Giving up on Proxmox, working with Hyper-V, and BitLocker

The installation of Proxmox should have been straightforward but unfortunately it just was not to be. I attempted the installation process from scratch this time and came out the other end with the same result.. Debian refusing to boot with the pve kernel. This left me with a few options.. 

• Install Proxmox on a different flavour of Linux
• Install the bare metal ISO of Proxmox
• Go with a different hypervisor

After weighing up my options and a bit more research I decided to just ditch Proxmox altogether. The first attempt at installation didn't leave me with much confidence and I was tired of messing about with bootable USBs. I decided to go completely against my original decision and try out something different..

Client Hyper-V

Client Hyper-V is the name for the virtualisation technology that was introduced in Windows 8. It is not enabled by default so many people probably don't even realise they have it. It needs to be enabled via the control panel. Client Hyper-V is more or less a slightly more limited version of the Server implementation of Hyper-V. From reading the technet article regarding these limitations I do not think they are going to affect me, but I did read somewhere that the free version can only run a small number of VMs. I haven't really looked into this to be sure, but I don't see this being a major issue yet. The only requirements for enabling Hyper-V are:

• Your desktop must have at least 4GB of RAM. Mine has 16GB so I have more than enough for multiple VMs
• Your CPU must support SLAT technology (Second Level Address Translation). My AMD 8350 supports SLAT so this also not an issue.

Ok, good to go!

Does my CPU support SLAT?

Microsoft has a handy little utility called coreinfo that allows you to check for this. Click here to download Coreinfo. Once you have downloaded it you will need to extract it to some directory of your choice. Then you will want to open a command prompt (Admin) in this directory by pressing Win + x and choosing "Command Prompt (Admin)". Now navigate to the directory where you stored coreinfo. Now run the command 'coreinfo -v'.

On an AMD if your processor supports SLAT it will have an asterix in the NP row as below:

Enabling Hyper-V

Because Hyper-V is an optional feature it will need to be enabled via the control panel. Open the Control Panel, click Programs, and then click Programs and Features. Click Turn Windows features on or off. Find Hyper-V in this list and enable it, click OK, and then it will request to reboot your machine.

Easy right? 

The fun begins..

Guess what!?! More issues! yay! For some reason I am just not allowed to implement any sort of virtualisation technology outside of VirtualBox. Damn you Oracle, what you have done! During my first attempt at enabling Hyper-V it reached about 90% progress after restarting so I just figured I had missed a prerequisite or something on those lines.. So I tried again and got the same result. The message appearing on my screen was "We couldn't complete the features". Interesting, but at least I didn't turn my PC into a paperweight this time. Some furious google-fu brought me all kinds of results but the primary answer seemed to be related to virus guards, but I do not have one installed other than Windows Defender or Microsoft Security Essentials - Whatever the built in option is called for Windows 8. So I am working under the assumption that this is not responsible.

A second common answer for this was a backlog of Windows Updates preventing the hyper-v installation from completing. Apparently my computer just hates me because even something as simple as getting windows updates to install was proving difficult. Windows continuously refused to connect to the update server every time I tried checking. I kept getting Windows Update Error 0x80243003 in return so I needed to run a utility from Microsoft for repairing Windows update. This worked... after running it countless times as each time I ran it there was a new problem! Eventually after getting all the updates installed I attempted to enable Hyper-V once more and this time reached about 93%! On top of that the error changed to "We couldn't complete the updates" which I guess can be considered progress.. ?

I tried reviewing the event logs for my installation attempt but this did not shed any light for me as to what happened. Moving on the final relatively common resolution was to enable bit locker on the drive where hyper-v is installed. Was worth a try.. I mean, what harm could it do?

Bitlocker - Windows encryption

BitLocker lets you encrypt the hard drive(s) on your Windows based system. It's basically there to protect your data on the off chance that someone robs your physical computer so they will not be able to boot or access your data without the password. So  went through the process of enabling BitLocker..

To cut a long story short, it worked but my computer didn't play nice with it (surprise surprise). Following a reboot after enabling bitlocker I was greeted with an orange and white striped screen like below:

Not quite paperweight material this time as I quickly realised I could still type in the password that I had set despite having nothing to look at. I just typed and hoped and thankfully it worked out. I found this rather annoying and potentially a dodgy situation since I can't see what or where I'm typing.. I did not test to see if Hyper-V worked as I did not have the patience to let the process completely encrypt the SSD before disabling it..

So.. What now?

I never did get Hyper-V enabled and I do not think I will any time soon. So for now I am going to decide on how to proceed from here.. Surely I'll get something working eventually..