-Vista.aspx

now you have to disable the compatibility check: the following article told me so:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprovirt/thread/a98e77b7-95d4-444f-8dbc-630c98074436/

Now I installed Virtual Server and tried to create a virtual machine and start it. Up till now it seems to start. I have not tried the last part:

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Next restore all settings what you changed in Group Policy and restart your computer. Unfortunately Application Compatibility Engine will detect Virtual server services and block that again. So you have to go to the Virtual Server directory (Usually C:Program FilesMicrosoft Virtual Server) and rename the vssrvc.exe to something else (example: vssrvc_newname.exe). Open the registry editor and replace all entry which contains "vssrvc.exe" to vssrvc_newname.exe (path, DCOM object details, etc)
Finally restart your computer and enjoy Virtual server 2005 at Windows 7 RC 🙂

</quote>

That I’ll try tomorrow.

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