Bl** Hyper-V!

Well, I wasted 3 hours of my life last night trying to get Hyper-V working on one of my PC/servers. Admittedly it's an ancient 2 years old, only has PCI-Express, SATA-II support and up to 4-core Intel processors, but for some reason, my attempts to install Hyper-V would get just so far and fail with a cryptic 0x8007045D error.

As a seasoned professional, I tried the obvious - shouting at the PC, kicking the PC, snapping at my children as they came in to ask innocent questions, then as a last resort I tried using different installation media, screwing about with BIOS settings and so on.

None of it worked. The error code, according to Google, seems to be hardware related, but I've no idea where and Hyper-V being a complex high-quality piece of software gave me no clues. Perhaps if the installation hadn't taken up to 30 minutes at a time (goodness knows what it was it was doing) I could have got back to Heroes an hour earlier.

After giving up, I re-installed VMware ESXi - an installation which, no kidding, took only 10 minutes end to end.

I have been planning a review of the virtualisation technologies, especially with respect to storage, clearly Hyper-V is going to make this a challenge.

Microsoft - you're not on my Christmas card list this year (which they weren't on in the first place as my wife writes all the cards in our house) - VMware welcome back.