Hello thank you for joining me today we're going to create something called a nested Hyper-V server. A nested Hyper-V server is a VM that is enabled to function like a Hyper-V server. It runs on a Hyper-V host and while a nested Hyper-V server is not recognized as a supported option in an everyday data center production environment, it does have possibilities for other business needs. Examples for instance can be development teams that require isolated Hyper-V environments, or one I'm accustomed to, which is creating Hyper-V servers for technical training.
In many training environments the availability of many physical Hyper-V servers usually isn't practical, but if I have one robust server with a large complement of memory, CPUs, and storage I can easily create 8 to 10 nested Hyper-V servers to give my students an opportunity to experience a Windows Server Hyper-V environment. So this is the VM that I want to convert into my nested Hyper-V server it's called ‘Nest-HV’.
On this particular VM I have allocated over 12 gigs of memory, six virtual processors, and I've added an additional hard drive to hold the VM files for the VMs that will be running on my nested Hyper-V server. So at this point let me show you how easy it is to set up a nested Hyper-V server.
First we want to make sure our nested Hyper-V server candidate is turned off, and this particular VM is already shut down. The next thing that we want to do is bring up a PowerShell window. This is a PowerShell ISE window on my Hyper-V host. I'm going to run two commands. The first command is to expose the virtual extensions necessary for my VM to function as a Hyper-V server so I'm going to go ahead and run that command at this time. And that ran successfully. Now the second command I want to run will enable something called MAC address spoofing.
This is going to allow external network connectivity from my nested Hyper-V server, and the VMS running on that outside of the Hyper-V host that it's running on. I'm going to go ahead and run this particular command at this time. OK, that ran successfully. Now we're going to go back to our VM to finish up our configuration. I'm going to go ahead and start this up, connect to it, and we'll finish our configuration on that particular VM at that point. I'm in my nested Hyper-V VM, and our next step is installing the Hyper-V server role.
Once again we're using PowerShell and this particular command will install the Hyper-V server role and the management tools. So I'm going to go ahead and run that at this time. Now when this completes we're going to reboot the VM and we'll rejoin after that. Okay I'm back in my newly created Hyper-V server.
I am in Hyper-V manager and at this point I can create new VMs, import VMs from other Hyper-V environments and, if I need to, I can move my nested Hyper-V server to another Hyper-V server host.
Thank you for watching how to create a Microsoft nested Hyper-V server and, have a great day.
