Locked Hyper-v on a WinPE enviroment [disregard: impractical approach]

[Nic410]

I was thinking that a WinPE with Hyper-V would come in handy to have.
Boot an unbootable PC and run the VMs from that PC to save the day. And fix the PC in the weekend or whenever there is time, as the VMs can run in "emergency mode" with this boot CD/DVD.

Thanks

 

[Wichestery2k]

@Nic410 I pmed you a link, let us know if it helps!!

 

[Cyler]

Here we have 2 questions:
1 if we can do it
2. If we should do it

The answer to No 1 is... Yes using Qemu as it has no dependencies or probably yes ( I personally haven't tried it) with the addition of some libraries (.net and others) slipstreamed inside PE, and then run Vmware Player with the desired predefined VMs if they can fit in Ram. Remember by default WinPE doesn't use swap and you need to jump through hoops to make it do so but then if you do activate swap, you risk the disk you want to rescue as PE runs exclusively from RAM (X: is a ram disk).

The answer to 2 is... there is no real point or benefit, or I don't see one at least and on top, you risk breaking a bad hard disk even more. You just add extra steps to the recovery process that will slow the PC down if anything or will ask you to do extra "maneuvers" to do the simplest of things. For example, to scan a local disk, you will have to do extra steps to mount it in the VM... which may risk the disk itself, and then because you emulate things, you make them dead slow. Not even going to ask why multiple VMs.

If we think about it, if recovery of a dead PC is what we care for either because of a bad disk or, viruses, all you need is PE and a good set of recovery tools and antivirus tools.. 2 or 3 is more than enough per category. Add some testing tools (ram, etc) and maybe some net/internet tools (FTP or any such tools, to transfer files out of PC, internet browser, etc) and you are set. Why do those through a VM when you can run them faster, easier, and native directly from PE?

The only other time I explored WinPE and VMs was to use them as an alternative to Esxi Server and I needed a lite OS to host the VMs to run. Results, for various reasons were below expectations but it was fun to build such PE.

Hope it helped.

 

[Nic410]

...I was thinking more along the idea of Win to Go, or such as to boot from USB-3.x and read the Hyper-V VMs from the disk and run it as such.
As far as I believe, no one uses DVD/CD but rather, Rufus it, or Ventoy. But yes, I understand that a BootCD (WinPE) would be far fetch but, y'all come up with ( to me ) unbelievable stuff so I made the request.

All this is just an idea. I'm running a AMD 5950x w/128 Gig ECC ram and the VMs are: 1 TrueNAS and the 5 or 6 Win10's, load iSCSI for storage ( from TrueNAS ), making the VM itself quite small on an NVMe drive. All this from a Win10 pro. It may sound crazy to run it as such but I've don it for years without a hitch.
The above idea was based on since every data disk is in that TrueNAS, in case if an emergency I'd plug an USB NVMe and keep going.

But for what I read, is just an idea and for what it seems, a bad one too. If the idea is an impossibility or to be so slow in practice, that is useless, then that's that.

Thank you all for sharing

 

[Cyler]

I see now, I thought you meant this as a generic tool to be used in many PCs and not a system specific to your needs. I did try something similar to what you say tho for other reasons.

Well, the setup has to be extremely custom to your needs. For example, PE by default doesn't have iSCSI support and it's needed to be added (despite what people say, it's relatively easy to add), then you need to be aware of windows PE limitations. For example, it cant run for more than 72h and so every so often you need to shut down everything and run again, no swap file, and a few other things we take for granted in a normal OS.

In general, I would suggest it's better to have a small SSD to use as a mirror of the main system disk (boot partition only) and in case of failure, boot from that one and take your time fixing or replacing the main Nvme. A cheap boot SSD will not cost much and will make sure you have 99.99% uptime. For sure it's easier to do than to have a custom PE with additions and system drivers added and can't even be sure if it will run/perform as one might think.

EDIT: Because you have it on your title, HyperV can not be initiated or even added on Windows PE. Partly because of the lack of support of VT-X, partly from other dependencies missing, few people tried, and no one could make HyperV run on PE.

 

[Nic410]

...and that's a wrap. I'll do a backup of the boot drive ( 512 GB NVMe ) and of the VMs drive ( 2TB NVMe ) and call it a day. In case of failure, slap in a new NVMe and keep going.
The other is 2ea 18TB passthrough to the TrueNAS where the files are at ( moved Destop, MyDocuments, etc to that iSCSI in each VM ).
In any case, this new PC is going to be backed up by another TruesNAS ( ..the old PC is going to be turned into a TrueNAS box just to have a backup of everything. )

That is the more sensible approach/contingency in case of
Thanks for the chat Cyler.