Hello folks, the Dude here, helping you make a learning lab based on a single machine.  From this all things are (pretty much) possible…lets get our learning on now!

Enable Hyper-V in Windows 8:

Pretty straight forward step here.  In the Windows 8 Start Menu type “features” and select settings on the right hand side.  You should now see a short list, including “Turn Windows features on or off”.  Click it and it’ll bring up the view below:

 

Check the box for “Hyper-V” so it appears as above and hit “OK”.

If the option is not present or greyed out, then your hardware isn’t configured for Hyper-V or doesn’t support it.  Use this TechNet article to sort out the hardware aspect:  http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/1401.hyper-v-list-of-slat-capable-cpus-for-hosts.aspx

Note that this process will require a reboot to enable.

Hyper-V Manager in Windows 8:

Once Hyper-V is enabled in Windows 8, you have Hyper-V manger available to you:

This is a typical Microsoft Management Console.  Click on the host name and see the empty space.  Right click the host name (in this case JS8560W) and select “Virtual Switch Manager”.

 

 

Virtual Switch Manager

Lets create a Virtual Network Switch, shall we?  Since I don’t know your environment, I don’t know if we’re going to run into issues building this with external facing connections, so let us stick to an Internal network.  This is a network where the host (our Windows 8 machine in this case) and the guest machines will communicate, but the guests cannot get out onto the hosts network.

 

 

So lets click “Create Virtual Switch” so we can get the view below:

 

 

For this purpose, the defaults will work great.  So lets click “ok”.  Yay we just made a virtual network for our hosts!

 

For the next installment on making a VM (virtual machine) click here:

 

http://blogs.technet.com/b/jeff_stokes/archive/2013/04/18/building-up-a-learning-lab-based-on-windows-8-and-hyper-v-part-ii.aspx