I’ve got a confession to make: I’ve been using Windows 10 on a Vaio.
My MacBook Pro Retina is a few years old now, and it’s been suffering a few broken parts from a rough life on tour. I’d buy another one, but it’s not a great time to buy a new Apple – the current laptop range is a little long in the tooth.
When the Microsoft store ran a fire sale on the Vaio Canvas Z, a powerful Windows 10 tablet, I had to give it a shot. Allan Hirt had given me a demo of it at the MVP Summit, and I was really impressed. The hardware is perfect for me: 16GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD space makes for a demo-friendly presenter laptop, and the tablet screen with detachable keyboard is a great movie platform for airplane time.
I’ll blog about the general hardware and Windows 10 experience later, but today I’m focusing on something I use a lot: virtualization. Setting up a few new VMs was an eye-opener.
Hyper-V can’t always share WiFi networks with guests. Microsoft says “wireless networking is quite tricky for virtualization” – errr, it’s just worked on Macs as long as I’ve been using them, and I’m pretty sure this used to work fine for Microsoft’s own Virtual PC. WiFi isn’t going away – this needs to just work out of the box without 11-step workarounds.
You can only drag & drop files into certain guest OS versions. During VM setup, it almost seemed random – some of my VMs could, some couldn’t. Eventually I figured out that “enhanced session mode” – which enables stuff like drag & drop and copy/paste files – only works on Windows 8.1 and Win2012 R2 VMs. (I tend to use older Windows versions with my older SQL Server versions because it lines up with what clients typically use – they don’t usually run SQL Server 2008 on Win2012R2.)
Plugging new USB devices into guests is a pain. On a Win2012 R2 host, you have to open Hyper-V Manager, right-click on the guest, click Connect, click Show Options, click Local Resources, click More, expand the Drives list, check the box for the USB drive. Here’s a screenshot tour of the process. On Macs with VMware – just plug in any USB drive or device, and you get a popup asking if you want it to be connected to the Mac, or to which running VM. Done.
Hyper-V HighDPI screens are a mess. Years ago, Apple laid a ton of groundwork to prepare for Retina displays, and as a result, guests don’t need to know anything about the resolution they’re running on. OS X can seamlessly scale any app up or down. Windows, not so much – on the high-resolution Vaio, Hyper-V guests start up with microscopically small text, and up-scaling server OS’s ends up looking like hell.
The verdict: you get what you pay for.
I get it, it’s an unfair competition: Hyper-V is included free with Windows, and I’m comparing it to a paid product (VMware Fusion). I also understand that I’m focusing on things that don’t matter for data center virtualization projects, where WiFi, drag & drop, USB, and HighDPI screens don’t matter.
But on laptops at least, Hyper-V’s experience leaves a lot to be desired.
23 Comments. Leave new
I’m yet to have a good Hyper-V experience for the same reasons. Try VirtualBox instead….it’s worked for me every time, and my wi-fi works with it, too.
Chris – I’ve heard VirtualBox users sing its praises, so I’ll ask – how’s the experience with each of the above issues? For example, can you linearly scale desktops and run HighDPI stuff without the overlaps or magnifying glasses?
Just curious or may be new born question 🙂 – What is difference of this with Microsoft Surface Book – 1TB / Intel Core i7 !
Vishal – about $2,000. The Vaio was $1,300 with 16GB and 1TB of SSD, and the Surface Book costs quite a bit more than that.
when i tried to look its almost more price , I wish they will have sale again ! thank you Brent for stop by and comment this was really useful blog.
VMWare Workstation delivers much of what Fusion does, however both of them have been discontinued by VMWare. I’ve also had very good luck with VirtualBox on both Windows and Linux, and it ought to run on a Mac too.
On my Mac I have Fusion and Parallels Desktop. I like the network configuration options with Fusion. I have not had really any issues with PD. I had not heard they Fusion Pro is being discontinued.
Brent, I tried Hyper-V and I felt the same way. Somethings with Hyper-V are just too much of a PITA. I guess that’s the Mac spoiling me. You plug it in and it works (plug & play ??).
I’ve never had a problem with it, even before I started working for Microsoft LOL.
Switched from HyperV to Virtualbox so I could switch from Windows 8 to Linux. Even on Windows, networking/clipboard sharing/host drive mounting/etc all works first time.
