Some days ago I compared the new HP EliteBook and ProBook series. Now I decided to buy the HP EliteBook 8460w mobile workstation. I think this is the best option between performance and batterylife.

Here the 8460w configuration I ordered:

• HP EliteBook 8460w Mobile Workstation
• Intel® Core™ i7-2630QM Processor (2.0 GHz, 6 MB L3 Cache)
• Mobile Intel QM67 chipset
• 14.0-inch diagonal LED-backlit HD+ anti-glare (1600 x 900) with 720p HD Webcam
• AMD FirePro™ M3900 w/1 GB gDDR3
• 8GB 1333 MHz DDR3 SDRAM (2D)
• 500 GB 7200 rpm 2.5-inch hard drive
• DVD+/-RW SuperMulti DL Drive
• DualPoint (TouchPad and PointStick)
• Intel Centrino® Ultimate-N 6300 (3×3)
• Bluetooth® Wireless Technology 2.1
• TPM & Fingerprint
• HP 9-Cell 100 Wh Li-Ion Battery
• 56K v.92 high speed modem
• HP Elite Support with limited 3 year standard parts and labor warranty 3/3/3

As I said the main reasons for me to buy this notebook, are the performance, the form factor, the batterylife and of coure the design. I am sure the EliteBook 8460p would be enought performance for me, but I really like the color of the EliteBook w-series notebooks.

Since HP will not release the EliteBook 8460w in Europe I ordered the notebook directly in the HP Online Store with my myus.com account.

If you are using Microsoft Hyper-V with new Intel Sandy Bridge or Intel Westmere processors and our server has over 48GB of physical RAM you may get a performance decrease. Microsoft released a hotfix (KB2517329) for this problem.

This could also be a problem with a lot of Hyper-V installations on Cisco UCS, because the most of them will use more than 48GB of memory.

The performance decrease could show its self in the the following issues:

• The CPU usage is high and the server responds slowly when you copy large files on the computer. For example, you copy a 10-GB file
• The disk I/O performance of the virtual machines (VMs) is slow
• Windows takes a long time to start

The hotfix is not include in Service Pack 1 for Hpyer-V R2 or Windows Server 2008 R2.

For more information about this you can check KB2517329

I run several Windows Virtual Machines (VMs) on my Mac with VMware Fusion. Even VMware Fusion has a great performance for Virtual Machines I am really happy about every performance increase I can get. I made a list with some tuning tips.

• First use Windows Classic Theme
• Deactivate System Protection (You also win some Diskspace)
• Under System Properties –> Advanced –> Performance –> Choose Adjust for best Performance
• Deactivate Autostart objects with MSCONFIG

There are a lot of more tips out there but I thinks these are pretty important.

Tonight I did a bigger P2V (physical 2 virtual) migration. I virtualized an older Windows Server 2003 SP1 with MS SQL Server 2005 and WSS 3.0. This can be used as a step by step how-to guide.

• First I created a Image of the old server with Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 2010, this could be done online. I just stopped all the Sharepoint, SQL and Web Services so that no new data could be written in the time I created this Image.
• After I moved this Image to the Microsoft Hyper-V Host Server, I started to convert the v2i Image with Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 to a Microsoft VHD.
• I created a new Virtual Machine on the Hyper-V Server and added this existing VHD. (Important here: I tried to create the same Hardware environment for the VM which I had as physical Hardware before. (Dual Core with 2048MB memory) So I had basically no problem to start the Virtual Machine.
• Now its time to install the Hyper-v integration components (the VM Drivers) which can only be installed on Windows Server 2003 with SP2 or later. I turned off the Virtual Machine again and attached the VHD File offline on my Hyper-v Server, so I had file access to the Virtual Hard Disk. I simply added the Servicepack 2 file to the root of the VHD.
• After unmounting the VHD, I started my Virtual Machine again and installed the Servicepack 2 and the Hyper-v Integration components.
• Now I added more Hardware to the Virtual Machine (Quad-Core and 4GB memory). I also change the Legacy Network Adapters to normal Network Adapters (higher Network performance)

The performance of the new Hyper-v is just pretty impressive.