If, for some reason, you want to boot Windows Server 2008 without the hypervisor you can create an extra entry in the boot loader. Here's how:
- At the command prompt, type the following:
bcdedit /copy {default} /d "No Hypervisor" - The above command should say: The entry was successfully copied to {guid}. Copy that guid to the clipboard including the curly braces.
- Now, type the following command:
bcdedit /set {guid} hypervisorlaunchtype off
In the above command, replace {guid} with what you copied in step 2. The above command just sets a property in the boot entry that will not load the hypervisor on boot.
That's it. If you now boot your machine you will get a boot menu with an extra option.
Now why would you do it? Troubleshooting is one reason but for test/dev/training purposes you might want to run something like Virtual Server or VMware Server/Workstation on the same box. Running those with the hypervisor turned on will give you all sorts of problems: it will be slow, and you won't be able to run x64 guests in VMware, etc...
As for me, I wanted to try out Solaris 10 on VMware as currently Hyper-V doesn’t support Solaris yet.
Tip #1: There is a bug in VMware that if you select the default 540MB memory allocation, the installation will hang. You need to allocate 1024MB.