Browse by Tags

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 – this one is for you. Now for a bit of background...

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 version number of the integration services –...

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.  Here is a quick screenshot from one of my Hyper-V...

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 will want to use is “wbadmin.exe” Backing up a...

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 longer need to do this ) You can use Windows Server...

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-Sleep -milliseconds 100} until ((Get-VMIntegrationService...

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 had two management packs for Hyper-V. One written...

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.com/en-us/news/press/2013/jan13/01-15OSMomentPR...

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 advantage of the new PowerShell functionality in...

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 that I hear about network teaming (it also discusses...

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 . "Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Cookbook"...

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 group policy setting in their domain. We have written...

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 manually mount the virtual hard disks in the management...

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 do it with a single line of PowerShell: Get...

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.vhdx We will figure out whether you want the new...

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 handling of different disk sector sizes And more…...

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 handling of different disk sector sizes And more…...

It seems like all I am talking about right now is our posters – but this is too cool to not mention.  Hopefully, as a reader of my blog you are well familiar with the highly detailed Windows Server architectural posters that we have been releasing over the last couple of years.  Well – you...

While I was at TechED Australia I had many people come up to me and ask me about the best way to migrate their VMware servers to Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012.  I spent a lot of time talking about the fact that System Center Virtual Machine Manager provides this functionality – and is great for...

We get a lot of positive feedback about the Hyper-V Component Architecture Posters that we have been producing (you can grab the latest one from here ).  Recently the team that produces these posters also made some in-depth companion articles that step through some of the finer details of Hyper...

I finally got around to setting up SCVMM 2012 SP1 CTP2 in my test lab today.  One of the first things I tried to do, after getting everything setup, was to do a shared-nothing live migration.  However this failed with the following error message: After a bit of investigation I discovered that...

A little while ago I talked about how Hyper-V in Windows 8 / Windows Server 2012 allowed you to see the IP address of a virtual machine through Hyper-V Manager . Well, with the release preview / release candidate build you can now take this a step further and use PowerShell to get a quick overview of...

It has always been our recommendation that Hyper-V be installed on Windows Server Core in production environments (for performance and security reasons).  In Windows Server 2012 we have done a lot of work to make Hyper-V on Windows Server Core an easier option for people to use, through improved...

In the past – a problem that many users hit was that if they were trying to move a virtual machine (through live migration or through import / export) we would have problems if the virtual machine configuration wasn’t matched correctly to the destination server.  With live migration we would block...

When you import a virtual machine into Hyper-V with Windows Server 2012 / Windows 8 – you now have three options:  Register, restore and copy: Restore and copy were available in previous versions of Hyper-V – but register is a new option.  Let me quickly step you through what each of these...