A Tour of the Hyper-V Manager Tool

Anyone deploying virtual machines using Microsoft Hyper-V will likely spend a considerable amount of time interacting with the Hyper-V Manager MMC Snap-in. As such, it is important to gain a good understanding of how to use this administrative tool. This chapter is intended to provide a basic overview of the Hyper-V Manager tool and cover the basics of using this tool to modify some key server settings.

Installing the Hyper-V Management Snap-in

The Hyper-V Manager snap-in is installed by default when the Hyper-V role is installed on a Full Windows Server 2008 installation. Given that the snap-in is graphical in nature, it is not installed on the command-line based Windows Server 2008 Core installation. The only way to manage Hyper-V on a Windows Server 2008 Core installation using the Hyper-V Manager is to do so remotely by running the snap-in on a system running a full Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista installation.

To facilitate remote Hyper-V administration from systems that are not running Hyper-V, the snap-in may also be installed as a stand-alone tool on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1 Enterprise and Ultimate editions.

Both the Hyper-V Manager snap-in and the Virtual Machine Connection tool may be installed on Windows Vista by installing the Windows Vista SP1 Management Tools Update package which is available for download from the Microsoft web site.

Launching the Hyper-V Manager

The Hyper-V Manager may be invoked using a number of different techniques, each of which will be outlined in this section.

- Administrative Tools Menu - Launch Hyper-V Manager by clicking on the Start -> Administrative Tools -> Hyper-V Manager menu option.

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