For those of you looking to get a super fast QuadCore server to run Windows 2008 Hyper-V, take a look at the Apple Mac Pro Server as an option. After screwing around for a week at my local Frys Electronics trying to get a clone motherboard (ASUS 2 processor with support for up to 24gb memory) to work (problem where the ASUS motherboard ONLY supports the 3ghz Xeon processor, not the 2ghz processors they sold me, they want $1200 more to upgrade me from 2ghz to 3ghz processors, no thank you!), I walked over to the Apple section of the store and bought an Apple Mac Pro Server.

So I ended up with an off the shelf Apple Mac Pro, comes with 2 Intel Xeon QuadCore 2.8ghz processors (so 8 core), 2gb of RAM (has 8 slots, so expandable to 32gb of fully buffered DIMM memory), and a 300gb 7200rpm drive for US$2750 (Aug/2008).

I popped in 4 4gb DIMMs bringing my memory up to 18GB and I popped in an off the shelf Seagate 1TB 7200RPM SATA drive (all "rails", cables, etc are included) and that was it, the system is pretty darn beefy. The unit comes with a keyboard and an Apple Mouse (although I bought a $19 "2 button" mouse as it's pretty useless trying to use a 1-button Apple mouse in Windows virtual images), although the USB keyboard that Apple supplies with the thing works great, no complaints about the keyboard, has all the function keys and is very smooth to work from.

So, got the system home and plugged in the memory, hard drive, and my 2-button mouse and connected it up with a 17" LCD I had at home and started to load it up. BUT, few things on trying to get Windows 2008 Hyper-V to work on the MacIntosh MacPro computer. Here you go...

1) You MUST run BootCamp to be able to get the Hypervisor to run on the Windows hard drive partition (more on this later in this posting)
2) You CANNOT boot to just a plain Windows 2008 hard drive with Hyper-V loaded up on it, for whatever reason, even though the drive boots and everything seemingly works perfectly, you will always get a "Hypervisor is not Running" error. Trust me, I took a fully working SATA hard drive that had Windows 2008 and Hyper-V on it that worked fine in another computer, booted the hard drive on the MacPro (and since the drive ONLY has Windows on it, it only booted to Windows (took a few minutes to load up network drivers and stuff on the thing through Plug and Play), but upon reboot of the drive, I got the error "Hypervisor is not Running". No matter what I did with the drive, didn't load the Hypervisor. Took the drive out and popped it into a normal PC computer and it booted Windows and Hypervisor fine. Back into the MacPro and Hypervisor did not run...

So, my conclusion on this is that because Macintosh computers do not have BIOSs and instead use EFI, that despite the fully working Windows hard drive working on a BIOS-based PC computer, when it boots on the EFI-based MacIntosh, that the Hypervisor (hvboot.sys) does not load, just the normal Windows boot.sys loads, thus you can't run Hyper-V.

Bottomline, I tried it every which way as I really want to simplify getting Hyper-V to work on this MacPro, and tried it in all parameters, couldn't simplify the process. BUT, did get Hyper-V to work on the Mac Pro very reliably, here's what I did...
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1) Load the MacPro computer with Mac OS (Leopard, presumably as that's what they come with these days out of the box)
2) Run through the Mac OS setup and add in your name, language, etc, etc until the computer boots to the Mac OS
3) Run bootcamp to install the Windows 2008 partition, which basicaly is Double Click on the MacIntosh Hard Drive, choose "Applications" to go into the applications folder, then choose "Utilities" to go into the utilities folder. Double click and run BootCamp Assistance.
4) BootCamp will ask you a bunch of things, one being how you want to partition your hard drive. I had a 300GB drive so I choose 100GB for the MacIntosh OS and moved the little bar thing over so that my Windows Partition was going to be 200GB. I'd recommend you make the MacIntosh Partition with at least 50GB as you WILL be booting to that partition here forward and it'll download patches and updates and other stuff, so you need a good amount of operating space available on the Mac Partition (plus if you're like me, you'd want to fiddle with GarageBand and do video editing on your 8-core Mac, so have some play room on the MacIntosh partition, 100gb is good...)
5) When the thing notifies you, you'll need to pop in your Windows 2008 DVD. To open the DVD drive of the Apple MacPro, press the eject button on the Mac keyboard (it's the up arrowish looking thing above the "delete (backspace)" key, basically in the F13 function spot. This will open the DVD drive so you can pop in your Windows 2008 DVD. Press continue or whatever to proceed with Bootcamp. Effectively it will "boot" the Windows 2008 DVD.
6) For the Windows installation, you'll find when you get to installing Windows 2008 on one of the partitions, the entire disk will be full. You'll notice that there is one partition labeled something something "(BootCamp)" that'll have the amount of space (in gigabytes) you specified, THAT is the partition you'll install Windows 2008 on. Be careful, there is a partition that is 200mb (megabytes) that is a primary boot partition, DON'T DELETE THAT as that is the bootcamp boot partition and if you wipe that, you have to install the MacIntosh OS all over again (been there, did that, 60 minutes wasted). You'll also notice like a 10mb partition or something and a partition that'll be some GB in size that is the Mac OS partition. But choose the one that says "BootCamp" and is about the size in Gigabytes you specified.
7) If you select that "Bootcamp" partition, you'll find that it'll say you can't install it on that partition (because it's actually in FAT format out of the Bootcamp utility). So you need to choose Advanced Installation or whatever from that screen and then sit on that BootCamp partition and choose to delete the partition and then create a NEW partition this time NTFS. And now proceed by choosing this new NTFS partition to load Windows 2008.