Having switched to Linux, thinking about switching from Virtualbox to Gnome Boxes for “in-band” updates, but I don’t really need multi-VM setups/networking/etc these days.
Don’t think any of my displays qualify as “HiDPI”.
I agree with you. I had to give up my Macbook (to the delight of my daughter) when my company went Hyper-V a few years ago. I had a number of issues getting going, and even over time I’d be afraid to change anything in my setup for fear my VMs would stop. We went back to VMWare on the desktop because of issues.
Steve – yeah, that blows me away. We should be the exact target market for laptop Hyper-V users, I would think. (I get that the desktop / server market is a different user base entirely.)
Agreed that WiFi just works on VMWare Fusion. The reason I still prefer Hyper-V is because I learn a lot about networking, routing and the likes that data professionals like us need to be aware of. Plus, with PowerShell scripting, I can easily deploy multiple sysprepped Windows VMs, something that I can’t easily do with Fusion unless I use the VIX API. That’s very helpful when you want to provision a 4-node Windows Server Failover Cluster stretched across multiple network subnets 🙂
To get WiFi working on Hyper-V guests, create an External Virtual Switch that uses the wireless NIC on your laptop/desktop. Doing so will create a bridged connection between the WiFi and anything you connect to it.
https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=ED87889E7ECCF22F!800&authkey=!AHQioetUP0LIJ4s&v=3&ithint=photo%2cjpg
Once it is created, you can use this as the vNIC for any Hyper-V guests. I just did a demo of configuring Windows Routing and Remote Access Service (RRAS) for use as a router/switch for Azure site-to-site VPN where the RRAS VM was using the WiFi virtual switch.
Edwin – yeah, that’s the 11-step workaround that I linked to in the post. Not exactly elegant or intuitive.
The upside of this approach is that you can’t change your DNS settings without breaking and re-creating the bridge!
UGH, wow, I didn’t even think about that! Holy cow.
I am not too impressed with VMWare Fusion either. I constantly have issues copying from their VMs to the host. I constantly have to stop and restart VMs. it’s very annoying for a paid solution.
In my PC I use Vmware Workstation: http://www.vmware.com/products/workstation/ Works great and almost as good as the Mac Fusion Version!
Brent, I was totally disappointed in both Hyper-V DPI issues and Remote Desktop ability on high DPI screens until I started using RDCMan v2.7. It works perfectly and fonts scale good. You just have to be able to allow your machines to connect via RDP, of course. I use this on my Surface Pro 3 and Dell XPS 13 to connect to Hyper-V VMs that run on another machine. Email if you have questions.
Scott – yeah, I’ve had problems with that when my network has hiccups, though.
“What sorcery is this?” You are a seriously funny guy. 🙂 I love the picture too..
Hahaha, thanks.
Hi Brent,
Does your new Vaio tablet have the lovely new ‘connected standby’ or now called ‘Instant On’ functionality?
This is a new power standard that allows Windows tablets and smartphones to go into a low power mode but still allow background tasks to run when you hit the ‘standby’ button. It’s great for tablets, and makes them sleep a bit like ipads/IOS
However connected standby doesn’t play nicely with hyper-v. The moment you install/enable hyper-v in Windows-10 it will disable connected standy and leave you just the hibernate option. There is a workaround, but its not nice. You need 2 bootup options, one for hypervisor on, one with it off. Yes, you need to reboot between hyper-v and non-hyper-v sessions to retain a decent sleep mode.
Another interesting and little known feature of Windows 10 and Connected Standby is that the standard defines that Bitlocker is turned on by default. It starts off in an ‘about to encrypt’ mode, and the moment you connect to a microsoft or AD account Windows will upload the bitlocker key and then encrypt the hard disk without even telling you. Nice to be secure, but nice to know its happening and have a choice to say ‘No’. Just make sure you know where your Bitlocker key is, especially in an AD environment. There will be some people who get burnt by this when their tablet refuses to boot and they can’t unlock the encryption. [Go to Settings, System, About to see the current bitlocker settings]
Also agree on the scaling issues with Windows-10. Try using a highDPI tablet like a Surface, and an external monitor that is normalDPI. You can set independant scaling for each display, but it doesn’t play nice, especially if you are regularly pluging in and loggin into windows in different places. You often end up with apps that display too large or too small. Logging out and in often resets the scaling, but some apps (Skype for Business) just dont scale properly.
Phil – ouch, that’s a lot of rough news. (sigh)