Hyper-V for Developers Part 2

In Part 1 of this series we detailed a number of infrastructure tasks for getting your Client Hyper-V environments up and running quickly on a Windows 8 developer workstation.  With this post we will focus inward into our datacenter simulation and complete the work necessary to prepare for simulation of real-life application deployment scenarios.

What do you mean I can’t cut and paste into a VM?!?

One of the earliest pain points developers discover when using Hyper-V virtual machines is that unlike some other popular desktop hypervisor products the Virtual Machine Connection (VMC) does not allow files to be cut and paste from the host machine into a virtual machine.  Out of the box the options under the Clipboard menu of a virtual machine connection simply allow us to virtually type text via the Type clipboard text command.  These limitations have been the “way it is” for sometime. 

So what is the intrepid developer to do in order to copy his or her files into a VM for the purposes of installation, application deployment, or whatever other file transfer tasks are required? Enter the Internal Network to the rescue.  In Part 1 you may remember I showed that one of my two standard Hyper-V virtual switches is called Guest2Host which I configure on an internal network.  Now let’s setup a internal network between our APP1 server and the Windows 8 host machine.

First shutdown the APP1 server and navigate to the Hyper-V settings for this VM.  Under the Add Hardware section add a second virtual NIC to this server and set this NIC to be connected to the Guest2Host virtual switch.  Your setup should resemble the screen clipping below.

Now startup the APP1 server and login via the VMC.  A quick glance at the desktop wallpaper will show that the newly added NIC on the internal network has obtained an auto-configured 169.254.150.87 address (which is actually working by design as part of RFC 3927).  This may be familiar to some people who have seen this type of address before when their PC experiences difficulty obtaining a lease for a new address on a DHCP network.  We are going to use this address as a means to access our VM’s from our Windows 8 host.

Read more: Ken Kilty's Blog

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