Windows 8 for Business : Virtualization (part 2) - Using Hyper-V Manager

Using Hyper-V Manager

Hyper-V Manager is the Hyper-V management console and the exact same utility that is provided with Windows Server 2012 and the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) for Windows Server 2012. As you can see in Figure 2, Hyper-V Manager is a modern and full-featured tool, and all you need to create, manage, and run virtual environments on your PC.

Figure 2: Hyper-V Manager

Hyper-V Manager is such a feature rich application that describing all of its features would require a book in its own right. But here are the top things you can do with this utility:

• Connect to other PCs or servers: While you can of course work solely on your PC, you can also connect to other Hyper-V installs on other PCs or servers in your environment. In fact, you can connect to multiple Hyper-Vs, which is useful for copying virtual machines from machine to machine, within Hyper-V Manager, using drag and drop.
• Create a virtual machine: The primary function of Client Hyper-V, of course, concerns the creation and configuration of virtual machines, or VMs. To create a new virtual machine, click New and then Virtual Machine in the Actions pane and then step through the wizard to complete the action. Each virtual machine can be configured with a name, (dynamic) RAM allotment, a network, one or more virtual hard disks (VHDs), and an attached installation media (which can be a physical disc, an ISO, or other source).

• Create and manage a virtual hard disk: Separate from your virtualized environments, you can create and then edit virtual disks that can be used by any of these environments (or accessed as physical disks from the host OS—your PC—using a new VHD shell integration feature we’ll describe shortly). To create a new VHD, click New and then Virtual Hard Disk in the Actions pane and then step through the wizard. Note that Client Hyper-V now supports the newer VHDX format, which provides support for virtual disks up to 64 TB. But VHDX is not supported in OSes earlier than Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. Also, VHDs can (and should be) configured to be dynamically sized. That way, a 2 TB virtual disk—which appears as a single file to the host system—won’t take up much too much disk space unless you later fill it up with content. To edit a virtual disk, select Edit Disk from the Actions pane.
• Create and manage virtual switches and SANs: Useful in both testing and production environments, you can create and manage both virtual switches—external, internal, or private networks—and virtual SANs, which emulate a corporate storage area network.
• Manage virtual machines: Once you’ve created a virtual machine, you can access its settings and configure far more features than were available in the New Virtual Machine wizard. Among other features you can configure are the device boot order, the memory (RAM), the number of virtual processor cores, the attached hard disks (which can be virtual or physical), and much, much more. As you can see in Figure 3, virtual machines come with a dizzying array of settings.
• Install and run an operating system in virtual machines: At some point, you are of course going to need to install an operating system in that virtual machine, configure it to your liking, and then possibly install applications within it. You do so as you do when installing Windows or other OSes on a physical PC, except in this case it’s running virtually and is accessible in a window as shown in Figure 4.
• Import and export virtual machines: If you’ve created a virtual machine in another instance of Hyper-V, you can use the Import functionality to import it to whatever machine you’re connected to (the host PC or a remote PC). Likewise, you can export virtual machines so they can be used elsewhere. You may do this, for example, when you’ve completed configuring a VM and would like to deploy it to a product server.

Figure 3: Settings for a virtual machine