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Hyper-V sets VM created date to 1601, in the reign of Good Queen Bess

Meanwhile, Hyper-V 2016 adds feature VMware's had, and Microsoft's hidden, since 2010

Virtualisation mavens have been reminded that Microsoft’s Hyper-V has a bug that occasionally resets the “created” date of virtual machines to the year 1601.

That's 1601 as in during the reign of Queen Elizabeth the first. Which we feel compelled to point out was quite a few years before the server was invented.

The bug's been acknowledged for about three years, with no official fix in sight. There's a workaround, here.

The bug comes about if you reboot a Hyper-V host and seems not to have any real-world implications, other than to cause bemusement.

That emotion may also be worth rolling out when considering a new feature in Windows Server 2016's version of Hyper-V, namely PCIe passthrough. If you're not familiar with the technology, it allow's a host's PCIe peripherals to be shared among guests, which Microsoft thinks will be handy when guests tap into hosts' super-speedy NVMe disks hooked up on PCIE connectors.

VMware's had the feature since vSphere 4.0 arrived in 2010.

What's more, Microsoft itself admits it had the technology to do PCIe passthrough in 2010, but decided not to deploy it for security reasons and the fact it would have stopped live migration of VMs among other things.

The good news is that we can all expect PCIe passthrough, or “Discrete Device Assignment” as Microsoft calls it, in Windows Server 2016. The feature's also made it into the new Tech Preview 4 of the OS.

Alan Waite, research director at Gartner for technical professionals, said Microsoft's making much of Discrete Device Assignment to show that it's on par with VMware and that it can fit into the few remaining virtualisation niches it can't already fill. Server virtualisation, Waite added, is not the most dynamic field these days so while he will be “impressed” if Microsoft has pulled this off, he doesn't expect 2016 will be a big year for the technology.

Working server virtualisation in 1601, however, would impress even the most jaded vAdmin. ®

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