Virtual PC Guy's Blog

Pasting text to Hyper-V guests drops characters in Windows 8

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Mon, 21 May 2012 20:57:57 GMT

I often use the feature of Hyper-V that allows you to “type clipboard text” into a virtual machine. Unfortunately, in the Windows 8 / Windows Server 2012 beta release there is a known issue where doing this can result in missing or garbled characters being typed into the virtual machine.

Luckily – Ned Pyle has posted the details of how to work around this here.

My preferred option is to increase the keyboard buffer (the second option that he outlines).

Cheers,
Ben

Why is my virtual machine “Off-Critical”?

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Fri, 11 May 2012 17:43:00 GMT

In Windows 8 / Windows Server 2012 we have introduced a new state for a virtual machine to be in. This is called “Off-Critical”.

What is happening here is that there is a virtual machine registered with Hyper-V – but we cannot find the XML configuration file for that virtual machine. In the past, this would have just caused the virtual machine to disappear from Hyper-V Manager. In Windows 8 / Windows Server 2012 we now show the virtual machine in Hyper-V Manager – but mark it as “Off-Critical”.

The most common reason to have a virtual machine that is “Off-Critical” is because you had the virtual machine stored on a file server or removable disk (e.g. USB) that is not currently available.

When a virtual machine is in this state you have two options:

Delete the virtual machine. This will simply tell Hyper-V to stop looking for this virtual machine.
Restore the missing storage (e.g. reconnect the USB disk)

Note that in the beta build, after you have restored the missing storage you will need to stop and start the virtual machine management service for us to detect that the configuration file is back. Once you have done this – everything should be good again:

Cheers,
Ben

Shrinking a VHD in Windows 8 - fast!

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Thu, 10 May 2012 22:27:41 GMT

A couple of days ago I talked about how it was much easier to shrink a virtual hard disk in Windows 8. But after writing that blog post – I spent some time playing around with PowerShell and found that there was an even better option.

Instead of logging into a running virtual machine, doing some work, shutting it down and completing the operation. You can do everything from PowerShell in Hyper-V if the virtual machine is shutdown first.

The process that I figured out is as follows:

get-vm <vmname> | select ID | get-vhd | select path

This command will get you the virtual hard disk path and file name for each virtual hard disk in the virtual machine. Obviously you can skip this if you already know it.

mount-vhd <vhdname> –passthru | get-disk | get-partition | get-volume

This will mount the virtual hard disk in the management operating system, and let you know the drive letter that was assigned to it.

resize-partition –driveletter <driveletter> –size <newsize>

This will resize the partition inside the virtual hard disk

dismount-vhd <vhdname>

Dismount the virtual hard disk after shrinking the partition

resize-vhd <vhdname> –ToMinimumSize

Now shrink the virtual hard disk to match the new size

Here is a screenshot of me resizing a virtual hard disk from 50GB to 30GB on a virtual machine:

This whole process took under a minute and was completed without needing to start the virtual machine.

Cheers,
Ben

Shrinking a virtual hard disk in Windows 8

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Mon, 07 May 2012 15:29:00 GMT

Late last year I posted about the process that I followed to reduce the disk size of my virtual machines, prior to converting them to using a fixed size virtual hard disk. The process I used was quite complicated.

If only I had waited for the beta availability of Windows Server 2012 – things could have been a lot simpler. You see, one of the new features in Windows Server 2012 is the ability to shrink a virtual hard disk. You need to free up space inside the virtual hard disk first – but then you can shrink the drive using a simple wizard. This means that the process of shrinking an existing virtual machine now looks like this:

Login to the virtual machine using an administrative account
Open Server Manager and select the Disk Management node under the Storage node.
Right click on the partition that you want to shrink and select Shrink
Select how much you want to shrink the partition by

In my case I want to shrink a 250GB partition to 70GB:

Once this is complete, shutdown the virtual machine.
Open the virtual machine settings under Hyper-V and select the virtual hard disk that you want to shrink.
Click on the Edit button.
This will open the Edit Virtual Hard Disk Wizard where you can now select to Shrink the virtual hard disk:
Now hit Finish

Hyper-V will automatically shrink the virtual hard disk to remove any free space from the end of the disk – so there is no need to enter how much you want to shrink the disk by. Once this process is complete your can boot the virtual machine and start using the smaller virtual hard disks.