I'm going to assume you know how to Install Windows 2008, if not, plenty of references out there on loading Windows 2008 (I wrote Windows 2008 Unleashed and also Windows 2008 Hyper-V Unleashed which both Sams Publishing books have step by step installation of Windows 2008, but you can also find basic Windows 2008 install guides on the Web)

8) After you install Windows 2008, then you have to install the Hyper-v "Role" on the system. Because Hyper-V came as a beta when Windows 2008 shipped, you either need to:
8a) load up all Windows 2008 "updates" of which Hyper-V update is automatically downloaded with the latest Windows 2008 updates
8b) choose to download the Windows 2008 Hyper-V update off microsoft.com\downloads and run the msu installer to get Hyper-V installed

Okay, once you have Windows 2008 loaded up as well as Hyper-V installed, now the "trick". If you boot the MacPro computer through bootcamp by powering on the MacPro and holding down the Alt/Option button on the keyboard, you'll be able to choose to boot to either the MacOS partition or the Windows partition. Here's the issue though, if you choose the Windows partition from the BootCamp (alt/option on bootup) screen, the Hypervisor is not Running error will pop up when you try to start any Hyper-V images.

So the trick is, hold the Alt/Option key down on power up (basically past the BONG sound and until the menu comes up to choose between the Mac or Windows partitions) and choose to boot to the MacOS partition and actually load up the Mac OS operating system. Now from the Mac operating system, go to System Preferences (the little apple thing in the upper left corner for you Windows people) then choose "Start Up Disks" at the bottom of the System Preferences list of icons. You'll see the ability to choose the MacOS or the Windows partitions (plus usually a 3rd network boot option), but from the System Preferences / Startup Disks, choose the Windows option and click the Restart button right below it. You will be prompted whether you want to restart the computer, choose to Continue.

Now when the computer reboots, you do NOT need to hold the Alt/Options down on this reboot (actually do NOT hold it down on this reboot, let the computer automatically reboot to Windows as you instructed it to). So on reboot, the Mac OS shuts down and the system boots to the Windows partition. Now you'll be able to launch or create a Hyper-V guest session and it works like a champ, no errors...

My belief is that since the MacPro does not have a BIOS, if you boot straight to Windows, the EFI thing of the mac causes the boot.sys to load instead of the Hypervisor hvboot.sys, however when you run bootcamp and it boots to the MacIntosh OS and then you choose to "reboot" to the Windows partition, the reboot loads up the BIOS emulator long enough for the system reboot to Windows to tell Windows it's running on a fully blown Windows computer and to load up the hypervisor.

Crazy, but it works, and it works very reliably...

So now I have a dual QuadCore server with 32gb of RAM with a BootCamp dual boot Mac OS and Windows 2008 300gb drive and 1TB E> for extra images. The thing smokes, this is a super fast computer and one that I can fiddle with a super fast Mac to do video capture and video editing on the Mac side on the system, and boot to Windows to load up a dozen + HyperV guest images all at the same time.

Have fun!

Rand
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Added 8/5/2008: Few extra bits as I've now have had this going for the past week...
- reliability and performance are solid, best virtual host server I've run to date!
- as much as I note that you must cold boot to the Mac OS and then restart into Windows to get the hypervisor going, what I've found is that once I'm booted into Windows 2008, I can "restart" the Windows 2008 host server (after patching, updating, just to reset the host server) without having to go through the whole Mac OS step. The only time you need to go through the Mac OS and "restart" to Windows is when you do a cold boot of the Mac Pro computer. As long as Windows 2008 hypervisor is working, if you simply do a restart of the Windows 2008 host server OS, it'll restart directly to Windows 2008 without a problem...