Hyper-V Could not initialize memory: there is not enough space on the Disk

I received this error when I tried to increase the memory of the single freshly installed VM (Server 2008R2) on my Hyper-V 2008R2 host from 1024Mb to 2048Mb. This is a new clean 4Gb machine with almost a terabyte of free disk space so I was surprised by the error. The issue comes from how memory is allocated if the VM state is saved and how I installed Hyper-V on a bootable 8Gb USB drive. I found the clue to the answer in Robert Larson’s article on Hyper-V File Storage and Permissions

Background

In my setup Hyper-V itself is running on the USB drive. The USB drive simply contains a .vhd file that holds the bootable Hyper-V image. The image itself takes up about 6.5Gb which leaves 1.5Gb free.

The Problem

When a VM is initialized it writes a .bin file the size of the amount of RAM allocated to the VM. The default path to that is on the Hyper-V host drive, in my case the USB drive. I had already pointed the Virtual Hard Disk and Snapshot paths to the 1Tb SATA drive because I knew they wouldn’t fit on the USB drive (duh), but I didn’t realize that the location of the VM configuration would need space for all the VM memory dumps.

The Fix

Change the Virtual Machine path to use the 1Tb SATA drive also.

Case Study on Continuous Improvement in a Professional Association

I wrote this case study as an effort in process journalism so other current and potential future group leaders would have a process improvement reference. Download the Case Study on Continuous Improvement Running a Non-Profit Professional Association chapter.

You might also be interested in my popular post about 10 Reasons to Join a Professional Organization.

Hyper-V on a USB drive

In preparation for setting up a virtualized development environment on some new iron, I ran across this article series on Hyper-V virtualization in a flash – part 1, and part 2. I was planning on installing the Hyper-V on a separate hard drive, but I think I’ll try this first.

Sadly, my virtualization needs have outgrown my previous process of using client based virtualization like Sun VirtualBox and Microsoft Virtual PC.

If You Cannot Load Projects in Visual Studio 2010 using IIS

If you are running Visual Studio 2010 on Vista and using IIS to host your development projects, you probably need to run Visual Studio as an Administrator for VS to have access to load the project. How do you know? You’ll probably see “unavailable” next to the project name as shown in the screenshot below.

You can fix it by right clicking the Visual Studio launch icon from your Start menu and clicking “Run as administrator”, but that is a one time use action.

If instead you click on “Properties”, then select “Advanced” you can check the “Run as administrator” box and Visual Studio will always launch with Administrator privileges when you launch VS from that Start menu link.

This is the same operation that was necessary with some older versions of Visual Studio.