Cheers,
Ben

Windows 8 key combinations inside of Hyper-V

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Thu, 03 May 2012 16:40:00 GMT

Along with the new user experience in Windows 8, we have introduced a number of new Windows-Key shortcut combinations. For example – Windows Key + C will bring up the charms bar, while Windows Key + Z brings up the application bar. You can read about all of the various options on the Getting around in Windows 8 post on the Windows team blog.

But how does this work for Windows 8 inside a Hyper-V virtual machine?

With Hyper-V on Windows 8 – we have updated things so that, by default, all Windows key combinations go through to the virtual machine (except for Windows Key + L for locking the desktop). This means that you can just use the keyboard shortcuts out-of-the-box.

If, however, you are running Windows 8 on Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2 – Windows key combinations will not go into the virtual machine by default. But this can be easily remedied. All you need to do is to open the Hyper-V settings and go to the Keyboard setting:

There you can select Use on the virtual machine. Then you will be able to use the new key combinations in virtual machines too.

Cheers,
Ben

Ubuntu 12.04 under Hyper-V on Windows 8

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Wed, 02 May 2012 17:45:00 GMT

Recently a number of the Hyper-V drivers for Linux made it into the main kernel branch. This means that native support for Hyper-V is starting to turn up in a number of Linux distributions. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is an example of a new Linux release with Hyper-V support “out of the box”. To try this out for myself – I grabbed the 32-bit desktop install media from Ubuntu.com and fired up a virtual machine:

After the initial splash screen, I was pleasantly surprised by the first indication of the improved Hyper-V support. Before even install Ubuntu, on the first page of setup, I already had integrated mouse support.

I chose to Install Ubuntu and was then presented with a page that confirmed that I had enough space, and I had a valid internet connection. This was also interesting to note, as I had not added a legacy network adapter to the virtual machine. This meant that Ubuntu had already recognized and loaded drivers for the Hyper-V high-performance network adapter.

After this – the installation was fairly pedestrian…

The only quirk I encountered was that at the end of the initial installation phase – the virtual machine failed to reboot automatically. It sat at this page for about a minute until I manually reset it:

But after that it booted perfectly:

And I confirmed that applications and network connectivity was working correctly:

My favorite part of this was seeing this message:

“No proprietary drivers are in use on this system”. Correct! The Hyper-V drivers are now part of Linux, under GPL.

Cheers,
Ben

Eric talks about Hyper-V PowerShell

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:59:00 GMT

You probably do not know who Eric Bahna is, but let me tell you why you want to. Eric is a Senior Program Manager on my team who has been driving the development of Hyper-V’s PowerShell support for Windows 8 / Windows Server 2012. If you want to know the “behind the scenes” story – Eric is the man to talk to. In fact, half the time when I do a blog post about Hyper-V PowerShell cmdlets, at one stage in the writing of the blog post I had to walk into Eric’s office and ask “how the heck do I make this work?”

With all that in mind – here is an interview with Eric where he talks about what is happening with Hyper-V PowerShell Support in Windows 8 / Windows Server 2012:

Cheers,
Ben

Storage Migration is “copy and delete” not “move”

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:59:00 GMT

A little while ago I wrote about how storage migration actually works. One thing I would like to call out is that the storage migration process is “copy and delete” and not “move”. Which is to say that just before storage migration is completed you will have two copies of your virtual hard disks on your computer, and the final stage of the storage migration will be to delete the original versions of the virtual hard disks.

Why I am I highlighting this?

