Virtual machines: school me

[Nothinman]

Do they appear in device manager after enabling the display of hidden devices?

 

[Markbnj]

Do they appear in device manager after enabling the display of hidden devices?

They don't. And they also don't show up using NirSoft's DriverView-64. I don't have a lot of experience with driverquery, but for the moment I think I'll ignore them and see if any other flakiness occurs.

It's really BS how they packaged it, though. I find it hard to believe the only way they could deploy a VM is through a KB-numbered system update.

Edit: crap, things are definitely messed up. I started getting hangs trying to load web pages, did a ping test to www.pcpitstop.com and dropped 16% of the packets. Did a simultaneous test from my nix machine to the same addy with 0% loss, so whatever trails of dung the Windows VPC uninstall left in my system are still having their effect. I do have an image to work from, so at least I won't be starting from scratch. Maybe I'll try a repair first.

 

[Nothinman]

If it tells you the actual file names and you're feeling brave you could try booting from a LiveCD and moving them somewhere else and seeing what happens.

 

[Markbnj]

It does give me the names. I think I'll try that.

Edit: on second thought, meh, I don't think so. The two or three obvious names don't relate to networking. There are a couple that do, i.e. ipfilterdriver, which would be used to filter traffic from the host for the guest. Problem is I don't know everything they put on.

I think I'll just going to give up and restore from my image tonight. It won't be too bad since it is only a couple of weeks old, and all the stuff that I change every day is separately backed up.

 

[JasonCoder]

Coming a bit late to this thread but I've worked with VMs for years and have some thoughts to share.

1) VMWare is ahead of nearly everyone. VMWare knows this. Microsoft knows this.

2) MS is closing the gap pretty fast. Two main advantages I see today:

a) Hyper-V will run on damn near anything, ESXi is pickier than shit.

b) Native VHD support as a first class concept in the most popular OS on the planet.

3) Not sure anyone else offers it but under Win7 you can boot to .vhd (very cool)


I personally think VMWare is a far superior virtualization tech and the downloadable appliances are great. Ubuntu jeOS boxes running on a USB stick are awesome. However most Windows shops (that's a lot) will probably run Hyper-V so eventually who knows what VMWare will do or be.