Hyper-V is fine, except for what it does to the network in order to make things work.... Just like you experienced.

I think I remember you having said that before. That's a pretty bad place for it to fail, considering that most of the time a virtual machine is useless unless it can be attached to a network according to the user's specific requirements.

Frankly, it isn't that big a deal to build a hypervisor these days, now that all the heavy lifting is done in hardware. The days of trap-and-emulate are over, so it's no big deal to get a virtual machine running. Getting the networking, storage, and administration right is *everything*.

Microsoft Teams is having a massive outage today. Nobody can communicate with anyone else. So much for the cloud.

Typical lifecycle for Microsoft products:

1. Microsoft creates a product (Lync) that does what other products do, but worse
2. Everyone switches to it because it's Microsoft
3. Product is so overly complicated that it's easier to just let them run it in their cloud
4. Everyons switches from on-prem to cloud
5. It sucks inside Microsoft too and has a massive outage

Over at ${work} we had a Lync installation that was stupidly complicated.
They had servers all over the place and none of it worked right. For the number of users we have, they could have just run it on a single server and it would have worked fine. But they did it the MCSE way and it fell on its face on a regular basis. Now we're on the hosted version (Teams) and that's falling on its face today.

It wasn't just Teams, no matter what they say.... It spread across products outside of the MS world who must rely on O365 hosted AD.... I saw it happen in mulitple places today.

Virtualbox is not great for desktop workloads, and Hyper-V is even worse. I've been suffering with laggy Virtualbox performance for a while now. Just had to get my office to buy me a new laptop because of creeping motherboard wonkiness, and I bit the bullet and dual-booted it with Ubuntu.

That's right for the first time in 15 years I am running Linux natively, and on a laptop even. (The webcam doesn't work. Poo.)

On the whole it is performing much better so far.

Ok I'll bite ... what hypervisor do you like for desktop workloads? I'm running VirtualBox on my Windows machine, but I'm not particularly attached to it.
On my Linux machine it's KVM, which seems to work flawlessly.

Are you able to run the Windows partition on your new laptop as a virtual machine, and also run it natively using dual boot? I tried that once but I messed it up badly and had to reinstall.

2020-02-05 13:25 from IGnatius T Foobar
Ok I'll bite ... what hypervisor do you like for desktop workloads?

I'm running VirtualBox on my Windows machine, but I'm not particularly

attached to it.

$ME walks and offers unsolicitated opinion.

I use KVM. VirtualBox is ok but I think it integrates worse with my Linux install. Does it still require 32 bit libraries to compile? That was a bummer.


Qubes OS uses Xen, and I found the concept quite interesting for desktop ussage. It lacks polish and it is expensive to run, though.

I've never used KVM for more than 5 minutes to test. The problem with Virtualbox is poor video performance and KVM is no better because it is designed the same way. VMware Workstation might be better, but I somewhat doubt it because the problems are fundamental.

I've found VMware workstation the least offensive....

To really get good video performance, you need to do direct rendering from within the VM. That means installing actual native GPU drivers within the VM, and exposing the hardware directly to the VM, but doing it all in a way that's similar to userspace apps doing direct rendering on a bare-metal OS. The host VMM and guest OS would both need enhancements to be aware of all the details, and it might break the security model but that's a small price to pay.

There has been some research in this direction but it's not going to be ready for prime-time any time soon, if ever.

It appears that Teh 'Soft has become magnanimous enough to allow users to remove Notepad, WordPad, and Paint in an upcoming release of Windows.

Gee, thanks. How about letting us remove Edge, Cortana, Xbox, and all the bloatware we REALLY want gone?

Gee, thanks. How about letting us remove Edge, Cortana, Xbox, and all

the bloatware we REALLY want gone?

You will se such a thing no way. THey want to push that crap on you no matter what :-P

I think Paint is actually discontinued now. That's probably overdue

So Microsoft's search in Windows 10 ties back to the mothership... A fiber cut caused search to go offiline?

What are then sending back that we don't know about?

All your porn? ;-)

I wonder if Windows on ARM is going to take off. If I only cared about email, writing some documents and some light web browsing, I'm sure it's fine. But I can do those tasks with almost anything.

It seems Mircosoft still doesn't get that backward compatibility is mainly why peple still put up with Windows.

Honestly, they should do what I thought they would when they bought Connectix....
Build a brand new OS from scratch. Use VMs for backward compatiblity.

That's basically what they use WOW for, whenever they have to make a jump to a new word size (16-32-64 bits). They just did it really badly by bringing too much crap forward instead of just leaving it behind in the thunked world.

This is something Apple *does* know how to do. They've done it so many times now that they're good at it.

But as you pointed out ... people run Windows mainly for compatibility with the vast library of Windows software, not because they love Windows.

Micros~1 is retiring the MCSA, MCSD, and MCSE clown college diplomas on June 30 (yes, of this year).

It could be called a "bold" move, but of course it is just an attempt at another power/money grab, because all of their new "role based certification options" point directly to Azure.

So much for the kinder and gentler Microsoft. It looks like they're tired of not having a cloud monopoly. I wouldn't be surprised if Bill Hitler came out of retirement.

And now, Bill Hitler Hitler Hitler Gates has announced that he is leaving the boards of Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway to focus exclusively on his "philanthropy".

We in the technology world will never forget the lives and companies he destroyed while running Microsoft. We will never forget his reign of terror. We will never forget how the entire technology world was held back by ten years or more while it was locked into the Windows ecosystem.

May he die soon, and may there be a particularly hot place in Hell for him to rot.