back to article Let's get graphical with Hyper-V

We recently had a good look at what it takes to get a Hyper-V failover cluster up and running using PowerShell. It isn't quite as scary as it is often made out to be, but like many command line interfaces it is the stuff of laminated cheat sheets for administrators who don't use those commands every day. The alternative is to …

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  1. Joerg
    FAIL

    Yeah..sure.. build the Hyper-V user base for free...

    ...then Microsoft will step in as usual and request huge payments, locking licenses, not providing updates and so on.

    Microsoft only wants to destroy VMWare to estabilish a monopoly. They can't accept VMWare to be a success just like they hate Apple.

    1. JDX Gold badge

      Re: Yeah..sure.. build the Hyper-V user base for free...

      They don't need to charge for Hyper-V if Hyper-V users are running Windows.

    2. Davidoff
      WTF?

      Re: Yeah..sure..

      "Microsoft only wants to destroy VMWare to estabilish a monopoly."

      Ok, the stupid monopoly drivel, here it comes again! But obviously you haven't noticed that this time it's VMware who practices customer locking and charges large amount of money for every additional bit of functionality, and squeezes customers with ever increasing license costs. I guess you also have been in a coma when vSphere 5 was introduced and customers were angry because VMware had over tightened the price screw when they changed to charging for using your server RAM as well. On the other side, Hyper-V supports many features that cost an arm and a leg with VMware, while also supporting non-MS hypervisors with their management solution (SCVMM).

      But don't let get reality in the way of a proper delusion.

      "They can't accept VMWare to be a success just like they hate Apple."

      The same could be said about Apple and Samsung, or in fact most other companies. It should be fairly obvious why companies rarely have sympathies towards their competitor, but I guess that's also different on whatever planet you're on.

  2. Pirate Dave Silver badge
    Pirate

    Never see WIndows 8 as personal desktop

    But I have found that beating on Server2012 for a few hours gives a desktop that is fairly close to useable, even without ClassicShell. You just have to go nuts with shortcuts on the desktop and get used to not having a Start menu (not easy after 18+ years of using it, though). I still prefer my Server2003 desktop, but I guess times change.

    These two articles about Hyper-V were great, Trevor. Thanks, man, I've got to look into this stuff later this summer after my other projects finish. We're leaving Novell and heading into Microsoft-land, so this is timely info.

  3. nomski
    Meh

    device manager working??

    Having added the right bits to the group policies I have still not been able to get this working with HyperV 2012 with Win8 managing it. I also ran across a thread that said this from a microsoft representative "Ok, looks like I found out what was going on here. Remote access to PnP was disabled completely in Windows 8 and cannot be re-enabled. That's why you're seeing this behavior."

    Has anyone got device manager working on hyper-v2012 with windows 8 or server2012? I can remote manage everything else but the bit I need!!

  4. Nate Amsden

    RDP to the server itself?

    Hyper-v free? So anyone can download it? I thought it was tied to the Windows server OS. I've never seen anyone post a link to where they could download Hyper-V for free(that wasn't a time limited eval) to install on a bare metal system. But I don't track Microsoft closely so it could be possible.

    for my vcenter stuff I normally just remote desktop to the server running vcenter and run the vsphere client locally (I do have a Citrix XenApp essentials for this and other windows admin tools as well). Mainly because running the vSphere client over a WAN (in my case 3k-5k miles away depending on the DC) is really sluggish, it's relatively unusable(for my taste at least).

    Can you not do something similar for the MS side of things? Remote desktop in to whatever system is running the SCVMM(?) and run the client locally for clients that are not windows 8 or windows 2012? You mention restrictions with VDI - but of course remote desktop isn't the same as VDI, so I don't think such restrictions would apply. Remote desktop's default license is for remote admin anyway. I am not sure if the system running hyper-v scvmm has a usable desktop interface or if it is one of those minimal console installs (or if it could be either).

