Using PowerShell to Set Up Hyper-V

Doctor Scripto

Summary: Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, explains how to use Windows PowerShell to simplify the Hyper-V set-up process.

Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, is here. I am sitting here sipping a fairly nice cup of green tea. I wimped out this afternoon. I have a team meeting in a few minutes, so I did not take the time to make a proper pot of tea. Instead, I grabbed a tea bag and shoved it into a cup of hot water. No cinnamon, no herbs, no nothing—only hot water and a tea bag. I almost feel like I am being punished.

I paved over my laptop the other day, and I am in the process of setting it up again. I can tell you that it runs WAY faster right now. It boots quickly, shuts down quickly, and everything seems fresh and new. I miss lots of apps, but I am in the process of relocating them in the store, and getting stuff installed.

One project I have been dreading is setting up Hyper-V. I will tell you that having real, live Hyper-V on my desktop operating system is a huge win for me. I used it nearly every day to test some type of script or configuration. I also use it when I am making presentations at conferences such as PowerShell Saturday in Atlanta—or via Lync, such as PowerShell Saturday in Singapore.

The thought of all that mousing makes my hand hurt

Having Hyper-V on my laptop and having a cool client operating system absolutely rocks! But the thought of setting it up and all the associated mousing around makes my hand ache. I mean, dude. There is the setting up of the virtual machine locations, the setting up of the machine configuration storage locations, creating virtual switches…and that is before I even begin to import any virtual machines. So, naturally, I have been putting it off. I mean, why do today, what I can put off until tomorrow? The Hyper-V user interface is shown here.

Image of menu

But, then it hit me. I do not need to put this off (in fact, I cannot put it off too much longer because of Windows PowerShell Saturday in Atlanta) because in addition to having the real-deal Hyper-V, I also have the real-deal Hyper-V Windows PowerShell module. Yes! Windows PowerShell for the win!

 Check to see what I already have

The first thing one might need to do is to see if Hyper-V is even installed on one’s laptop. To check this, use the Get-WindowsOptionalFeature cmdlet. If you need to enable Hyper-V, you can do so by piping the results to the Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature cmdlet. This technique is shown here:

Get-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName *hyper-v*all  |

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature –Online

Following the installation of Hyper-V (in addition to the Windows PowerShell management module for Hyper-V), I can use the Get-VMHost cmdlet to examine my current configuration. I pipe the results to the Format-List cmdlet so I can see all of the property values. The command and its output are shown here.

Get-VMHost | Format-List *

Image of command output

Creating the virtual machine folders

One of the cool things about the MD function in Windows PowerShell is that it can create multiple folders at the same time. Normally, I use the old process as follows:

  1. Test to see if a folder exists.
  2. If the folder exists, exit gracefully.
  3. If the folder does not exist, create it.

I use the Test-Path cmdlet to check for the existence of the folders. But you know what? If I want to create a folder if it does not exist, all I need to do is to call the command to create the folder. If the folder exists, an error occurs. I know this. I really do not need to see a message stating that the folder exists. I really do not care if it does. So I decided to suppress the error message, and pass an array of folder paths to the MD function.

Creating the folder paths

So, I know where I want to create the folders. I decided to break the paths up into a couple of variables, and use the Join-Path cmdlet to create the folders. This gives me an advantage: I might want to use the script on a different computer at some time, but I still like my folder structure. The only thing I might need to change is the actual drive letter. So in my script, I create a couple of variables as shown here:

$VMDrive = “E:”

$VMPath = Join-Path -path $VMDrive -ChildPath “vms\vm”

$VHDPath = Join-Path -Path $VMDrive -ChildPath “vms\vhd”

MD -Path $vmpath,$VHDPath -ErrorAction 0

Creating the time span for resource metering

I wrote a very detailed blog post about creating the time span for resource metering for Hyper-V. You may want to check it out: Use PowerShell to Configure Hyper-V Resource Metering. What I do here, is use the New-TimeSpan cmdlet to create a new time span of an hour and a half:

$RMSave = New-TimeSpan -hours 1 -Minutes 30

Setting the virtual machine host

To configure my virtual machine host (that is, my laptop), I use the Set-VMHost cmdlet. I specify the paths and the resource metering timespan. The command shown here is a single line command:
Set-VMHost -VirtualHardDiskPath $VHDPath -VirtualMachinePath $VMPath -ResourceMeteringSaveInterval $RMSave

When I run the command, no output appears in the output pane of my Windows PowerShell ISE, as shown in the following image:

Image of command output

Here is my complete script:

<#

 ConfigureVMHost.ps1

 Ed Wilson, msft

 HSG-10-8-2013

#>

 

# The following will install Hyper-V on my Win8 laptop

<#

Get-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName *hyper-v*all |

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature –Online

#>

 

Import-Module -Name Hyper-V

$RMSave = New-TimeSpan -hours 1 -Minutes 30

$VMDrive = “E:”

$VMPath = Join-Path -path $VMDrive -ChildPath “vms\vm”

$VHDPath = Join-Path -Path $VMDrive -ChildPath “vms\vhd”

MD -Path $vmpath,$VHDPath -ErrorAction 0

 

Set-VMHost -VirtualHardDiskPath $VHDPath -VirtualMachinePath $VMPath -ResourceMeteringSaveInterval $RMSave

Join me tomorrow when I will talk about using Windows PowerShell to work with Hyper-V networking on my laptop.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter and Facebook. If you have any questions, send email to me at scripter@microsoft.com, or post your questions on the Official Scripting Guys Forum. See you tomorrow. Until then, peace.

Ed Wilson, Microsoft Scripting Guy 

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