Hyper-V server as host for 3 VMS

[Clément 145]

I mostly work with a traditional setup. Ex: 3 Physical Machines: One server ( Windows Server ), and Two Workstation ( Windows 10 ).
 

I'm considering hosting everything in a single new machine, and I'm still studying the options
I will use the 3 VM machines at the same time.

One Windows Server ( PDC ) 
One Windows 11 workstation must be part of the domain.

One Windows 11 Workstation not in the domain! (This machine will be use to connect to my customers via VPN or whatever they require )

 

 In my case, one possibility would be to have as Host OS a Hyper-V server ( Free ! )

Any of you using Hyper - V server ( or any other )?
Does delphi installs and works fine?
How about Dongles ( code signing, etc ), would they work on a VM with these settings?

  I 'm using two dongles: One for code signing , One to digitally sign my invoices. Does allowing USB-passthrough works for you?
  Today I configured my IDE to sign and deploy the installers to my website.  This must continue to work this way.

 

 

 

[Brian Evans 83]

Windows 11 Pro and higher support running Hyper-V as an optional feature.  I use a workstation running Windows 11 Pro as my main environment with WSL, Windows Sandbox, and some Hyper-V virtual machines for various other development, and testing tasks that require different/clean environments. 

 

Current machine is a P620 from Lenovo with a 16 core Threadripper PRO 3955WX with 128GB RAM using SSDs + Optane 905P for storage (the latter configured as a Dev Drive using ReFS) and a Radeon PRO W6400 graphics card. Newegg been slowly clearing out Optane 905P drives for much less than they used to go for, so I bought one, not sure if it has made much of a difference. 

[Lars Fosdal 1732]

I got a Lenovo P16 (i7)64Gb/ 1TB+500GB Workstation Laptop, and run "corporate" Windows 10 latest patches on the WS and Win11 Pro on a Hyper-V VM.

This machine is my regular work machine and it runs an SQL Server instance on the primary OS as well.

 

I also have a private MacBook Pro M1 16" with 32GB and 2TB, running Parallels and Win 11 for ARM on a VM, and RHEL on a VM.

 

Delphi installs and runs just fine on both Win 11 VMs.

Interestingly, the MBP is faster than the P16 for the VMs, staying cool and silent, while the P16 spins up the fans like a turbine.

 

I haven't tried dongles on my VMs, since signing happens on the corporate build server, but both VM hosts can pass through USB ports, so I would expect it to work.

[Fred Ahrens 56]

For using the code signing dongles (or any other USB device) I recommend VirtualHere. Install the VirtualHere server in the host machine and your USB dongles/devices connected to the host can be accessed via a simple client within your VMs. It's not free but not expensive and just works.

Meanwhile we switched from Hyper-V to Proxmox as it has built-in USB-pass-through and other features missing in Hyper-V. But main reason was: there is actually no longer a free stand-alone Hyper-V server as it got discontinued by Microsoft.

Edited February 25 by Fred Ahrens

[Vincent Parrett 657]

3 hours ago, Clément said:

In my case, one possibility would be to have as Host OS a Hyper-V server ( Free ! )

You know Hyper-V server has been discontinued right? 

 

If you are going to use this machine for directly (rather than only remote desktop into the vm's) then just install windows 11 and use the hyper-v feature. If you are going to remote into the vms from another machine for your daily work then use something like proxmox ve (also free).   

[Vincent Parrett 657]

3 hours ago, Clément said:

How about Dongles ( code signing, etc ), would they work on a VM with these settings?

Be aware that code signing dongles do not allow access via remote desktop. We use VirtualHere over a vpn - our dongle is on a machine 300Km from the data center where are build machines are hosted (on proxmox) - it works really well - the only issue we have is that we can only do the code signing from one virtual machine (we have a bunch of Continua CI build agent vm's). 

[FPiette 367]

10 hours ago, Vincent Parrett said:

You know Hyper-V server has been discontinued right?

Only the free version is discontinued!

Here is what Jeff Woolsey, Principal PM Manager at Microsoft is saying:

The only thing that was discontinued was the FREE Microsoft Hyper-V Server product because we simply don’t have the time and resources to keep producing the free version. That’s it. That’s the only thing that was deprecated. [explanation skipped] In short, Hyper-V is here for the very long run.

[ZDeveloper 2]

win 11 pro (intel 13700/64gb/2Tx2 ssd)

vmware workstation 17 pro + all projects in VM's

3 vm simultaneously launched, works great

 

[Vincent Parrett 657]

4 hours ago, FPiette said:

Only the free version is discontinued!

I mentioned that it was discontinued since the OP mentioned that it was Free.

