Managing Hyper-V Server

Created Thursday 14 June 2012  

 

You need Windows Server 2012 or Windows 8 for remote management of Hyper-V Server.  

 

Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate downloads and links
Windows 8 Release Preview-ISO-Images  

 

There are serveral ways to manage Hyper-V Server 8 and guests remotely:  

 

  • Hyper-V Manager
  • Powershell 3.0
  • vmconnect.exe to connect to a virtual machine console
  • Remote Destop Connection to a virtuel machine

Of course there are other management-tools you can buy from Microsoft. But I am concentrating on the free ones.  

 

Using vmconnect.exe  

 

Hyper-V Manager comes as a feature in Windows Server 2012.  

 

To activate it, you can use powershell.  

 

Server Manager brings some Windows PowerShell-Cmdlets for this.  

 

get-module -Listavailable # shows available powershell modules, including servermanager.

 

get-module -Listavailable

# shows available powershell modules, including servermanager.

 

import-module servermanager # imports the servermanager module.

 

get-windowsfeature # returns a list of the command names for use with Add-WindowsFeature

 

Add-WindowsFeature RSAT-Hyper-V # activates Hyper-V Mananger - now integrated in the GUI.

 

If you want to use Windows 8 to get your hands on Hyper-V Manager, you have to download and install
Microsoft Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) for Windows 8. 

 

There is a 32-bit version and a 64-bit version. If your run Windows 8 32-bit version, you won't have the Hyper-V Role available on your computer, because Hyper-V is 64-bit only. But you can still manage
a Hyper-V server remotely.