    My main question though is to what extent has MS unified the management interfaces for hyper-v? The article is somewhat confusing to me as I've never used Hyper-V(nor do I have any plans to, as a Linux user). It seems to cover only 3rd party Hyper-v management tools and just makes a passing mention of the Microsoft equivilent of vCenter?

    I go back to this slide I saw at a vmware conference about 4 years ago:

    http://elreg.nateamsden.com/hyper-v-mgmt-2009.png

    Where they basically show screen shots of the 5 main tools to manage Hyper-V(of that era anyway). Can you do everything in one tool now? (or 2 maybe?) configure storage, networking(fail over included), setup the cluster, etc etc? I seem to recall at the time one of the limitations of Windows 2003 or maybe it was 2008 at the time was that network fault tolerance wasn't built in and relied upon 3rd party (NIC vendor provided) tools to do, and the newer OS(s) now have that integrated.

    I had some good discussions with a friend of mine who manages a mid sized lab of ~500 physical servers at Microsoft and a bunch of Hyper V (though no clusters or shared storage, or high availability of any kind). Though he was not able to answer that management unification question, I suppose because at least in part his lab doesn't make use of most of those capabilities.

    1. phuzz Silver badge
      Linux

      Re: RDP to the server itself?

      I think this is a link to the free version of HyperV:

      http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/hyper-v-server/default.aspx

      As it's a hypervisor, it doesn't have a GUI, so you can't RDP to it (as far as I know, not played with it yet).

      The single management tool for Hyper-V is to use Powershell, which if you're coming from linux you will either love (because it's a commandline based scripting language), or hate (because it's not identical to *your favourite* shell). Personally I like it and think it compares well to Bash, but ymmv.

      1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

        Re: RDP to the server itself?

        You can RDP into the free hyper-v server itself. THere is no classic GUI, however there is enough of one to be RDPable and it presents two CMD.EXE boxes for you to work with. (Just type powershell into the one to turn it into a powershell console.)

        It's free to try and free to use. You can even run it on VMware with minor modifications for testing purposes (links at the end of the article.) Go give it a boo!

      2. Nate Amsden

        Re: RDP to the server itself?

        hmm I checked it out (fortunately I happened to have a MS passport account)

        I logged in and got to a page that wanted a bunch of info, and said if you don't want to fill out the form hit cancel, so I hit cancel and landed here ->

        TechNet Evaluation Center > Home > Technet Evaluation Center

        where it says

        "Download full-featured evaluations at no cost"

        It lists things like windows server, office, sharepoint, sql server etc

        No mention of Hyper-V.

        If I go to Windows 2012 server it says

        "Register, then download and install full-featured software for a 180-day trial"

        180 days is of course significantly longer than VMware offers for their full featured trial.

        ...

        Then I went back to the original page, and filled out the form and it is now downloading

        a 1.6GB file, which I assume is hyper-v (9200.16384.WIN8_RTM.120725-1247_X64FRE_SERVERHYPERCORE_EN-US-HRM_SHV_X64FRE_EN-US_DV5.ISO)

        Somewhat confusing process. But will see what I get

        thanks for the link

  5. Inspector71

    Hyper-V Local GUI

    If you want a simple GUI for Hyper-V Server 2012 Standalone then give Corefig a try, pretty basic but it gets the job done for most of the important settings. Works pretty well in my test setup. It's available from Codeplex.

  6. h3

    As far as I know the disk management thing is a firewall issue it gets started automatically for me. I can never remember which rules it needs to be enabled though. (Some of them are on the local machine.)

    It is fairly usable for me. Single box. Workgroup. (I have a domain but the DC is on the hyperv server which makes distributing the certificate for https powershell easier).

    When I did this it was pretty much when it came out. Mostly what I used was the docs which are pretty awful. The how to install hyperv server 2008 R2 to usb and the hvremote.wsf (That at the time wasn't updated for hyperv server 2012) and trial an error.

