When you are managing a large number of virtual machines, it can get tricky to keep track of everything. One thing that I see many people doing to help with this is to make sure that the guest operating system has the same network name as the virtual...

A long time ago, Didier Van Hoye asked me how to configure the networks that should be used for live migration by a Hyper-V cluster using nothing but PowerShell.  Unfortunately, I never got around to getting an answer for him – until today. Didier...

A while ago I did a blog post that showed you how easy it was to check what version of the Integration Services were installed inside your virtual machines. However, a number of people came back to me and said: “Ben, I do not really care about the...

There is a great post over on the virtualization team blog about how to install the Hyper-V integration components offline.  Go check it out:  http://blogs.technet.com/b/virtualization/archive/2013/04/19/how-to-install-integration-services-when...

A colleague at Microsoft just sent me a pointer to this video of his 5th grade son showing you how to use Hyper-V to create a virtual machine: http://blogs.technet.com/b/yungchou/archive/2013/03/18/are-you-smarter-than-a-5th-grader-in-creating-hyper-v...

I have been spending some time working with the free version of Hyper-V server recently (available here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/hyper-v-server/default.aspx ).  It is lots of fun to see just how much you can do with this free...

Hyper-V now allows you to configure a startup, minimum and maximum memory limit.  If you are like me – you probably leave the startup ram at the default of 512mb – but you should really consider changing it to better suit your environment. ...

Last week I posted about how you can now use Windows Server Backup in Windows Server 2012 to backup virtual machines.  One of the first questions that people had was “how do I do this from the command-line?”  So – let me show you! The tool you...

Here is something new in Windows Server 2012 that I have not seen much discussion of yet:  Windows Server backup now has native support for Hyper-V: What this means is that: You no longer need to do anything special to backup Hyper-V (i.e. you no...

Over the last year there are a couple of PowerShell functions that have become a common set of many of my scripts.  One example is this “StartVMAndWait” function: function StartVMAndWait($vmToStart){ start-vm $vmToStart do {Start...

Last week we released the System Center 2012 Management Pack for Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012. You can go grab it here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36438 One thing I would like to highlight – in the past we have...

Yesterday we announced the general availability of System Center 2012 SP1 – which is great news for everyone who wants to build cloud solutions on Windows Server 2012. Here are a bunch of links that provide more details: Press release: http://www.microsoft...

Last week, Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 (details here: http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2013/1/red-hat-announces-general-availability-of-red-hat-enterprise-linux-5-9 ).  Amongst the various...

I came across a person with this problem on our forums recently: If you have a virtual machine that is in a saved state, but one of the virtual machines disks is now missing for some reason, you cannot start the virtual machine and you cannot remove the...

In the past I have pointed out the excellent WIM2VHD tool, that allows you to take Windows installation media and create template virtual machines without ever starting a virtual machine.  There is now an updated version of this script that takes...

I was recently given a pointer to the following document: Windows Server 2012 NIC Teaming (LBFO) Deployment and Management It is a very comprehensive guide to setting up network teaming in Windows Server 2012, and discusses many of the common questions...

The Hyper-V MVPs have been very busy lately – specifically a number of them have been heads down working on getting some great books written about Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012. Leandro Carvalho has just published the Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Cookbook...

Some of the Hyper-V MVPs are currently running “The Great Big Hyper-V Survey of 2012”.  You can read about it here: http://www.hyper-v.nu/archives/hvredevoort/2012/11/extension-to-december-1st-of-the-great-big-hyper-v-survey-of-2012/ http://www.aidanfinn...

We have received some reports from people who are seeing an error 0x80070569 when they try to start or live migrate virtual machines on Windows Server 2012.  After some investigation we have found that this is usually caused by the use of a custom...

Recently the “ Ask the Core Team ” blog did a great post about compacting a dynamically expanding virtual hard disk in Windows 8 / Windows Server 2012 .  You should check out their full post for the details, but the summary is that you now need to...

Recently, I needed to copy some files out of a virtual machine – which I did not want to connect to the network. After giving this some thought I realized that this would be trivially easy to do on Windows 8 / Windows 2012. In fact – I could...

Yesterday I showed you how to convert a VHD file to a VHDX using the Hyper-V Manager user interface . Today I want to show you that it is even easier to do using PowerShell: All you need to do is run the following command: Convert-VHD .\test.vhd .\test...

In Windows Server 2012 / Windows 8 we have introduced a new virtual hard disk format called “VHDX”.  There are a number of advantages to this format: Support for greater than 2TB disks Better performance for dynamic and differencing disks Better...

Recently I was working on a Hyper-V server, and was about to restart it, when I remembered that I had logged in with a different user account earlier on in the day.  I had used this other user account to start the creation of a large fixed size virtual...

In Windows Server 2012 / Windows 8 we have introduced a new virtual hard disk format called “VHDX”.  There are a number of advantages to this format: Support for greater than 2TB disks Better performance for dynamic and differencing disks Better...