Hyper-V virtualization in a flash, drive that is

On the installation options screen, if you have a DVD drive attached to your Hyper-V PC, you can just put a WHS disk in there.  If you have downloaded the ISO, you need to physically attach it to the Hyper-V server to browse to it.  I use a portable HDD.  In theory, you should be able to browse the network through that prompt and find your ISO on a file share somewhere, but regardless what you make your file share and NTFS permissions, it throws an error from my experience.  If you can get it to work, more power to you but after much fuss I was repeatedly greeted with this screen.

Anyway, MS screwed up there by not including the feature to browse for an ISO from a share, so choose your ISO storage method that gets the file local, review, and finish.

Once the VM has been created, click the green start button on the right hand side of the screen to start your VM.

You can open a console view for the VM by clicking connect.  From here on out it should be no different from installing an OS on a regular machine.

The only difference is once it’s installed, you need to install the “integration services” to make the VM work better.

Step 12 – Enjoy!  Well there you have it, a running test WHS on a baremetal Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 all from a USB drive.  Could MS improve a few steps in this process to make it easier?…they sure could, but we got there anyway.  Keep in mind there are other configuration options out there to tune your VM’s, hardware, etc but this will get you the basics.

Stay tuned for more write-ups on how to do this comparable process for ESXi 4.0, as well as the simpler host-based virtualization options too.  Auf Wiedersehn!