Windows PowerShell® 2.0 Bible

CHAPTER 20

Managing Hyper-V 2008 R2

IN THIS CHAPTER

Using WMI to manage Hyper-V

Introducing the Windows PowerShell Management Library

Controlling virtual machines Taking and managing snapshots

Taking and managing snapshots

Hyper-V is Microsoft's entry in the bare metal virtualization market. Although one of the relatively late arrivals in the market, it is a solid virtualization platform that is quickly gaining a foothold in the arena. At the core of Hyper-V is the Windows 2008 R2 kernel that enables administrators to manage Hyper-V with the same familiar tools they already use to manage Windows, including Windows PowerShell.

Hyper-V Management Interfaces

The default management interface provided by Microsoft for interacting with the Hyper-V service is WMI. You may remember WMI from Chapter 6, “Managing and Installing Software,” where it was used to perform software-related tasks. This chapter briefly looks at the WMI interface for Hyper-V and its structure. The Windows PowerShell community is very active and is always making improvements. So, in the next section, you look at a project created by the community that augments the WMI interface and makes it easier to use. The rest of the chapter focuses solely on management using this project.

WMI Management Classes

Microsoft's interface for automation of Hyper-V is WMI. There are no native Windows PowerShell cmdlets for managing Hyper-V, but as you discovered in Chapter 6, Windows PowerShell can interact effectively with WMI.