Well, storage migration is designed to allow you to move your virtual machines from one storage location to a completely different location (i.e. a new disk, SAN or SMB share). But every now and then I find myself using storage migration just to reorganize my virtual machines and their folder structure. This can result in problems if I want to move a large virtual machine from one folder to another folder on the same disk. If I want to do this I need to make sure that I have enough space for two copies of the virtual hard disk.

Cheers,
Ben

Storage Migration Hyper-V Settings

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:09:18 GMT

Hyper-V provides one setting that you can configure for storage migration. The maximum number of storage migrations you can have happening at the same time:

By default this is set to “2”. If you try to perform more than this – you will receive an error message that tells you that you are at your limit. If you want to change this setting (I usually set it to 10) the only thing you need to consider is if your physical storage is up to having that much I/O occurring at one point in time. My systems tend to have SSD disks or to be configured in RAID 10 and are able to handle a larger number of simultaneous storage migrations comfortably.

Cheers,
Ben

Storage Migration Performance

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 17:14:00 GMT

A common question I get asked about storage migration is “how does it perform?”

This question can actually be broken into two components:

How long does it take to move the virtual machine storage?
How does performing a storage migration effect the rest of the system?

Let’s tackle these sections separately.

First up – how long does it take to move the virtual machine?

As I have discussed, at the core of storage migration is the combination of a single file copy of the virtual hard disk that is being moved, combined with duplicating incoming virtual hard disk writes. This approach means that the actual length of the storage migration depends on the amount of activity that is happening inside the virtual machine. The more data the virtual machine is writing to its storage, the longer the storage migration will take. For a virtual machine that is mostly idle (with little disk activity) the amount time that it takes to complete a storage migration is going to be similar to the amount of time it takes to perform an unbuffered copy of the same files.

I highlighted the word “unbuffered” because most of the time people perform buffered file copies. If you just copy a file in Windows explorer – you are doing a buffered file copy. These copies tend to be faster, but they utilize more system resources to do so, and are not recommended when copying very large files. You can do an unbuffered file copy manually in Windows by using the command XCOPY /J. This should give you a good idea of the amount of time that will be involved in using storage migration.

Now for the second part – how does performing a storage migration effect the rest of the system?

Assuming that you are migrating your storage to a new physical disk (or a separate SAN or SMB share) the impact is surprisingly small.

If you imagine a running virtual machine, with reads and writes happening to its virtual hard disks, storage migration will add the following activity:

Data is being read from the source virtual hard disks and written to the destination virtual hard disks. The extra read activity on the source virtual hard disks will effect the overall performance of the virtual machine, but the write activity will be happening on a different device.
New writes are being sent to both the source and destination virtual hard disks. This has very little impact at all, as the duplicated writes are happening to a different disk.

With all of that said – the performance impact of a storage migration is pretty bad if you migrate to another location on the same disk. If you think through this scenario (storage migration with a source and destination location on the same physical device) you will essentially be doubling the write operations on the disk, and performing a large unbuffered file copy at the same time.

All this to say – if you are interested in assessing the performance of storage migration – do not test it with a storage migration where the source and destination locations are on the same physical disk. Instead, use it like it is intended to be used and storage migrate between separate physical devices.

Cheers,
Ben

Performing bulk configuration changes with PowerShell in Hyper-V on Windows “8”

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 06:11:52 GMT

Over the weekend I noticed that one of my Hyper-V servers was running tight on memory. I did not want to move any of the virtual machines off of the server – so I decided to reduce the memory buffer on each of my virtual machines. At first I started using the graphical user interface to change the setting on each of the virtual machines. After a moment I realized that I could do this much more quickly in PowerShell by simply running Get-VM | Set-VMMemory –Buffer 10:

Once this was completed – I immediately jumped back into the GUI to check all my virtual machines had been updated. Once again I realized that this could be done more quickly through PowerShell by running Get-VM | Get-VMMemory | ft VMName, Buffer:

Now, normally PowerShell cmdlets do not return results just to confirm that things actually succeeded (they only display error messages). But if you are paranoid like me – you can get a command to display an output by using the “passthru” option like this:

Cheers,
Ben

Updating PowerShell help on Windows “8”

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 17:33:00 GMT

If you are evaluating the new Hyper-V PowerShell cmdlets in the Windows “8” beta – you may have noticed that the help is a bit bare. Here you can see what you get if you run “get-help” on the Set-VMDvdDrive cmdlet:

Just the parameter names and nothing else.

