Microsoft Virtualisation User Group UK

Hi everyone -

I have a shiney new MacBook Pro running Vista Ultimate 64-bit via bootcamp and was hoping to try to run Hyper-V as the base OS on it.  I've used a lot of VMW*&* but am new to Hyper-V so appologies for my newbie vocab.  Does anyone know if this is posisble?  Hyper-V can take advantage of EFI now, right?  Any note appreciated.

Thanks,

Kevin Q.

Hi Kevin,

I was talking to one of the user group members earlier tonight and he said he'd tried to install Hyper-V on a MacBook Pro and failed (after much trying, even involving Ben Armstrong from the product group).

The problem appears to be that, because the MacBook Pro does not have a BIOS (it uses EFI), it fails the check for processor capabilities when installing the Hyper-V role.  Windows Server will go on fine - just not Hyper-V.

Of course, if you've found out something different, it would be great to hear it!

Mark

Hi Mark,

is now a solution available to run Hyper-V on a Macbook Pro?

Regards,

Torsten

Hi Torsten - not that I'm aware of.  I'd love to hear from anyone who has got it working though...

Mark

Not working yet that I know of....

Unless you include running Windows Server 2008 inside bootcamp.  According to Adam Shepherd, it works fine there as you would expect.  What I was hoping for was to have Hyper-V be the supervising OS, like some of the VM-Ware demos I've seen seem to, that can virtualize any OS that will run on the Intel Mac hardware (Server 2008, Vista, Mac OSX, whatever).  So what Adam got to work is: Boot camp prompts for Mac or Windows and toot time.  If you choose Windows, it boots to Windows Server 2008 with Hyper V funtioning as fully as on any hardware.  So it may be what some of you are looking for.

Hope that helps and I'll let you know if we get more to work.

All the best,

Kevin Q.

I can understand why it works in boot camp - AFAIK, bootcamp is really just an boot loader with switching capabilities and it allows Windows operating systems to see the EFI as BIOS.  Without that translation, Hyper-V is failing to find the processor support it's looking for because it makes the BIOS calls and they fail.

Given this situation, I wouldn't hold up much hope of getting this working without Apple Boot Camp until Windows supports EFI natively (I think that was supposed to be in Vista/2008 but was slipped so hopefully it will be in Windows 7 - but that's just speculation - I have no hard evidence!)

M