Hyper-V guest custom resolution

1 -

• A couple things come to mind. Perhaps you can run Vista in a local PC virtual. The justification is server mgmt is a vista+ only proposition.
• You could install the tools in as remote desktop terminal services apps using a WIn2k8 virtual(we do this).

2 - Yes. As you work in Virtual machine manager, you can see the Powershell code behind each task. That's prob. a good starting place for learning

3- I assume Technet will have all this. Here's an MS presentation

1. Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 has no licensing requirements for itself, you have to license the guest operating systems just like normal. If i'm not mistaken the limit on Hyper-V R2 is 384 Virtual machines per server.

2. Yes.

3. I'm not familiar with virtualbox, but after googling around a bit I think the answer is yes.

4. No, I'm fairly sure its not compatible.

One additional caveat, it likely wont matter for you as linux in general is pretty resource light, but Ubuntu isn't listed as one of the supported guest operating systems so you wont be able to load the integration components. The ICs enable the synthetic NIC and VM storage adapters, general performance enhancers. That being said I'm running Ubuntu as a hyper-v guest and it works great, its a test server and not production but I'd be willing to bet it would do fine in production.