 

We were long time hyper-v users here - but the cost of windows server licenses just to get a hypervisor were too expensive for us (from memory, it was around $6K per server, was a while ago so might be wrong) - we first switched to xcp-ng (a disaster) and more recently to proxmox (couldn't be happier). I put the money I didn't spend on windows licenses towards another server. 

 

 

Edited February 26 by Vincent Parrett
typo

[Fred Ahrens 56]

1 hour ago, Vincent Parrett said:

... and more recently to proxmox (couldn't be happier).

 

 

+1 for Proxmox. For a very long time I had the impression, it's an "enthusiasts platform for virtualization". One of our customers "forced" us to test our software under Proxmox and 1 month later most of our bare metal machines and VMs were migrated to Proxmox VMs and containers. Couldn't be happier too.

[Kas Ob. 91]

Hyper-V Server 2019 is free LTSC and will stay like that until January 2029, which is its EOL

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/hyperv-server-2019

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-hyper-v-server-2019

 

[David P 2]

18 hours ago, Vincent Parrett said:

 the only issue we have is that we can only do the code signing from one virtual machine

Why is that?  Can multiple remote PCs connect to the Virtualhere server?

[Vincent Parrett 657]

4 hours ago, David P said:

Why is that?  Can multiple remote PCs connect to the Virtualhere server?

because a usb device can only be used by one machine at a time. Virtualhere presents the device on the remote machine as though it were local. 

[FPiette 367]

10 hours ago, Vincent Parrett said:

15 hours ago, David P said:

Why is that?  Can multiple remote PCs connect to the Virtualhere server?

because a usb device can only be used by one machine at a time. Virtualhere presents the device on the remote machine as though it were local. 

I guess multiple remote PCs can connect, but only one at a given time. The connected PC must disconnect to allow another to connect. Just guessing.

[David P 2]

12 hours ago, Vincent Parrett said:

because a usb device can only be used by one machine at a time. Virtualhere presents the device on the remote machine as though it were local. 

Thanks. Any idea on the lifetime of a connection/use for a code signing cert?

Edited February 27 by David P

[Vincent Parrett 657]

4 hours ago, FPiette said:

I guess multiple remote PCs can connect, but only one at a given time. The connected PC must disconnect to allow another to connect. Just guessing.

Correct - you need to disconnect using the virtualhere client and then connect on the other machine - it's a manual process. 

[Vincent Parrett 657]

2 hours ago, David P said:

Thanks. Any idea on the lifetime of a connection/use for a code signing cert?

Virtual here stays connected until you tell to disconnect or the link goes down. Virtualhere client also has an "auto use this device" option so it will always be available.

[Sherlock 632]

On 2/26/2024 at 10:17 AM, ZDeveloper said:

vmware workstation 17 pro + all projects in VM's

The future of vmware is uncertain since the Broadcom acquisistion. At least their "larger" products have been switched to a pricier model. At the moment they say that workstation and player remain untouched...for now.

https://borncity.com/win/2024/01/19/after-discontinuation-vmware-player-workstation-and-fusion-seems-to-remain/

[tgbs 10]

Proxmox for servers, Virtual machine manager(again KVM) for workstation with GUI. Easy to add host hardware

[Fred Ahrens 56]

On 2/27/2024 at 1:19 PM, Vincent Parrett said:

Virtual here stays connected until you tell to disconnect or the link goes down. Virtualhere client also has an "auto use this device" option so it will always be available.

You can control the client via command line (see https://www.virtualhere.com/client_api). This allows you to create build scripts that temporarily activate the dongle on the client system only when it's needed for signing your files and deactivating it after when the script finishes.

[Vincent Parrett 657]

4 hours ago, Fred Ahrens said:

You can control the client via command line (see https://www.virtualhere.com/client_api).

I did experiment with that, but we ended up with build failures when multiple builds were running concurrently on different build agents.  

[Uwe Raabe 1891]

2 hours ago, Vincent Parrett said:

I did experiment with that, but we ended up with build failures when multiple builds were running concurrently on different build agents.

Isn't that what Shared Resources are for?

[Vincent Parrett 657]

10 minutes ago, Uwe Raabe said:

Isn't that what Shared Resources are for?

Yes, and we did do that - but shared resources are aquired at the start of the stage (which means the token is in use for longer than it needs to be), so we had to split up our builds into more stages and that resulted in longer build times. I spent ages on various iterations trying different things. I found the virtualhere client would occasionally fail to disconnect the device and then builds would hang till I restarted the vh server. I guess it could be a latentcy issue, usb is very sensitive to it and our token and build servers are in different locations (300+ km).

 

I will have a good solution to this available in a few weeks, working on a new product that makes sharing the tokens trivial (remote code signing server) and being able to code sign from any build agent.  

Edited February 28 by Vincent Parrett
clarification