New Delhi PowerShell User Group.: Get-VMHost

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Part - 4 : PowerShell and Hyper-V : Connecting to Hyper-V Virtual Machines.

After running and starting Virtual Machines, we need to connect with them. We need to see the screen of the Virtual machines, so that we able to see "what's happening".

The most frequent way to connect to the virtual machines is to by using "Hyper-V Manager" , Right click on them and choose to "Connect" or select the virtual machine and then click on the "Connect" in the "Action Pane"

But, it's not making any sense, that we have started the virtual machine using PowerShell, now we have to use GUI of "Hyper-V Manager" to connect with our virtual machine.

Unfortunately, there seems no PowerShell cmdlet is there, by which we able to connect to virtual machine console.

Fortunately, there is small exe named as vmconnect.exe is available by which we can connect to the virtual machine.

If you type vmconnect.exe and hit enter, it will open a "Remote Desktop" type window, asking for server and Virtual machine name to connect.

If you want to see more parameters supported by vmconnect.exe , simple type vmconnect.exe /? and hit enter.

As we see in above screenshot, it seems that vmconnect.exe require majorly two thing to connect to the Virtual machine, first is "Hyper-V server" name and the second is name of the virtual machine which we need to connect to.

Let's connect to console in a semi- PowerShell way.

As we know that we can get a Hyper-V server name using Get-VMHost cmdlet.

In the below command I am storing the .Name value of Hyper-V server in to a $vmHostName variable.

$vmHostName = (Get-VMHost).Name

Execute the variable name and you can see the name of my Hyper-V server there.

Rest of everything is simple now, type the vmconnect.exe and then provide our $vmHostName variable and after that provide the name of the virtual machine , which we want to connect to, in my case it is "MediaWiki" , provide the name and hit enter.

vmconnect.exe $vmHostName "MediaWiki"

Bingo!! We are connect to our virtual machine console.. yayay!!!

If you are looking for a good PowerShell function to make this more advance check this out : http://www.powershellmagazine.com/2012/10/11/connecting-to-hyper-v-virtual-machines-with-powershell/ a cool function written by our PowerShell Guru Shay Levy.

That's all for now. See you in my next blog post.

Aman Dhally, Manya Dhally, Manya Kaur, Manya Arora, Manya

Thanks.

Aman Dhally

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Monday, July 14, 2014

PowerShell and Hyper-V : Getting Started with Hyper-V and PowerShell

“ To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.― Oscar Wilde ”

After writing article on “Desired State Configuration”, I was thinking about topics on which I can write a similar article series. Nothing was coming to my mind, as I already covered “Active Directory”, “Desired State configuration”, “DHCP”, “Event Viewer” and other topics.

As I use “Hyper-V” a lot, then I thought why not to write a 0 – 200 level series of articles on “Hyper-V”? to me it seems to be good idea J and I hope you may like it too.

I love "Hyper-v", before using "Hyper-V", I used to have "VMware Workstation" , but after migrating to windows 8.1 and start using "Hyper-V" I never used "VMware Workstation" again.

Let’s get started.

Prerequisites

· Windows 8.1

· Try to have at-least 4 GB of minimum Ram.

· 64 Bit processor

Yes, that’s all.

Step 1 :

Go to the BIOS Setting of your System / Laptop and enable Virtualisation.

Step 2 :

Boot your System
Go to Control Panel
Click on "Programs and features"
Click on "Turn windows feature On of Off"
Select all features and sub features of "Hyper-V"
and Click on "OK"

Step 3 :

Open PowerShell Console.
There is no need to Import Hyper-V module , as after PowerShell v3, they all auto imported.
```
Import-Module Hyper-V
```
To know the list of all cmdlets imported by Hyper-V module , you can run the simple command
```
Get-Command -Module 'Hyper-V'
```

Step 4 :

Let's run basic cmdlets for now.

To get the list of "Hyper-V" hosts, run the cmdlet, Get-VMHost
If you want to see the list of all virtual machines, just run the cmdlet Get-VM.
and you can see that all of machines are Off. you can cross verify it by open a Hyper-V management console.