Installing and managing Hyper-V in VMware Workstation 11

If you want to use VMware workstation to play around with Hyper-V or create a Hyper-V lab, this is fairly easy to get up and running.  Let’s take a look at installing and managing Hyper-V in VMware Workstation 11.

Creating the virtual machine is straightforward in VMware workstation.  Simply create a new VM.  Make sure the Version in the options of the VM is set to Hyper-V (unsupported) as opposed to Windows Server 2012, etc.  If you create the VM with Windows Server 2012 instead of the Hyper-V setting, when you attempt to install the Hyper-V role in the server itself, you will get the error:  “Hyper-V cannot be installed: A hypervisor is already running” as detailed in this VMware KB article: https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2044876

After you change the Version, you will no longer receive the message.

Installing the role

• Choose the Hyper-V role

• Virtual switch configuration

• Virtual machine migration settings

• Here we choose the Default storage location for the VHD files and VM config files

• Confirmation of role selection

• I chose not to restart the server automatically, so I received the restart pending warning.  Restart your server at this point if you didn’t auto restart.

Managing the Hyper-V server

Installing the server and role is by far the easiest steps to this process.  If you are like me and are installing the Hyper-V server simply into a workgroup and want to use this as a lab machine whereby you administer the server via your host workstation or other management VM that isn’t in the same domain or workgroup as the Hyper-V server, then you need to do a few steps to be able to administer the box without errors.

If you attempt to connect to the Hyper-V server fresh after the role install, you will most likely receive the following error message:

You will see the error that is presented talks about the management service needs to be running and that you have to be authorized to connect to the server.

Hyper-V Remote Management Configuration Utility (HVRemote)

There is a really great commandline utility called Hyper-V Remote Management Configuration Utility (HVRemote) which does all of the heavy lifting getting a lab server ready to connect via a workgroup client or a client in a different domain.

Take a look at the utility documentation here as well as download it:  https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/HVRemote

After adding your remote user to the server itself for management purposes, you should be able to connect to the box remotely using the Hyper-V Manager.

You should also now have access to the functions of Hyper-V such as Import Virtual Machine, Hyper-V Settings, Virtual Switch Manager, etc.  Also, most importantly access to New > Virtual Machine.