But there are two important things to know:

We do have quite detailed help available – even though this is only a beta release.
It is quite easy to get the full help

All you need to do is to open an administrative PowerShell prompt and run “update-help”. Here you can see the extra details that are available after running this command:

You can also get access to examples after doing this:

Personally, I find that I often look at the examples to remind myself how to use a specific cmdlet. What makes this a bit pathetic is that half the time I am looking up examples that I wrote myself :)

Cheers,
Ben

Doing an advanced Storage Migration with Windows “8” - in PowerShell

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 16:54:00 GMT

Yesterday I showed you how to perform an advanced storage migration with Windows “8” using the graphical user interface. Today I want to show you how to do the same thing in PowerShell.

Just like when we did a simple storage migration in PowerShell – you use the Move-VMStorage command. But instead of providing a single location (via the DestinationStoragePath parameter) you will need to provide the new location for each part of the virtual machine that you want to move. You can use the VirtualMachinePath, SnapshotFilePath and SmartPagingFilePath parameters to specify the new location for the virtual machine configuration file, snapshot configuration files and the smart paging file respectively.

However, where things get tricky is when you want to specify new locations for the virtual hard disks. The problem is that a virtual machine may have 1 virtual hard disk, or dozens of virtual hard disks, and PowerShell does not provide a simple way to handle an arbitrarily changing set of parameters. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to handle this – and ended up with a solution where we use an array of hash tables to specify the new location for the virtual hard disks.

Let me explain in detail:

Imagine that you had a virtual machine with three virtual hard disks that you wanted to move to different locations. The virtual hard disk names, locations and new locations were as follows:

VHDX name	Current location	New Location
Boot.vhdx	C:\TheWrongPlace	D:\VHDs
Data1.vhdx	C:\TheWrongPlace	E:\VHDs
Data2.vhdx	C:\TheWrongPlace	F:\VHDs

To move these files you would need to construct a hash table for each one. Like this:

@{“SourceFilePath” = “C:\TheWrongPlace\Boot.vhdx”; “DestinationFilePath” = “D:\VHDs\Boot.vhdx”}
@{“SourceFilePath” = “C:\TheWrongPlace\Data1.vhdx”; “DestinationFilePath” = “E:\VHDs\Data1.vhdx”}
@{“SourceFilePath” = “C:\TheWrongPlace\Data2.vhdx”; “DestinationFilePath” = “F:\VHDs\Data2.vhdx”}

You would then need to put all of these hash tables into an array and pass them to Move-VMStorage on the VHDs parameter. Which would look like this:

Move-VMStorage –VMName “Test” –VHDs @(@{“SourceFilePath” = “C:\TheWrongPlace\Boot.vhdx”; “DestinationFilePath” = “D:\VHDs\Boot.vhdx”}, @{“SourceFilePath” = “C:\TheWrongPlace\Data1.vhdx”; “DestinationFilePath” = “E:\VHDs\Data1.vhdx”}, @{“SourceFilePath” = “C:\TheWrongPlace\Data2.vhdx”; “DestinationFilePath” = “F:\VHDs\Data2.vhdx”})

Pay special attention to the following details:

The array uses round brackets “()” while the hash table uses curly brackets “{}”
The array is comma separated, while the hash table is semicolon delineated

With all of that in mind – here is the PowerShell command to perform the same operation that I showed you yesterday in the graphical user interface:

Specifically – it moves the snapshot location and two of the virtual hard disks for the virtual machine “Windows Server 8 – Spaces test 1”.