    I have not used server manager at all. (Some weird reason I cannot install it to my desktop. I am using the en-us language pack). It is a pita using ReFS just by powershell because I don't really know that much about what it can do properly. (And Windows people seem to love GUI's more than is good for them).

    I am using it on ReFS as well. (I saw a presentation at the time saying that doing that was a good idea despite what people seem to say since. It was very well reasoned and I cannot find it any-more. There is a flag that you need to change in order to go from ReFS to none ReFS). There is very little that is at all important on it.

  7. benjarrell

    Domains

    "I also strongly encourage you to never under any circumstances or for any reason attempt to do anything with Hyper-V Server without having all your hosts on a domain."

    I would put that as anything with Windows Server, not just Hyper-V.

  8. h3

    You can use the direct link for hyperv server 2012 as well if you want :

    http://care.dlservice.microsoft.com/dl/download/3/4/7/347A95F0-A63C-492F-BE43-F376AE30C9FE/9200.16384.WIN8_RTM.120725-1247_X64FRE_SERVERHYPERCORE_EN-US-HRM_SHV_X64FRE_EN-US_DV5.ISO

    (If MS didn't send their spam at stupid o'clock then it would be less needed).

    Suppose it might be getting an update to coincide with 2012 R2 as well.

    I like the way it is is not deliberately feature restricted.

    If you wanted to use hyperv server with ReFS as a home nas as long as you are capable of doing account administration / storage administration from the command line you could do that. The smb performance is much better than any open source product I have tried. (Solaris CIFS / Samba).

    Using it with a samba domain is potentially interesting. (Rather be able to make the samba a BDC though if only because I know there are some stuff that is going to be a nightmare otherwise. Had to something with Solaris 10 when it first came out to deal with authenticating manually against an active directory and I think it is going to be like that so I haven't tried it).

  9. DaveR
    Facepalm

    Local GUI is not a problem

    I don't see why VMware is so alluring to as many people. It seems that they were just blinded with this company long time ago, and now are not ready to spend a minimum effort to wide open their eyes to the robbery VMware does with them via their pricing. Hyper-V on the other hand gives you ALL you want to create and manage your virtual environment. If you miss having local GUI, and you don't want to deal with PowerShell, which you still have to sooner or later, just use something like 5nine Manager for Hyper-V.

    1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

      Re: Local GUI is not a problem

      Because VMware is easy to set up and use. Install ESXi (which takes seconds) and wait for it to boot. Get the IP address it came up with and point vSphere at it. *BAM*. No other configuration required.

      Hyper-V requires [expletive deleted] about with the [expletive deleted] thing just to be able to access it remotely. You either have to

      1) Deploy through SCVMM in the first place

      2) Install, then type a bunch of stuff in to domain join the host, wait for GPOs to apply, reboot. Oh, and you have to make GPOs in the first place to deal with firewall, etc because the thing doesn't ship "useful out of the box."

      3) Faff around with a bunch of powershell in order to get it working off domain, which will either involve downloading and executing a script locally (fun times, wget is where?) or it will involve shooting yourself in the face as you try in vain to figure out what arcane madness that Microsoft wants configured to get a usable non-domain host that you can remotely work on using the standard management tools.

      We like VMware because VMware is so simple to use you would have to have been lobotomized by a rototiller as a small child to screw it up. DO you remember why Microsoft got where it is today? It sold the world on ease of use. Today Microsoft is the one making software with an incomprehensibly difficult to use "out of box experience" simply because it wants to sell you on the up-jumped pricey management tools. The tools themselves (of course) don't work properly without buying even more Microsoft software so by the time you've tallied all the little marks on your stick Microsoft is easily as expensive (or more) just to get the same job done.

      So which do you think people are eager to use? The one that says on the front "love us, we're cheaper" but in fact is the same price and significantly harder to get running outside of the very narrow cone of use case they've described with their automated install SCVMM spanky fun time woo-woo method, or the one that is equal cost, but consists of "click, click, DONE?"

      Think about this really, really hard.

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