Building up a learning lab based on Windows 8 and Hyper-V, Part I

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:

 

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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:

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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”.

 

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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.

 

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

 

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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

1 comment

  1. I love running Hyper-V on Windows 8! I wrote a blog about XP mode back in the Win 7 day. So happy we have full Hypervisor support now in the client! I'm RDP'ing into my local VM's all the time. Great to see this blog post.

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