VRTUAL Machine

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A while ago we received an email from a colleague inside Microsoft asking if we new about a spelling mistake in our product.  They stated that we had used the word "vrtual" instead of virtual.  Needless to say - we were surprised to hear about this - but it was soon confirmed:

If you look at the BIOS (or firmware) version string inside a virtual machine it says "VRTUAL".  After some investigation - we received a quick answer that the problem was that the SMBIOS field (where this data is stored) only supports a 6 character string, and "VIRTUAL" is 7 characters long.

Now - some of you are likely saying "Ben! HYPERV is 6 characters!  Why didn't you use that?".  The simple answer there is that Hyper-V Generation 1 virtual machines (shown first above) use the same BIOS as we did for Virtual Server and Virtual PC - which was when this string was decided upon.

Cheers,
Ben

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2015
    > asking if we new about a spelling mistake Heh.

  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2015
    Thanks for sharing. However, I would like it much better if Microsoft would focus on fixing the Windows-10-Hyper-V-enhanced-session-mode-disconnects-every-2-minutes-if-logged-on-using-local-user-account-without-password issue introduced in Windows 10 late last year...

  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2015
    NoOffense - We are looking at this right now - it was only recently discovered that the root cause of the problem was having a blank password.  I would recommend that you set a password for your user account to avoid that. Fortunately - there is more than one person on the Hyper-V team, so my time spent writing blog posts does not mean that bugs are not getting fixed. Cheers, Ben

  • Anonymous
    September 16, 2015
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 16, 2015
    The comment has been removed