Hyper-V is a great environment, for both testing and production purposes. I run my SBS 2011 production server as a virtual (guest) to my windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V physical environment.
I may be wrong, but it sure seems as if SBS 2011 starts up faster virtually rather than if it was installed normally, on a physic platform.
One often-asked question with Hyper-V and SBS is “how do I access a USB external drive to run my daily SBS backups?”
The solution comes from KernelPro and their USB over Ethernet solution. This allows you to either connect to a USB drive on a different computer in the network, or in the case of Hyper-V, allows a guest partition to access the USB drive on the parent partition. But don’t be confused by the name “USB over Ethernet’ – this is exactly what you want. The program has both a Server (Full) and a Client module program that will be used.
From the Parent partition:
- Connect the removable USB drive (to be used for your SBS backup)
- Right click Computer, then click Manage –> Storage –> Disk Management, reformat the drive (if necessary), and then select to take the drive Offline
- Download and install the full (server) version of the KernelPro ‘USB over Ethernet’
- Start up the Kernel Pro utility and it should display all your USB devices (drives, keyboards, mice, etc.)
From the Guest partition:
- Download and install the client version of KernelPro ‘USB over Ethernet’
- Start up the utility, click on the Add new USB server icon, and enter the LAN IP address of your Hyper-V server
- Then click on your USB drive to use, and under Properties, set the option to ‘connect automatically when it is available on the server’
- KernelPro will use a random port number, which you may need to open in the client firewall configuration
Configure and schedule your SBS Backup, and you are all done!
