A world first, I think: 14393 guest 2008R2 host, possible !!!!

People playing with hyper V are surely aware that MS backs just one version of guests after the host's one.

So theoretically on Hyper-V 2008R2 you can run just Win 8.0 VMs, on Win 8/2012 hosts you can run just Win 8.1/2012R2 guests and so on.

Practically on 2008R2 hosts you can run w/o major problems any VM from Win 8.0 to W10 10586 (and Server 2016 TP4).

Anyway W10 anniversary and Server 2016 RTM won't run at all.

Now happened tath I needed to run a Server 2016 RTM inside a Server 2008R2, and although TP4 still runs fine and w/o any major problem, the RTM version is obviously the preferred choice.

So I spent a couple of hours one week to prove my theory, and then a week to perfect a method to make it simple to implement:

In short my guess was that the problem was not the kernel or any other fundamental component of builds 14393, but the bundled Hyper-V itself, so I started to test an image with HyperV totally removed from it, and it worked!

Then I narrowed down further the culprit to the guest integration components alone, finally I ended to identify THE single, tiny, file responsible of the boot hang of the Anniversary VMs.

That file is HyperVideo.sys and it is the VGA driver who takes care of the emulated VGA for the Hyper-V consolle alone (i.e. not the remote desktop video).

In short you can replace it with the one taken from anything from 9600 to 10586, but you can also remove it altogether from boot.wim and install.wim, and everything will still work as usual.

The VGA performance of the Hyper V consolle are poor anyway, so even if you remove the file instead of replacing it, practically nothing changes. Practically it's just a 26KB "fake" driver.

Either way, Win 10 anniversary will work nicely and rock solid, w/o any other problem, on 2008R2 hosts.

I'm sure that the week spent on it will help a lot of people unwilling to upgrade a perfectly working server just to run a W10/2016 guest (core versions are affected as well).

So enjoy more years of life to your 2008R2 server thanks to a stupid 26KB file killed or replaced

 

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Stop posting those stupid sentences.

There is not ancient SW. There is SW that does what you need and software that doesn't.

For the record, that 2008 R2 server is acting as WMC server/HTPC, as a Primary Domain Controller, as a centralized backup server and also, thanks to HV is running nicely the deduplication on its storage.

Also given it's classified as an "home" product you can install on it most standard antivirus, and partitioning programs which are usually forbidden on server.

If you have a better and cheaper solution I'm all ears

 

That's the inf not the driver.
Whaterver... Yepp... this looks as one of those drivers that needs the double signature check (aka you can't load another one even with the driver signature enforcement disabled). In that very case we are lucky because the driver does practically nothing of useful.

But if were something more important like the scsi or network driver we were out of luck

 

No. Period.

 

Exactly. In that case the driver is "null", still not the inf.

I agree. no one will die if you stick with the wrong definition.