A little trouble with Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V on an HS21 blade

I loaded Server 2008 R2 on an IBM HS21 blade to finally get my feet wet with Hyper-V.  Honestly until the changes in R2 I was not at all interested in the product, especially being the VMWare bigot that I am.  It was an extremely simple install, but after creation of my first VM I ran into a little trouble.

Its complaint was:

The virtual machine could not be started because the hypervisor is not running.

Well Hyper-V requires a little more assistance from hardware to run than ESX does.  The first thing I took care of was the setting the hypervisor to auto in the Boot Configuration Data Store with bcdedit.  The command is:

bdcedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto

Then I went ahead and updated the blade’s bios to the latest version, which is v1.12 for this model 7995 I’m running.  As with anything dealing with IBM’s website it took most of the morning just locating what I needed.  Once that was done it was time to dive into the bios settings.  Under Advanced Setup -> CPU Options I had to set “Processor Execute Disable Bit” to Enabled.

Once that was done Hyper-V decided to play nice and allowed my VM to boot up.  On to the next adventure with familiarizing myself with Hyper-V.

Filed Under: Windows