Hyper-V and Sound

By calejo on January 2nd, 2009



Before I start – lets be clear THERE IS NO SOUND CARD IN A HYPER-V VM

Good. Now that’s out of the way lets talk about how we get sound in a Machine without a sound card – and this applies to a physical server too.

Sitting in it’s rack in the data-centre there is no reason why a server should have a sound card, and not much need for it. When you run applications via terminal  services you might very well want sound and so the Remote Desktop client (MSTSC.EXE has an option "Bring Sound to this machine"

Although Hyper-V connection use the same RDP protocol under the surface, this behaves as though it is plugged into the VM’s graphics card, it’s not a "remote desktop" session, so to get this to work you need to have Remote Desktop (Or full on Terminal Services installed).

You need to start the Windows Audio Service on the remote server. If it’s not running when you log in you won’t get any sound in that session, so if you start it from remote desktop connection, save yourself some grief and log out.



Using a Wireless Network Adapter on Hyper-V

By calejo on January 1st, 2009



Out of the box Hyper-V does not support connecting virtual machines to wireless network adapters.  As a primarily server focused product this is a reasonable limitation – especially given evils that we need to do to get wireless network adapters to work with virtual machines.  But all is not lost – it is possible to setup an internal virtual network and utilize Internet Connection Sharing (as discussed here) to get you up and going.

The first thing to do is to create a new internal virtual network switch:

  1. Open the Hyper-V Manager and select your server.
  2. Select Virtual Network Manager… from the action pane (on the right).
  3. Select New virtual network and choose to Add an Internal network.
  4. Give the new virtual network the name you want hit OK.

Now to setup Internet Connection Sharing:

  1. Open the Control Panel and open Network and Sharing Center.
  2. Select Manage network connections from the list on the left.
  3. Locate the icon for your wireless network adapter, right click on it and select Properties.
  4. Change to the Sharing tab.
  5. Check Allow other network users to connect through this computer's Internet connection.
  6. If you have multiple network adapters you will need to select the specific entry for the internal virtual network switch.
  7. Click OK.

You can now connect virtual machines to the internal virtual network and allow them to access the Internet through your wireless network adapter.

Taken from: http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2008/01/09/using-hyper-v-with-a-wireless-network-adapter.aspx