Cheers,
Ben

Doing an advanced Storage Migration with Windows “8”

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 16:29:00 GMT

A little while ago, I showed you how to do a simple storage migration with the Windows “8” beta release. Today I want to show you how to use some of the more advanced options of storage migration. With a simple storage migration you select to move all of the files that make up a virtual machine to a single folder:

But, you can also select to move all the bits of the virtual machine to different locations. You can see that once I select this option – the wizard just added a lot of new options for me to configure (if you look at the list on the left):

The first thing you can do is select the specific bits of the virtual machine you want to move. You can move everything to different locations, move just one part of the virtual machine, or move a combination. In this case – I am moving two of the 7 virtual hard disks associated with this virtual machine, and I am changing the snapshot location for the virtual machine.

For each item that you want to move, you then get an individual page that shows you the details about the current location of the file and lets you specify a new location.

When you get to the end – a summary page shows you everything that you have configured. Hitting finish will go ahead and move all the pieces to the right location.

Cheers,
Ben

Cleaning up after VM upgrade with PowerShell in Windows “8”

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 23:14:11 GMT

Sometimes little things bug me. Often – while these little things are annoying, it is too much effort to actually fix them. Thankfully – Hyper-V PowerShell gives me an easy way to “fix small annoyances” quickly. One example for a “little thing that bugs me” occurs when you upgrade the integration services for a virtual machine: we do not eject the integration services ISO file when we are done.

The result is that I end up with a bunch of virtual machines with this DVD in their DVD drives. There is no real downside to this – but it is annoying.

The other day I sat down and figured out a PowerShell one-liner that would check all my virtual machines and would eject the DVD – only if it was the integration services installation DVD image. Here it is:

get-vm | get-vmdvddrive | %{if($_.path -eq "$env:windir\system32\vmguest.iso") {Set-VMDVDDrive -VMDVDDrive $_ -Path $null}}

It gets each virtual machine, gets the DVD drives assocciated with each virtual machine and then removes the DVD image if it is the integration services DVD image.

Nice and simple – and now I am much happier with the state of my system.

Cheers,
Ben

Option to remove .BIN files with Hyper-V in Windows “8”

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 20:24:27 GMT

In Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 – starting a virtual machine would result in Hyper-V creating a .BIN file which matched the size of the memory assigned to the virtual machine. We did this to ensure that we always had enough disk space available to create a saved state (which is particularly critical if the physical computer is shutting down – and the virtual machine is configured to save state when the physical computer shuts down).

However – many people did not like to see their disk space being “wasted” like this. As we have seen memory increase in physical computers – we have started to see systems come out that have more memory than disk space, which obviously causes a problem here.

To address this in Windows “8” we made a simple change:

Now we only pre-create the .BIN file if you choose Save the virtual machine state as the Automatic Stop Action for the virtual machine. If you choose Turn off the virtual machine or Shut down the guest operating system we will only create a .BIN file if you manually choose to save state the virtual machine.

Cheers,
Ben

New networking tab on Hyper-V Manager in Windows “8”

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 16:24:00 GMT

Here is another small feature that I have fallen in love with in Hyper-V in Windows “8”. When you open the Hyper-V manager you will see that we have added some extra tabs to the bottom of the virtual machine status. One of the tabs is labeled Networking:

On this tab you can see how many network adapters a virtual machine has and which virtual switches they are connected to. Be far more importantly – you can see the IP addresses that are being used by the virtual machine. It wasn’t until I had spent some time using Windows “8” that I realized how often I would log into a virtual machine – just to run ipconfig and figure out its IP address. Now I can get this quickly at a glance.

Note – in order for this to work you must have the latest version of the integration services loaded inside the virtual machine.

Cheers,
Ben

Lots of Windows Server “8” information

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 23:23:17 GMT

This has been a busy week for Microsoft talking about Windows Server “8” – so I wanted to take a moment to call some interesting information to your attention.

