NFSv4 is only for security, typically you want to avoid this in a production virtualization environment. You would want to be on NFSv3 for performance reasons.
XenServer supports SD Card installs. Not sure about Xen
XS is just a packaging of Xen. So anything XS supports, Xen has to have supported. Xen is completely flexible and can be used anyway that you want, it itself doesn't have the same concept of "supported" like XS does.
It's apparently a sporadic issue with Server 2012 r2 or Windows 8.1 running on Hyper-V on Windows 8.1/Server 2k12 R2 with Generation 2 VMs and secure boot. Secure boot needs to be disable for some updates. All expect for 3 out of the 98 were failing. Odd thing is there are four other 2k12 r2 Gen 2 VMs on the host that had no issues with the windows updates. Disabled Secure boot on the VM and it worked fine.
I think that that is becoming less and less true. Quirky environments are becoming less and less the norm. The need to install locally is rapidly going away. There are still things that get installed locally but the variety and commonality is dropping at a prodigious pace and the isolation of programs is getting to be quite good.
If you do not want your VMware host to reach the Internet or any other subnet, you could also not give it a default gateway thus blocking it from communicating over any router automatically.
It's the computer I didn't want to reach the internet. However, I wanted the VMware to be alble to. I've, since then, achieved that mission.
@NetworkNerd the p2v for this is nice... just remember to check off a box if you're looking to use hyper-v on 2012... The downside though is that you might get a bloated VM because you can't move some of the blocks from the end of the vm to the front. Had that happen to me on one drive that was a 160gb vm using only 40gb. used the tool and was left with a 120gb vm... turned out that there were 'unmovable files' at the end of the vm image...
