Windows 7 seems to be quickly shaping up with its new taskbar and a much more polished UI than Vista.
After testing it on both my laptop and in Hyper-V I've found some interesting stuff I wanted to share.

Your system administrator does no allow the use of saved credentials to log on to the remote computer <computername> because its identity is not fully verified. Please enter new credentials.

If you are using Hyper-V and your client is in a domain you might have seen this dialog a couple of times.
Or if your testing out VMM 2008 Beta in a domain environment you must have gone nuts by now.

The workaround for it is pretty simple.
On your domain server, open up Group Policy Management Editor and go to Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System -> Credentials Deligation.
Double click on Allow saved credentials with NTLM-only Server Authentication, click Show and add "*servername.domain" to the list.

My server is named Exia and my domain is home.mindre.net, so I added *EXIA.home.mindre.net to the list.
Now go on your client and open a Comand Prompt with admin rights and run gpupdate.

Cached Credentials in a domain environment should now work :)

I've created a sidebar gadget so I can see what the Hyper-V server is doing from my workstation.
The gadget can list multiple servers at once and also support vmconnect when double clicking on a VM.
PS: The gadget uses WMI to connect to the server so the user need remote WMI access (Step 5) on the Hyper-V server.

Version 3.3 is now available!

Version 3.3 adds a Height Offset value to the settings.
This value indicates how much offset each row should add.
If the gadget is't showing all the VM's, try set Offset to 1 or 2.

The initial release had a very good response from all over the world!
I've actually had visits from more than 60 different countries the last week and seen the gadget been written about in blogs from China, Korea, Spain, United Kingdom and the United States.

The latest gadget version has been bumped from 2.3 up to 3.0 with the introduction of the new VM Control feature.
This new feature allows you to control your VM's directly from the gadget without having to open Hyper-V Manager.
Hyper-V Manager installation is being autodetected now so you don't need to locate and select the vmconnect.exe anymore.

PS: If you click on the gadget before holding the mouse over the VM Control buttons, you will see the description for the button.

More...

Powershell script for creating snapshots

The script creates a snapshot for each VM on the Hyper-V server.
Then it removes all snapshots older than 6 days (except the ones made on a Sunday).

CreateVmSnapshots.ps1 (1.01 kb)

Powershell script for exporting(backup) Virtual Machines

The script exports all the VM's to a given backup location.
It pauses each VM if it's running, exporting and turn the VM back on if it was running before.

CreateVmBackups.ps1 (1.75 kb)

Task Scheduling

Combine these two scripts with the Task Scheduler and you have a fully automated backup system!
To run a Powershell script in Task Scheduler enter Powershell as program and "& 'C:\Hyper-V\CreateVmSnapshots.ps1'" as argument.

PS: Run the scripts once to see that they work before adding them to the Task Scheduler, as no errors will be shown if they fail in the Task Scheduler.