The new Windows Server “8” Beta Hyper-V Component Architecture poster is now available from the Microsoft Download Center.
Information about Hyper-V Replica is coming out on the Windows Virtualization team blog:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/virtualization/archive/tags/hvr/
John Howard has been doing a great series of posts talking about the use of SR-IOV in Hyper-V in Windows Server “8”. You can start reading about it here:
Everything you wanted to know about SR-IOV in Hyper-V. Part 1
The Windows Server blog has a great post talking about a bunch of the new technology coming for Windows File Shares (including the fact that we now support running virtual machines that are stored on Windows file shares):
Windows Server “8” – Taking Server Application Storage to Windows File Shares

And of course – there is much more to come!

Cheers,
Ben

Storage Migration + PowerShell + Windows “8” = Magic

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 19:10:25 GMT

Here is a neat trick that we figured out a little while ago. With a single command you can organize all of your virtual machines:

The command is:

Get-VM | %{ Move-VMStorage $_.Name "D:\Hyper-V\$($_.Name)" }

This command gets each virtual machine on the server, and then performs a storage migration to move it to a folder under “D:\Hyper-V” that has the same name as the virtual machine itself. It is amazing how powerful such a simple command can be, and it has become a staple tool for me to clean up a server that I have been messing around with virtual machine placement on.

Cheers,
Ben

How does Storage Migration actually work?

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 16:09:00 GMT

Now that I have showed you how to perform a storage migration of a running virtual machine in Windows Server “8” (both through Hyper-V manager and through PowerShell) an obvious question you might have is: but how does this actually all work?

The process followed by Hyper-V internally to perform a storage migration is actually quite simple to explain (though obviously quite tricky to actually make work in code) and is as follows:

Step 1: We start with a virtual machine that is reading and writing to a virtual hard disk file (.VHDX in the diagram, but storage migration is supported for both .VHDX and .VHD files).

Step 2: After the user selects to perform a storage migration, we immediately create a new virtual hard disk in the requested destination. We continue to read and write to the source virtual hard disk – but any new write operations are also mirrored to the new virtual hard disk.

Step 3: We perform a single single pass operation to copy the data from the source virtual hard disk to the destination virtual hard disk. While this copy is happening we still continue to mirror writes to both disks. We also keep track of uncopied blocks that have already been updated through a mirrored write – and make sure to not needlessly copy that data again.

Step 4: Once the copy operation is complete – we switch the virtual machine to be running only on the destination virtual hard disk.

Step 5: We delete the source virtual hard disk and the migration is now complete.

One important note to make here – we are very careful to not delete the source virtual hard disk until after the virtual machine is successfully running on the destination virtual hard disk. This way if there is an error at any point in the storage migration – we can always fail back to running off of the source virtual hard disk.

Cheers,
Ben

Using PowerShell to Storage Migrate with Windows Server “8”

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 16:14:00 GMT

Yesterday I showed you how to do a simple storage migration using the Hyper-V Manager user interface. Today I want to show you how to do the same thing in PowerShell – and in my opinion it is even easier to do in PowerShell than with our user interface.

As a quick reminder – I am not showing you the complex side of storage migration (yet) I am just showing you how to accomplish the task of getting all the bits for a given virtual machine moved to a single folder, while the virtual machine continues to run. The PowerShell command for this is actually quite self explanatory:

Move-VMStorage -VMName "Windows Server 2008 R2" -DestinationStoragePath "E:\Hyper-V\Windows Server 2008 R2"

“Move-VMStorage”, the name of the virtual machine you want to move, and the name of the folder you want to move it to. Couldn’t be much simpler than that right? Well, actually it can. You see, the “-VMName” and “-DestinationStoragePath” parameter names are not required. You can actually just type this:

Move-VMStorage "Windows Server 2008 R2" "D:\Hyper-V\Windows Server 2008 R2"

Trust me, the first time you get to show this to someone who thinks that PowerShell is too complicated / tricky – you will feel like a rock star :-)

Cheers,
Ben

Doing a simple Storage Migration with Windows Server “8”

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 16:54:00 GMT

One of the new features for Hyper-V in the Windows Server “8” beta release is called storage migration. This feature allows you to move all the files that make up a virtual machine to a new location, while the virtual machine continues to run. Neat!

