Hyper-V 2019 Server might be a great and free opportunity to host Hyper-V VMs.
The main problem is that it’s quite an unfriendly & raw environment not set to live outside a network domain.
Setting up a domain server for small labs, or similar realities can be quite expensive and not advantageous.
Surfing the web, I found several sources to use it in a private network and to enable the VM administration by Hyper-V Management Console.
This can be a suitable solution also for people (like me) that aren’t PowerShell gods.
Setup on the server-side
After having downloaded .ISO file from Microsoft, and completed the installation phase, we can start to set it up:
From the administrator account, we have to:
- set server name,
- enable remote desktop,
- set fixed IP,
- setup windows update,
- verify/setup time & date settings,
- verify/setup telemetry settings,
open a PowerShell window and:
- verify Hyper-V features (not needed in this version), with the following command:
install-windowsfeature Hyper-V -includemanagementtools
- set network category to ‘private’
From PowerShell, run the following command:
Get-NetConnectionProfile
and then:
Set-NetConnectionProfile -interfaceindex <reported_index> -networkcategory private
- init Remote Management by the following command:
winrm quickconfig
Add any needed account to Hyper-V Administrators local group by the following command:
net localgroup "Hyper-V Administrators" <account_name> /add
… then apply any windows update on the server-side.
Setup on client-side
Install RSAT Hyper-V manager (available only on Professional or superior editions).
- open the Control Panel
- click on Programs & Features
- click on Turn Windows features on or off
- we need to install Hyper-V Management Tools
From an administrator Command Prompt, you have to:
- set your server has ‘trusted’:
winrm s winrm/config/client @{TrustedHosts="<ipaddr>"}
- add server credentials:
cmdkey /add:<ipaddr> /user:administrator /pass
Now we should be able to open the Hyper-V Management Console and connect to our server by using its IP address.
Server QoL (Quality of Life) Tuning
Because it’s a barebone Windows, we don’t have any of the user-friendly preinstalled programs (like Explorer for example).
A good option may be to use portable programs.
The first step is to add a network share in which copy anything needed (utilities, .ISO images, …), by typing something similar to the following command:
net share <sharename>=<local path> /grant:everyone, full
(for example net share temp=”c:\temp” /grant:everyone, full)
Then we can copy any portable app, we can need.
We may like the idea of an Explorer clone like:
… and then we can start to create/add our VMs.