3.3 Configuring other hardware settings
Some of the other virtual hardware settings you might want to
configure include the following:
-
BIOS settings—for example, to modify the boot device order
or turn on Num Lock
-
Memory settings—for example, if you wanted to change the
amount of startup RAM or enable Dynamic Memory on the virtual
machine
-
Processor settings—for example, to configure the number of
virtual processors that the virtual machine uses, enable
processor compatibility to allow live migrations to hosts having
a different processor architecture, or configure the NUMA
topology on a NUMA-capable host
These settings and others can be configured using either
Hyper-V Manager or Windows PowerShell, and you can search the
TechNet Library for more information about what they do and how to
configure them.
3.4 Configuring virtual machine management
In addition to configuring the virtual hardware for a new
virtual machine, you might also need to configure some of its
management settings. As with virtual hardware, you can do this
either by opening the virtual machine’s settings in Hyper-V Manager
as shown in Figure 7 or by using
Windows PowerShell.
The management settings you can configure for a virtual
machine are as follows:
-
Name If you want to, you
can change the name of the virtual machine as displayed in
Hyper-V Manager and used with Windows PowerShell cmdlets.
Changing the name of the virtual machine does not change the
names of the virtual machine’s configuration files and virtual
hard disk files, however.
-
Integration Services By
default, all Integration Services are offered to the virtual
machine. However, if you need to, you can disable some or all of
these services—for example if the guest operating system doesn’t
support some of them.
-
Snapshot files location By
default, snapshot files are stored in subfolders of the default
location where virtual machine configuration files are stored.
If you frequently perform snapshots and are running out of
storage space on the host storage device, you might want to
change the snapshot files location to a different storage
device.
-
Smart Paging This new
feature of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V allows a virtual machine
that is being restarted to temporarily use disk resources on the
host as a source for any additional memory needed to
successfully restart the virtual machine. Then, once the virtual
machine has been restarted and its memory requirements have
lessened, Smart Paging releases the previously used disk
resources because of the performance hit that such use can
create. Smart Paging is used only when a virtual machine is
restarted and there is no free physical memory on the host and
no memory can be reclaimed from other running virtual machines.
Smart Paging is not used if you simply try and start a virtual
machine that’s in a stopped state, or if a virtual machine is
failing over in a cluster.
-
Automatic start action This
setting allows you to specify what the virtual machine should do
when the host machine boots up. The options you can choose from
are to automatically start the virtual machine if it was running
when the VMM service on the host stopped (the default), to
always start the virtual machine automatically, or to do
nothing. You can also specify a startup delay in seconds to
reduce resource content between different virtual machines
starting up on the host.
-
Automatic stop action This
setting allows you to specify what the virtual machine should do
when the host machine shuts down. The options you can choose
from are to save the virtual machine state (the default), turn
off the virtual machine, or shut down the guest operating
system.
You can also use Set-VM cmdlet of Windows PowerShell to
configure the preceding virtual machine management settings. For
example, to change the name of virtual machine SRV-A on HOST4 to SQL
Workload, you would use this command:
Set-VM -Name SRV-A -NewVMName "SQL Workload" -ComputerName HOST4
