Windows 7 Activation Woes

Since getting KVM and QEMU up and running and installing Windows 7 on a virtual disk (a necessary evil if I'm going to use this laptop for work), I ran into some activation woes, with Windows 7 unable to activate the volume media

Windows could not be activated.
Key management services (KMS) host could not be located in domain name system (DNS), please have your system adminstrator verify that a KMS is published correctly in DNS.
Error: 0x80092328
Description:
DNS name does not exist

Unlike the days of my youth and with the help of an MSDN subscription, my media and key is actually legitimate. After a bit of searching, I found KB929826, which outlined how to fix the problem- a simple one line command to be run as administrator:

slmgr -ipk XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX

and all issues were solved:

Flip the switch from 'Broken' to 'Fixed'

The key to using KVM: ENABLE VIRTUALIZATION IN THE BIOS

In the words of the famous Homer Simpson- "Doh!"
After doing a bit more research and piecing together why I could boot into Windows, but then everything would come to grinding halt, it occured to me to check the BIOS to ensure that virtualization is enabled, as I was continuously getting an error when starting a VM: "Could not initialize KVM, will disable KVM support".

Seeing as my intel processor supports virtualization (egrep vmx --color=always /proc/cpuinfo), why wouldn't KVM start correctly? Furthermore, modprobe kvm-intel wouldn't load correctly.

After a couple of audible, "huh."s it occured to me to check the BIOS on the HP laptop to ensure CPU virtualization was enabled. SURPRISE! It wasn't. After enabling it in the BIOS and booting, and with a little more confidence, I ran into the same problem, "Could not initialize KVM, will disable KVM support." After a bit of Googling, I found that for whatever reason, a full shutdown and cold boot were necessary for the BIOS setting to take effect. Sure enough, after a reboot and starting my VM:


And with the -CDROM option pointing to my Windows 7 ISO, I made it past the infinite "setup is starting" page, and was able to install Windows 7:



As is usually the case, the issues experienced with KVM were due to user error rather than shoddy development.


So some tasks to complete to ensure that my work laptop will actually facilitate work:

• Ensure I can share files between my RHEL host and KVM guests
• Ensure that USB devices can be used on KVM guests
• Provide my work Windows 7 guest with enough disk space to accomodate all of my work documents

After a bit of consideration, I think my best approach will be to keep my guest OS on a different virtual disk image than my documents. That way I can keep a separate non-OS partition with all of my documents on it and boot my virtual disks with the -hdb option, thus allowing me to easily switch from Windows 7 to Windows XP guests.

Some links I found useful or potentially useful:
How to resize a libvirt image
QEMU Monitor Commands
QEMU USB Handling

Mounting ISOs in Windows 7

One feature that I was hoping Windows 7 would have (as Linux has had it since I can remember) is the built-in ability to mount ISOs... but alas, again Microsoft disappoints. To add insult to injury, neither Daemon Tools nor PowerISO work reliably in Windows 7. Windows XP SP3 broke Daemon Tools (something with sptd-SCSI Pass Thru Direct), and PowerISO installs on Windows 7 only unreliably, apparently determined by the particular workstation's hardware- here at work my coworkers who use Dell 740s have no problem, but the install always fails on my Dell GX620.

So what's the solution? Pismo File Mount. And it may be better than PowerISO or Daemon Tools anyways. It allows much more granular control of the mounted ISO, such as mounting for the owner only and establishing access (rw,r) for other users. It also allows you to mount ISO where they are, as opposed to a virtual disk, allowing quicker and better Windows explorer integration.

Adobe PDF Printer on Windows 7

Apparently Adobe Professional's Adobe Converter printer does not install cleanly on Windows 7. To manually install the printer, I did the following:

1. Start > Control Panel > View Devices and Printers
2. Add a Printer
3. Add a Local Printer
4. Create a new port
5. Named it AdobePDF
6. If Drivers auto populate, select Adobe PDF Converter, else
   
7. Click "Have Disk"
8. Browse to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobatx.x\Acrobat\Xtras\AdobePDF
9. Click any of the Adobe PDF Converters
10. Click "Use the driver that is currently installed (recommended)"
11. Name the Printer (I used the default "Adobe PDF Converter")
12. Right-click on the printer > Printer Properties
13. Go to Advanced tab
14. Click "Print directly to the printer" so that it doesn't spool printing

And now it works as intended! Just another odd quirk with Windows 7...

VMWare NAT on Windows 7

While I would never dream of switching my home workstation to a new version of Windows within its first few months on the market, particularly when it is still only in RTM, at work is a different story.

I could probably still get by using XP Pro on my workstation, and put Windows 7 in a VM, I find self-immersion to be the best method to fully learn a new OS, as it forces me to get it set up completely, otherwise I can't do work.

While I've run into a few annoyances thus far (no Daemon Tools or PowerISO, urg), nothing yet has been a show stopper... until I tried accessing the internet in my XP Active Directory administration virtual machine in VMWare using NAT.

Apparently Windows 7's new compartmentalized network security breaks VMWare's NATing ability. Note in the below screen shot how the VMWare Network adapter is identified by Windows as being on a public network, thereby disabling its connection.


I was able to still use Bridged networking within VMWare, but this was not practical at work since we have to specific each connected machine's MAC address in our DHCP tables to assign it an IP- a bit overkill for an only occasionally non-critical VM.

So after some digging and a bit of troubleshooting, I found a workable solution thanks, in part to this article, using Win7's Internet Connection Sharing (ICS). One important caveat to note is that Win7's networking has changed in a few minor ways that require a bit of deviation from the article. Below is a summary of steps:

1. Run the Virtual Network Editor as Admin
2. Go to Host Virtual Adapters tab, remove all VMNet instances (default are VMNet1 and VMNet8)
3. Click Apply
4. Click Add, select VMnet1
5. Click Apply
6. Go to the Host Virtual Networking tab
7. Click the > next to VMnet1 and change the address and subnet to use the Win7 ICS network (192.168.137.0 / 255.255.255.0) <- note how this deviates from the article
8. Click Apply
9. Go the NAT tab and select VMNet1
10. Click Edit and change the Gateway to the ICS gateway IP (192.168.137.1)
11. Click Apply and restart the NAT service
12. Go to the DHCP tab
13. Add VMNet1 and remove all others
14. Click Apply
15. Select Properties of VMNet1 in DHCP Tab
16. Enter a Start and End Address for DHCP (I used 192.168.137.50 to 192.168.137.75)
17. Click OK then Apply

19. Go to Network Connections in the Windows 7 Control Panel
20. Right Click on your Local Area Connection > Properties
21. Go to Share Tab and check both boxes (Allow other network users to connect through this computer's Internet connection and Allow other network users to control or disable the shared Internet Connection [optional])
22. Click OK

23. On each VM, go to Network settings and select Host Only Networking for every VM that needs to NAT out to the network

Done! Seemed to do the trick on my XP SP3 VMs, and now I can administer our AD tree and group policy!