What happens is that the registry routinely gets corrupted on virtual machines that are running Windows Server 2003 R2. I will be working on a VM with no signs of trouble, reboot the VM, and receive a message stating that the registry was corrupted. The crazy thing is that there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason for the occurance. I have seen it happen to freshly installed copies of Windows as well as VMs that have been running for weeks. The interesting thing is that it is always the same registry key that becomes corrupted (HKLM\Software).

Over the last couple of months, this has started to become a major issue for me. I have lost dozens of hours of productivity to rebuilding lab VMs. I just wanted to put this out there and see if anyone else has experienced this problem.

I have gone over the Microsoft documentation numerous times, and it seems as though I am doing everything correctly. Tonight I stumbled onto an interesting Web page though (http://connect.microsoft.com/EBS08/community/discussion/richui/default.aspx?NewsgroupID=2554&RootArticleID=317560). Although Microsoft says that EBS will run on top of Hyper-V, there have apparently been a lot of problems with doing so.  Although some people claim to have been able to pull off a full EBS deployment using Hyper-V, I am running out of time in getting this deployment done. Tomorrow I am going to try using physical hardware.