SBS on HyperV

I am currently setting up a Hyper V enviroment to run our internal SBS server plus one or two other servers and to provide a platform for our disaster recovery offering. Basically we offer a 25 seat DR Centre with PC's, Telephone, Internet Access etc. The idea is to virtualise the customers server to our Hyper V enviroment in the event of their building burning down or any such catastrophe. 

Now the challenge is to restore the SBS backup onto the Hyper V. Hyper V at the moment does not support pass through USB so just plugging the drive into the Hyper V will not work. 

So first I plugged the USB drive into the host machine. On the host machine Disk Management I put the drive offline. The drive is then availible as a drive in the settings of the VM. First off I set it as a SCSI drive but when I ran a restore it did not pick up the drive. Then I changed the drive setting so IDE. Booted off the SBS server, said repair my computer and it picked up the backup drive and the restore began. It took about 8 hours to restore 100Gb but that is probably down to the speed of the disk system in you test setup.

Remote shooting on a Canon SLR on 64 Bit Windows

This isn't about SBS but I am going to post it anyway. I dabble with a bit of photography on the side. I have a Canon 350D which isn't the fanciest camera but it works. Recently we rolled out iPhones to our company. A company called onOne software makes a pretty cool iPhone app to remote fire the camera. So I downloaded the remote app server and then discovered that Canon do not make a driver for any 64bit operating system. Most people just change the mode on the camera to Print/PTP to download their pics but it does not allow any remote shooting. This got me thinking.... Windows 7 has XP mode. So I downloaded XP mode for machine. Got it installed. Installed the Canon drivers for my camera in XP mode and attached the camera to the XP mode virtual machine. The virtual machine could see the camera so we were cooking with gas. I installed the remote app. I did have to install .Net 3.5 framework and then set the networking settings on the virtual machine to the wireless card on my notebook but I got the application to work... So anyone with Windows 7 64bit that needs to remote shoot with a Canon camera go with XP mode.