Monday, May 10, 2010

Running Hyper-V images with Sun VirtualBox

If you want to run your Hyper-V created or downloaded machines on Sun VirtualBox, you might experience some problems. When settings in VirtualBox are incorrect the image won’t start. I first thought it’s was about conflict with Hyper-V Integration Services or incompatibility between the Hyper-V vhd and VirtualBox. But luckily it’s just some configuration of VirtualBox to make it work.
So I have a SharePoint 2010 Hyper-V image and Next week I need to give a training and needed to use Sun VirtualBox as Hyper-V doesn’t run on Windows XP. So I copied the Hyper-V virtual hard disk to my local machine and followed the following steps.
  • Start VirtualBox
  • Create a new Virtual Machine
  • Do the basic settings
  • Add the Hyper-V virtual hard disk
  • Set IO APIC enabled in the Systems Tab (this is is important, otherwise it will hang after like 20 seconds on startup)

  • Start the VM in VirtualBox
  • Stopped the Hyper-V services and set startup type to: Manual

  • Installed the VBoxGuestAdditions for better integration with the virtual machine.
If you didn’t set the correct settings the virtual machine does start however after about 20 seconds (depending of your hardware) it hangs forever, and looks like this: