Hyper-V on VMWare Fusion on OS X

The reason I’ve been quiet lately is because I’ve been busy building a Microsoft SharePoint site. Without discussing what’s right or wrong or why let’s get to how I’m doing this using only Apple hardware in a way that’s ready to be moved to physical Windows Servers.

Before you get started, there’s a decision you should make upfront – will these virtual machines need to be visible outside of the network between your Mac and them? If so, make sure you Bridge the network interfaces between the VMWare machine and your Mac rather than NAT. The Hyper-V machines will be bridged to this connection either way.

Click “Customize” at the end of the VMWare quick install wizard. Put the VM somewhere better than your home folder.

  • Set your startup drive to NOT “Split into 2GB file”
  • Add a very large second disk. This is where the Hyper-V machines will actually be stored.
  • In the Processor settings, “Enable HyperVisor Applications”
  • Also give this machine as much CPU and RAM as you can.
  • Edit the virtual machine’s .vmx file (VMware machines are bundles like OS X Applications) and add: hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = "FALSE"

Run the windows installer. Enable the Hyper-V role.Do Windows Updates. About 90 minutes and 17 reboots later (or just skip Windows Updates if you dare) you’ll be ready to start adding Hyper-V machines. Except for one small problem: that giant second HDD you attached via SCSI to Simulate a RAID controller isn’t available.
Open up a command line and run disk part or diskpart.exe or DiskPart (they all should work).

san
san policy=OnlineAll
list disk
select disk 1
attributes disk clear readonly
online disk

Your disk may not be disk 1; use whatever makes sense based on the results of list disk.

Running the drive partitioning utility will not prompt to format the drive. Once done, you can now follow best practices and store Hyper-V machines on a drive that isn’t startup.