Emulation using Microsofts Hyper-V
From MARIAGE in DART
This work has been fairly short, as Microsoft’s Hyper-V does not support audio/sound directly. In a multi-media environment this limitation is not acceptable.
Other serious limitation to Hyper-V for our purposes are the support of guest operating systems and the difficulty in virtualization of existing computers.
With the functionality of Hyper-V it is fairly obvious that it is build for hosting servers with only a limited support for client operating systems. A full list can be found on http://support.microsoft.com/kb/954958. In summary Hyper-V supports Windows Server 2008, 2003 and 2000. In addition it supports Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10. Supported client operating systems are Windows Vista and Windows XP. For Mariage the limitation on Client operating systems are serious and limit the use of the Hyper-V for our purpose.
The lack of tools for virtualization is also excluding the use of Hyper-V for our purposes. Hyper-V can import guest operating systems created on and exported from another Hyper-V installation. In addition it can, with some manual intervention, import guest systems from Virtual Server 2005.
A tool to virtualize existing systems, Virtual Server 2005 Migration Toolkit (VSMT) can be down loaded from Microsoft. This tool will only run under Microsoft Server 2003.
For the audio problem a "work around" exists, to use remote desktop software to run applications and thereby using the soundcard on a client. This solution has been tested and works OK for audio. For combined video / audio however the audio was not in sync with the video, and audio delays of 1-2 seconds relative to the video was experienced.
