How to: Building a virtual Hyper-V 2012 R2 infrastructure

NOTE! Building this environment is not supported by Microsoft. This is only usefull for study Hyper-V and the System Center 2012 R2 Suite.

When you want to build an Hyper-V cluster, you’ve have to had at least 2 servers or desktop machines for your Hyper-V host servers. I don’t have that much hardware, so I want to install and run everything on my desktop machine (see this blogpost). But wait for a moment, we want to install a hypervisor within a hypervisor? Is this  possible? The answer is yes and no!

Installing Hyper-V isn’t that difficult. Just hit a copple of times on “Next” and your Hyper-V host is up and running. But the next step is to install a new VM and enabling the Hyper-V Server Role. When you enable the Hyper-V Server Role within a virtual machine, you’ll receive an error. This is because Windows is checking all the prerequisites for enabling the Hyper-V role.

So, there’s a way to install Hyper-V whitin a Hyper-V environment. The only thing is, you cannot start a VM within this virtualized Hyper-V host. So you can build for example a Hyper-V cluster with multiple VM’s on it, but you cannot start these machines!! For me it is enough for testing purposes and studying. For example, you can build your own virtual Private Cloud with Hyper-V 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2.

1.) I’ve installed 2 new VM’s within Hyper-V 2012 R2. These are going to be the virtualized Hyper-V hosts.
2.) The Hyper-V Server Role is still disabled
Get-WindowsFeature -Name Hype*
3.) Install the Hyper-V role
Enable-WindowsOptioanlFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Hyper-V -All -NoRestart
4.) Install the Hyper-V management tools
Install-WindowsFeature RSAT-Hyper-V-Tools -IncludeAllSubFeature
5.) Install the Windows Failover Clustering Feature
Install-WindowsFeature RSAT-Clustering -IncludeAllSubFeature
6.) Install the Multipath IO feature for ISCSI storage
Install-WindowsFeature Multipath-IO
7.) Restart the machine 8.) After the reboot you’re able to create and build your Hyper-V cluster

NOTE! Building this environment is not supported by Microsoft. This is only usefull for study Hyper-V and the System Center 2012 R2 Suite.

2013-12-16_11h58_06    2013-12-16_11h58_41    2013-12-16_12h00_08

2013-12-16_12h00_30    2013-12-16_12h02_58    2013-12-16_12h03_22

2013-12-16_12h04_26    2013-12-16_12h04_51    2013-12-16_12h05_16

2013-12-16_12h05_29    2013-12-16_12h05_46    2013-12-16_12h19_19

2013-12-16_12h20_04