Now, I could (quite literally) write a small tome about everything there is to know about storage migration, but I am not going to. Instead I am going to tackle it one piece at a time. First, let me show you what the simplest storage migration process looks like in Hyper-V today.

First you find your virtual machine in the Hyper-V Manager and then you select Move… from the action pane (or you can right click on the virtual machine and choose Move… from the menu there):

This will open the new Move Wizard. After going through the introduction page you will be asked to choose the type of move you want to perform. If you are running Windows Server “8” you can choose to either do a live migration of the virtual machine, or a storage migration of the virtual machines data. We only support live migration on Windows Server “8”, while storage migration is supported on Windows Server “8” and the Windows Consumer Preview. This means that if you are running Hyper-V on your desktop (as I am doing here) you will only see the option to move the virtual machines storage:

After choosing Move the virtual machine’s storage you will be presented with three options. Today I am just going to show you how to do the first, and simplest, option where you select to Move all of the virtual machine’s data to a single location. I mean, it does not get much simpler than that – right? “Put all my stuff over there!”

Logically, after selecting to put all the virtual machine bits in a single location – we ask you for the location to use. We also show you how much space the virtual machine is using at this point in time (my virtual machine is using 8.44GB in this example) so you can make sure that you choose a destination location with enough space.

Finally, we show you a summary of what is about to happen. When you click finish the storage migration will begin.

Once the storage migration has started you can track its progress in a couple of ways. You can use the progress dialog that is displayed over the Move wizard (which will remain until the storage migration is complete).

Or you can view the detailed status in the Hyper-V Manager:

Using the Hyper-V Manager is very handy when you have multiple storage migrations happening at the same point in time:

As you can see – this is very easy to do. Tomorrow I will talk about how to perform a simple storage migration with PowerShell, and then we can start diving into the deeper aspects / options of storage migration.

Cheers,
Ben

System Center 2012 CTP for Windows Server “8” Beta support now available

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 02:09:14 GMT

This is really cool. Last week we announced to availability of the Windows Server “8” beta, and today the System Center team have release a Community Technology Preview (CTO) of System Center 2012 that allows you to manage Hyper-V in Windows Server “8”.

Go here to read all the details:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/scvmm/archive/2012/03/10/system-center-2012-ctp-for-windows-server-8-beta-support-now-available.aspx

Cheers,
Ben

Using PowerShell to mount virtual hard disks in Windows Server “8”

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 00:42:55 GMT

Yesterday I showed you how easy it is to mount virtual hard disks with Windows Explorer in Windows Server “8”. But what if you want to script it? Don’t worry, we have you covered.

First – we have the very simple Mount-VHD command that allows you to mount a virtual hard disk. But we can do better than that! One of the most common questions about scripting virtual hard disk mount is: “How do I find out the drive letter that has been assigned to the virtual hard disk?”.

Well, you can do this in Windows Server “8” by running: Mount-VHD <VHD name> –passthru | Get-Disk | Get-Partition | Get-Volume

Which will give you something like this:

Cheers,
Ben

Mounting virtual hard disks in Windows Server “8”

Ben Armstrong [MSFT] — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 07:39:00 GMT

I have done many posts over the years about how to mount virtual hard disks under various releases of Windows. Windows Server “8” makes this the easiest possible thing to do. To mount a virtual hard disk – just find your .VHD or .VHDX file and double click on it:

The virtual hard disk will be mounted, and you will automatically be directed to the first partition on the virtual hard disk:

Here you can easily copy / move / manipulate files. When you are done, just choose to eject the disk (shown in the picture above).

Note: You do need to enable the desktop experience in order to get this experience with Windows Explorer.

Cheers,
Ben