Today Microsoft announced the availability of Windows 2012 R2 RTM to Technet/MSDN subscribers.

As I have a Technet subscription with my MCT I had to download right away install and see if it works….

When I had installed the server I activated the Hyper-V role and the management tools

In the RTM version of the Hyper-V PowerShell module there is 178 cmdlets and in the preview it was the same number so no new cmdlets have appeared in the latest release.

I had to test the Live Migration feature and see if it worked to move a VM from a win 2012 Hyper-V to a R2 RTM, I had some issues when trying from the R2 ( I had done the delegation in the AD for kerberos) and when trying from the hyper-v manager it was not totally clear what was wrong:

and it was in the PowerShell console the error was stated  and as you can see I had forgot to set up a virtual network with the same name as on the source host and that was why the migration failed..

once that was done the migration worked flawlessly 🙂

Tomorrow I will continue evaluate the RTM release and maybe there will be a new post about my findings then  🙂

I have been busy with a newborn baby and not had so much time over for my blog but now I am back at work 🙂

I was reading this post about how to convert the vhdx to vhd before uploading your virtual disks to Azure and felt that I needed to explore why the default OS vhd disks on the IaaS role is 127 GB and not larger. There was once a limit that Virtual PC could not utilize larger disks than 127GB on the IDE controller but do not think that Azure runs on Virtual PC 😉

In your local cloud and Hyper-V 2012 you can create VM´s with OS disks connected to the IDE that is larger than 127 GB, although the best practice is to create additional disks and connect them to the SCSI controller instead and install the services there!

So to test first that i could convert a vhdx to vhd and then upload it, and also be able to use it in Azure I used the Convert-WindowsImage.ps1 script to create my test-vm that was 128GB large.

When uploading with the cmdlet from the Azure PowerShell module it goes quite fast as it only uploads the bits that contains data, not empty blocks.

And when the upload is finished you create a disk from the uploaded VHD, and as you can see on the screendump it is still 128 GB

and when I start and connect to it, it show the disk size of 128 GB inside the IaaS VM also!

One lesson learned is that before uploading your own virtual machine VHD to Azure, and that is to enable remote desktop settings as otherwise you will not be able to connect to the Azure virtual machine once it is running.