Virtual Hardware 7 Undocumented Feature Revealed!

So after my last post, VMware did some digging and the real reason for the initially odd behaviour was exposed – it’s a combination of the way Virtual Hardware 7 presents virtual disks to Guests, and the difference in default policy settings of Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition and Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition.

So in a nutshell, as Rob elaborates in the comments to my earlier post, it turns out Virtual Hardware 7 presents virtual disks as SAN devices – not as local disks. This resulted in the default SAN policy of WS2008EE offlining everything bar the boot volume during installation. To be honest, this is actually a good setting to have IMHO – I wouldnt trust Windows admins with clustering either. To anyone who I work with or have worked with, that last sentence was clearly a joke !

The VMware KB article has been drastically overhauled so no one else will be in the dark in the future, and hopefully stuff like this will also show up in the Guest OS installation guide where it really belongs.

So in the end we all learned something which is always good, and it goes to show that VMware’s response to potential bugs is in fact anything but woeful. Hurray!