4. Hyper-V - How to create a virtual machine and how to modify virtual machine settings

How to create a virtual machine and how to modify virtual machine settings

In last part of this series I talked about Hyper-V Virtual Switch and how to create one. Now we are ready to build our first virtual machine and to do that we need to open Hyper-V Manager and right-click on the name of our Hyper-V server and choose New –> Virtual Machine. You can also click on new –> Virtual Machine from the Action pane.

Before you begin page will pop-up. Click next

In Specify Name and Location page we will specify a name and location for our new VM. In my case, it will be DC01 and default location D:\VM, click next

On this page select Generation 2 and click next. (explanations of these two are clearly stated on the page)

Now we have to define how much memory we want to assign to this VM. This option can be changed later. The amount of RAM you dedicate to this virtual machine will depend upon how much RAM you have available in the Hyper-V host.
If you check Dynamic Memory, the VM will only consume what it actually needs in order to perform. In my case I will leave it unchecked

On the Configure Networking page, we can simply choose which virtual switch our VM NIC gets plugged into. I will plug this VM into External Network (Which I configured I my previous post)

On Virtual Hard Disk page, most commonly, we will utilize the top option so that our VM gets a new harddrive. There is also option to use an existing drive or to attach it later. I will create a new one.

On our last screen we can specify which operating system our new VM is going to run.I will install Windows Server 2016 onto this new VM and so I can point my new VM at the installation ISO file location.

After clicking Next –> Finish, our new VM has been created and is ready to be started, which we can see inside the Hyper-V Manager console.

We can start it by right-clicking on it and selecting start.

After starting it, right-click on it again and click on Connect, to open a console window from which we can watch the boot process…

That’s it.
Let’s take a look on VM Settings. To open VM settings right-click on VM and select Settings.

Inside settings, we can adjust any aspect of our virtual machine’s hardware. Many settings can be done on fly, which means while the VM is running.

Add hardware – here we can add more hard drives or NICs to our VM. New feature in 2016 is that we can add or remove NIC’s while VM is running and that option is not grayed out. To be able to add new SCSI Controller or Fiber Channel Adapter we will need to shutdown our VM.
Firmware – here we can choose boot entry. If we want to boot from DVD or Network Adapter this is the setting we need to modify.
Security – Here we can enable or disable secure boot which will prevent unauthorized code from running at boot time (It is enabled by default) and choose Encryption Support.
Memory – In Windows Server 2012 ,we always had to shut VMs down in order to change the amount of RAM they were using (If Dynamic memory was not selected), but not anymore. New feature in 2016 allows us to change it while the VM is running even if Dynamic Memory is not selected. Option is not grayed out.

Processor – We have the ability to add more vCPU’s onto a VM.  Changing these settings requires that the VM is shut down.
SCSI Controller – Here we can add additional disks, ISO files and Shared Drives.
Network Adapter – Here we can add more NIC’s to our VM
ONE GREAT ITEM!!!
Inside the Settings window is a drop down menu at the very top. It will save you a lot of time if you need to modify VM settings on many machines. If you click on this drop-down menu near the top, you can navigate between the Settings pages for any of the VMs running on your Hyper-V server.