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        Running Windows NT 4.0 under Hyper-V

Section(s): General, Performance and Scalability
Published on Oct 29, 2008.
Last Modified on Aug 19, 2008.
Last Modified by Robert Larson.
Rated 2.5 out of 5 based on 2 votes.

Running Windows NT 4.0 is unsupported, but here is a trick to get it to perform well.

Hyper-V does not support Windows NT 4.0 as an official guest operating system. Hyper-V does provide an option to make it work better though. Do the following:

Create a new virtual machine to run NT 4.0.
Edit the VM configuration settings
Select the Processor hardware option to edit the settings
At the bottom is an option to Limit Processor Functionality, enable that option and press Apply.

Now when you start the NT 4.0 VM, it will perform better and act nicer to the overall Hyper-V server.

About Robert Larson

Robert Larson is the co-author of the Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Resource Kit, and the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Resource kit, both published by Microsoft Press. Robert has over 20 years experience in the engineering and IT field. Currently an architect with Microsoft Consulting Services, Robert focuses on helping customers design and deploy optimized data center and server infrastructures using physical and virtual approaches. Robert has been working with various virtualization technologies for over 4 years and is a regular speaker at Microsoft TechEd conferences in the US and Europe on the Microsoft virtualization stack. Robert has also written whitepapers and delivered webcasts on virtualization technologies. You can visit Robert's blog