Hyper-V virtualization in a flash, drive that is

In part 1, we installed the Hyper-V server to our USB drive, and now in part 2 we’ll bring it to life.

Our ingredients for part 2:

• Hyper-V enabled USB Drive (completed in part 1)
• Hyper-V MMC Management Plugin used on our 2nd computer to manage the virtual machines we install on our Hyper-V computer. (select your appropriate Win7 or Vista download)
  • Windows 7 (note this needs to be Win7 Ultimate, Professional, or Enterprise.  MS was lame and won’t let Home Premium join the fun)
    • Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7
  • Windows Vista
    • Hyper-V Remote Management Update for Windows Vista (KB952627)
    • Update for Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Management Tools for Hyper-V (KB970203)
• MS Hyper-V team’s configuration tool HVRemote

To begin part 2, reboot your PC with the USB drive in it.  When you reboot, adjust your BIOS settings to select the USB drive to be the first boot device.  Each BIOS is different so you’ll have to browse around to find your specific settings.  Once you have it selected as the first boot device, save the changes and reboot.  On reboot the USB drive will initiate it’s first setup procedures.  You’ll see a black screen for a bit and then the customary windows green bar doing it’s thing. (I apologize for the quality of these pics, only had a crappy iphone camera around at the time)

Hyper-V will begin to do it’s thing, starting services

Then it installs the devices

On to system settings

A reboot and splash screen later, and we’ve got action

Create an administrative password.  The next screen you come to is the main Hyper-V Management console on the server.  It’s comprised of 2 windows, the scconfig and cmd windows.  Sconfig is the initial program that runs on startup to help configure Hyper-V, and CMD is the basic command line to do any configurations needed outside of sconfig.

There are a series of initial configuration options in sconfig, most of which are very basic.  I know most people cringe when they see any sort of command line interaction, so I’m going to walk you through the initial configuration in as few of steps possible so you won’t have to deal with these screens ever again.  I didn’t take screenshots for the first few steps as it’s just text entry for the most part.

Step 1 – Setup workgroup setting.  Enter 1 in the screen and hit enter.  Type W for workgroup, and enter again.  Type the name of the workgroup you have setup in your environment, or if you don’t have one set up you can leave it as workgroup.  It’ll give you a prompt saying you’re now joined.

Step 2 – Give your new Hyper-V server a name.  Type 2 and enter.  I’ll be original and call it Hyper-V.  A restart may be needed here, if so continue at the next step when it’s back up.

Step 3 – Add a local administrator.   In order to manage the Hyper-V server, we need to have the very same user ID on Hyper-V that we are going to use on our management computer.  If on the management PC your user ID is John Doe, you need to have a John Doe ID setup in Hyper-V as well.  Type 3 and enter.  Notice the user ID I’m going to use has a space in it, so a hint for anyone with a space in their username to surround your ID in quotes, I entered “John Doe”.  It then brings you to a screen to enter your password.  There are strong password enforcement rules in place here so make sure you have an uppercase, lowercase, and numeric character along with at least 8 characters or it’ll throw an error.  If it does, just start over with our step 3 here and re-do it.  It’ll ask you to enter the password again, and then John Doe is ready to go on the Hyper-V server.  I haven’t tried it where my management PC had a different password than the Hyper-V PC, so I’d change the password on your management PC to match if the initial password wasn’t up to snuff.  And shame on you for using a weak password

Step 4 – Enable remote desktop.  This allows us to work on the sever without having to be at the console.  Enter #7, enter e, select 2 as we most likely don’t have a means for network based authentication in our workgroup environment, and click enter.  Don’t worry, even with 2 you’ll still need a username and password to connect.  Now enter #8 for network settings to see what the IP address is.  It should list the IP address and network card description under the available network adapters.  Write down the IP, and head over to the management PC.  Fire up the remote desktop client and enter the IP of the hyper-v server.  Log in with the ID we created in Hyper-V, so I’m using John Doe.  If you get a certificate pop-up for the RDP connection, click yes and you’ll be connected.

Step 5 – Run the HVRemote configuration script on your Hyper-V server.  This tool automates the various configurations that have to be performed both on the Hyper-V server and on the management computer you’re going to use.  If you want to see all of the steps that they automated in this script, feel free but trust me it’s much easier the HVRemote way.  The reason for most of the configurations is that Hyper-V is really designed to run in an Active Directory environment, and since we’re going to run it in a workgroup environment the tool has to configure our remote access, security policies, etc behind the scenes.  In order to get the script onto the server, you’ll need some sort of storage device to put the script on and connect to the Hyper-V server.  Since we’re all about USB drives in this write-up, that’s what I used.  Take any old USB drive, put the hvremote.wsf file on it and attach it to the Hyper-V server.

Now, that it’s connected, switch to our nice cmd window.  I practice the great art of guess which drive letter the computer assigned the new USB drive, and by guessing several letters at the command line, it turns out mine was J:  You can do this by just typing d:  and then enter to check the d drive, and so on.  A simple dir and then enter will list the contents of that drive.  If you know a more elegant means to find the drive, more power to you!  Once you find the drive that you put the hvremote.wsf file on, browse to the folder that has the file in it, or if it’s in the root of the drive you’re ready for the next step.  Type the following command    cscript hvremote.wsf /add:”John Doe”    Replace John Doe with whatever user ID you created on the Hyper-V server and you don’t need to use quotes unless you have a space in your user ID.  The script will work its magic, and you’ll end up back at a drive letter prompt.