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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 machine name.  This makes life a lot e ...

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 backg ...

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 servic ...

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-the-virtual-machine-is-not-running.aspx Chee ...

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-virtual-machine-and-installing-windows-server-2 ...

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 software (hint: you can do everything you can with ...

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 ...

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 Wi ...

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 ...