Richard Siddaway's Blog : Hyper-V, Virtualisation

Creating Virtual machines #1: Creating the VM

RichardSiddaway — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 20:20:09 GMT

I’ve had two projects in mind for a while. First I need to build a new WSUS server in my virtual environment & secondly I want to automate as much of the VM creation and configuration as possible. Oh – and I’m not using SC Virtual Machine Manager.

I’ll be using the Hyper-V cmdlets that come with Windows 2012.

I covered some of this in PowerShell and WMI but that was for Windows 2008 R2 and I was using James O’Neills hyper-v functions.

Does it get any easier with the cmdlets

This is what I came up with

function new-virtualmachine {            
[CmdletBinding()]            
param (            
 [parameter(Mandatory=$true)]            
 [string]$name,            
             
 [parameter(Mandatory=$true)]            
 [string]$path,            
 [Int64]$mem = 4GB,            
 [string]$vswitch = "Local Area Connection - Virtual Network",            
            
 [ValidateSet("Windows2012", "Windows2008R2", "Windows7")]            
 [string]$iso,            
            
 [switch]$startvm            
)            
            
Write-Verbose -Message "Testing VM Path"            
$vpath = Join-Path -Path $path -ChildPath $name            
if (-not (Test-Path -Path $vpath)){            
 New-Item -Path $path -Name $name -ItemType Directory            
}            
            
switch ($iso){            
 "Windows2012" {$isopath = "C:\Source\Windows 2012 RTM\en_windows_server_2012_x64_dvd_915478.iso"}            
 "Windows2008R2" {$isopath = "C:\Source\Window 2008R2\en_windows_server_2008_r2_standard_enterprise_datacenter_and_web_with_sp1_x64_dvd_617601.iso" }            
 "Windows7" {$isopath = "C:\Source\Windows7 RTM\en_windows_7_ultimate_x86_dvd_x15-65921.iso"}            
}            
            
New-VM -Name $name -MemoryStartupBytes $mem -Path $vpath -BootDevice CD -NewVHDPath "$vpath\$name.vhdx" -NewVHDSizeBytes 120GB -SwitchName $vswitch            
Add-VMDvdDrive -VMName $name -Path $isopath            
            
if ($startvm){Start-VM -Name $name}            
}

The new VM name and path are mandatory, I’ve set a default memory size of 4GB and added a default Virtual switch. I’m adding the iso file containing the OS I want to install – that’s constrained by the set validation and I have a final parameter that allows me to start the VM.

if the path in which I want to create the VM doesn’t exist I create it.

A switch statement is used to set the full path to the iso file.

The New-VM cmdlet is used to create the VM based on the information provided. I do hard code the fact that I’m setting the VM to boot from the CD and that the virtual disk will be 120GB

Add-VMDvdDrive is used to add the DVD drive to the VM (the controller location is automatically worked out) and the iso file mounted.

If the startvm switch is used then the VM starts and OS install commences. I’m deliberately NOT automating the OS setup at this time – that may be another project.

Networking pains

RichardSiddaway — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 19:57:27 GMT

Last week my wireless router decided that it had enough and wasn’t going to work any more. This was annoying because I was due to give a user group presentation that night.

I got a new router up and working but today discovered that connectivity from my Hyper-V environment wasn’t working. With the previous router I’d configured bridging between a Hyper-V virtual network and the wireless adapter in my host. That had to be recreated at which point I discovered that the new router didn’t want to support bridging.

I ended up using RRAS and NAT to get the connectivity. The instructions I found here

http://sqlblog.com/blogs/john_paul_cook/archive/2008/03/23/using-wireless-with-hyper-v.aspx

provide most of what you need.

Remember to set the default gateways and DNS servers properly for it all to work.

Lenovo W510, Hyper-V and BSOD

RichardSiddaway — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 18:12:34 GMT

Beginning of the week I took delivery of a Lenovo W510 – i7 quad core with Hyper-Threading (Windows sees 8 cores) and 16GB of RAM. From reviews I’d seen it seemed to run Hyper-V OK so it fitted the bill for a mobile lab.

Partitioned the disk OK and got Windows 2008 R2 installed. Had to download a few drivers from the Lenovo (IBM) site but everything I needed was there or on the box already. I’d ordered it with Windows 7 64bit so most of the drivers were available.

Installed Hyper-V and joined it to the domain.

Started moving Virtual Machines on to it and it started crash with a Blue Screen of Death. Not good & I’m not amused at this point. Eventually got to the point where it wouldn’t start – continual BSOD. Very not good – my new toy is going back if this continues!

Did some research and it seems there can be a conflict between core parking and Hyper-V. Core parking is a power saving technology that puts cores to sleep if they are not being used. Hyper-V expects them to be there = BANG.

I booted into the BIOS screen and disabled the power management features on the CPU (and PCI bus for good measure) that enable core parking. Restarted and everything now seems OK.

I can comfortably run a bunch of VMs and have a reasonable performance.

Then I discovered that I had to reactivate Windows on all the VMs. They’d been originally been running on a machine with AMD processor. New processor is Intel. Its enough of a change to trigger reactivation.

All done and everything seems to work fine.

Time to get Virtual Machine Manager installed and see what that actually does.