AdministrationCategory Archives

Add external USB hard drive to Hyper-V virtual machine

In this blog post I’ll describe how to add external USB hard drive to Hyper-V virtual machine.
In my case I have an external WD USB hard drive with 500GB capacity and I want add that drive into my Hyper-V virtual machine.

NOTE: As you probably know, removable usb drives is not supported in Hyper-V.

This is a short “how to”:

1. On your Hyper-V host open Disk Management.
2. Choose external USB hard drive and right click on him.

3. Click on Offline.

4. Open Settings on virtual machine to which you want to add external USB drive and select SCSI Controller on the left hand side, select Hard Drive, and click Add on the right hand side.

5. Check mark Physical hard disk: , select external USB hard drive na click OK.

6. Logon into VM and open Disk Management. Click on newly attached Disk and bring him Online.

Open Windows Explorer and you will see your external USB hard drive ;)

Enjoy in day ;)

Romeo Mlinar

December 17, 2012

Administration, Hyper-V, Microsoft, Virtualization, Windows 8, Windows Server

31 comments

Add Hyper-V host from other site to System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager SP1 Beta

I have several Hyper-V hosts in the Branch Office. Offices are connected with VPN site-to-site connection. In the Main Office I have System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager, and I want to add Hyper-V hosts to the VMM, but, when I want to add those Hyper-V hosts to VMM, console crashed after 46% of job.
If you have similar issue here is resolution how to resolve that.

1. On the Hyper-V host install Local Agent.

2. Open you VMM console and add Hyper-V host with installed Local Agent.

3. After a few moments, the Hyper-V host will appear in Virtual Machine Manager.

Have a nice weekend!

Romeo Mlinar

November 16, 2012

Administration, Hyper-V, Microsoft, System Center, Virtualization

0 comments

Converting WS2012 Core to a WS2012 with GUI and vice versa.

In the last few weeks I installed several Hyper-V hosts in my production environment. On every host I installed WS2012 Core with Hyper-V role. Why? Because I don’t need anything on that hosts except Hyper-V role, but, what if I’ll ever need something more than Hyper-V role? What if I’ll ever need WS2012 with GUI on that hosts?
In order to be ready for something like that, I decided to try on one of the test servers, and I would like to explain how to convert your installed WS2012 Core to a WS2012 “full” version (with GUI) and vice versa.

Follow this few steps:

1. Create a directory where Windows image will be mounted

MkDir MountDir

2. Determine the index number for a Server with a GUI image

Dism /get-wiminfo /wimfile:D:\sources\install.wim

3. Mount the WIM file using this command:

Dism /mountwim /WimFile:D:\sources\install.wim /Index:4 /MountDir:
c:\mountdir\readonly

4. On the last step, start PowerShell, then execute the following command;

a) PowerShell (press enter)

b) Install-WindowsFeature Server-Gui-Mgmt-Infra,Server-Gui-Shell –Restart –Source C:\mountdir\windows\winsxs

Now we have WS2012 with GUI installed!

If we want Core version of WS2012 we can do that through PowerShell! All you need to do is to execute the following command at an elevated Windows PowerShell:

Uninstall-WindowsFeature Server-Gui-Mgmt-Infra