Hyper-V virtualization in a flash, drive that is

Step 6 – Run the HVRemote configuration script on your management PC.  Get to a command line on our management server, and browse in the command line to the directory where you have the hvremote.wsf file.  Hint, you need to run an elevated command prompt, not a “regular” one, otherwise it won’t work.  You can use the dir command to list the directories, and the cd command to browse in the sub-directories until you get to where you have the file.  Once you’re there, we’re going to run 2 commands, the first being    cscript hvremote.wsf /mmc:enable      When that has completed it will take you back to the command prompt, and you need to run the next command    cscript hvremote.wsf /anondcom:grant     and you’re back to the command prompt again.  Phew, enough with that command prompt for now.

Step 7 – Install the MMC Management plugin.  Double click on the downloaded MMC update and install on the management computer.  I’ll walk through on Windows 7, so if yours is Vista it may be a bit different.  Once installed, go to start – control panel – programs and features.  Click on the turn windows features on or off link in the upper left of the screen.  A pop-up will show up, and look in the list for the Remote Server Administration tools.  Open that drop-down, then open the role administration tools drop-down.  In there is the Hyper-V tools checkbox.  Select that one and click OK.  It’ll do its thing and install.  Once it’s done, go to the start menu, administrative tools, and you should see a Hyper-V Manager option there.  If you don’t have your start menu configured to show administrative tools, you can get to it through the control panel as well.

You’ve entered the main management console for the Hyper-V environment.  As you’ll see, you’re not connected to anything yet when it first opens.  Click on the Connect to Server link in the upper right of the console.  That should bring you to a Select Computer prompt.  Change the radio button to another computer, and type in the HOSTNAME of our server that we’ve setup.  Since I named mine Hyper-V, that’s what I entered.  DO NOT enter the IP address of the server because for some reason Hyper-V needs to work off of hostname.  If you get an error after connecting, something like below it’s ok we’ll deal with it in step 8.

Step 8 – Set up the hostname for Hyper-V on the management computer.  I really don’t understand why we have to do this step, but for some reason MS didn’t make the hostname resolve very well in DNS on the Hyper-V servers.  So, to fix that we’re going to add our own record to the hosts file to help resolve the hostname to an IP address.  Open up an explorer window, and browse to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\   and open the hosts file in notepad.  Mine looked like below.

Add a row below the # commented out sections using the IP address for your Hyper-V server and the hostname you assigned.  Save the hosts file, and you should be ready to rock and roll.

Step 9 (maybe) – Before we build our first virtual machine,  notice we haven’t talked about any drivers yet for the hardware in the Hyper-V PC.  How will you know if you need to do anything extra or not?  Well, skip to step 10 and give it a shot.  If a nic shows up and your hard drives are there, that’s all that’s needed to get started.  If not, follow along in this section to get those other drivers installed.  If you couldn’t find an IP address or network adapter listed when selecting option 8 from the Hyper-V command window before, that’s a good sign that the NIC driver wasn’t included.  Or, when you go to setup a VM and there aren’t any hard drive locations available to select from during the VM setup wizard, or some of the hard drives are missing, that’s a good sign that the storage chipset drivers weren’t included.

Have no fear, there’s a way to get those pesky hardware devices installed that Server 2008 R2 doesn’t include by default.  It follows a similar process to running the hvremote.wsf file on the Hyper-V server, only this time you’re going to take the driver files.  If it’s your NIC or your storage drivers, you’ll need to download x64 capable windows drivers for your device.  Then, extract the drivers into a folder making sure there’s a .inf file in there.  That’s the file that windows is going to trigger off of to install the drivers.  In one machine I built I was using a Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 PCI-X SATA card.  Windows didn’t detect it automatically, and I had to go in and install the drivers.  I extracted the drivers to a folder and put them on the USB drive.  Then I browsed to the folder in the command window on the server until I got to the directory with the extracted drivers and the .inf file.  To install the drivers, I ran the following command    pnputil –i –a *.inf     That command looks for all .inf files in the directory, and installs the associated drivers.  If you want you can call out explicitly the inf file’s name in place of the asterisk, but either way works.  Then, after it successfully installs, a restart later and you’re ready to go.

Step 10 – Fire up the Hyper-V MMC, connect with the hostname, and we’re in a pretty GUI interface, hurray!  No more of that command line junk from now on   So we’ve finally made it to the interface to create a test VM.  If you don’t have a WHS license available, you can download the evaluation copy to work with.

In the MMC, the first thing we need to do is configure the network settings, so our VM can connect to a network.  Click on the virtual network manager in the right hand corner of the screen.  We’re going to add a new external virtual network so it can talk to other computers on our physical network.  That’ll bring you to a screen where you can give the network a name, and select the external network adapter you want to connect to this network.  We’re not going to get into management networks vs production networks in this write-up, so for the time being you can leave the allow management OS to share the connection checked.  Finish that step and you have a network setup that you can connect VM’s to.

Step 11 – Create VM!.  In the upper left of the screen, click on new, and then virtual machine.  Give your VM a name, and decide where you want to store it, either in the default location or somewhere else depending on the hard drive structure in your PC.

Next, select how much ram you want assigned to the VM, also depends on how much you have available on the PC.

In the next screen, choose what network you want your VM to connect to, select the one you just created.

Now,create the VHD that the VM will run off of, since we don’t have any other VHD’s created we can make a new one, choose the size, and choose where to store it.