Virtualized Environment

Maintenance Connection runs on any supported operating system within a virtualized environment as long as the virtualizing solution does not make changes to the operating system that cause differences in how applications and services operate.

VMWare, MS Hyper-V and others

Roughly this means that full virtualizing solutions like VMWare and MS Hyper-V do work correctly. Partial virtualizing solutions often may not work, we are not aware of any that run on Windows, but there are other virtualizing hosts that do this.

Customers have informed us they have successfully operated Maintenance Connection on VMWare (ESX, ESXi, and others) as well as Hyper-V. This is expected. We also run test and development servers in Hyper-V and from time to time VMWare with no known issues to date (see below for more details).

Included support, paid extra support

As with Operating Systems our standard support policy doesn't extend to things that make the operating system work, like Virtualizing Software, Hardware, Generators, etc. So while we do occasionally use some of these items we don't support any of this except as a 'per hour' support in the sense of helping with install, debugging problems etc.

What do we run?

In our development environments, we have had MC running in every MS server from Server 2008 R2 and every last one is running on some kind of virtualizing solution, either VMWare Workstation or Hyper-V. (We cannot run on Server 2003 because we use .NET 4.5)

Free MS-Hyper-V OS 2012

There can be some confusion with this product. At first glance it might appear that you can install this 'free' OS from Microsoft and then run applications directly on it, bypassing licensing costs and issues.

But this is not the case. The OS is not licensed for running applications on it, it is only licensed for running other, virtual, operating systems.

Installing IIS, the primary application we use, would be illegal and will either be a hack or impossible – we do not know which as we never intend to try.

Instead, you may use the free MS-Hyper-V OS to host the operating system, licensed and paid as appropriate, that virtual operating system will then run IIS.

So, using an operating system hosted by MS-Hyper-V OS then falls under the statements above.

Running Clients in Virtual

We are not suggesting you should do this as the practical value is limited and there will be cost considerations depending on your licensing agreements with Microsoft. However, we do run test clients in virtual computers and, following the rules for servers above, we have had no technical issues to date.

The one practical situation is where you want to run MRO on IE as well as MCxLE/MCe. Since MRO requires the IE browser to act like a 10+ year old browser, you could run a virtual computer running on your laptop (or desktop) with IE running in 'compatibility mode' when working on DMC/MRO and run IE on your laptop directly to run MCe/MCxLE.

Possibly extending this in the future, when someday IE stops supporting compatibility mode, you could have one virtual computer that has not upgraded IE that runs MRO and the host computer, your laptop, can run with the then most recent version of IE.