Friday 15 January 2016

How to Run Hyper-V in vSphere 5.5

How to Run Hyper-V in vSphere 5.5 :-

VMware vSphere has the special ability to nest hypervisors, e.g. Host a Hypervisor as a virtual machine. But it is not enabled by default; if you try to add the Hyper-V role to a Microsoft Windows Server, you will receive the following error message:-

Hyper-V cannot be installed: A hypervisor is already running.

This is correct, because this virtual server FS01, is being hosted by a VMware vSphere (ESXi) 5.5 Server.

Shut down the virtual machine, because we need to edit the virtual machine configuration settings (the VMX file).

At the VMware vSphere (ESXi) inventory, Remove the Virtual Machine from the Inventory. To do this, Right Click the virtual machine, and select Remove from Inventory.

The next few steps can be done in many different ways. Essentially, you need to edit the virtual machine VMX file on the VMware vSphere ESXi host server. I've listed some methods here:

Download the VMX file using the datastore browser, edit the VMX file in Windows notepad, and then upload the VMX file back to the host, overwriting the original.
At the ESXi console, or remoely via SSH, edit the VMX file using vi.
Use WinSCP, connect to the VMware vSphere (ESXi) server and edit the file directly.

I'm going to demonstrate Option 3 in this tutorial. It's quicker.

Download WinSCP from here - http://winscp.net/eng/index.php and start WinSCP. Enter the

hostname, IP Address or fully qualified domain name (fqdn)
username
password

and Click Login to login and connect to your VMware vSphere (ESXi) host.

Select the virtual machine machine datastore and folder. In this tutorial, the virtual machine is stored on datastore /vmfs/volumes/nfs_datastore8_dcs_san2a

Right Click the vmx file in the right hand pane. In this tutorial the file is called fs01.vmx and click Edit:

Notepad will launch, add the following lines to the VMX file

vhv.enable = "TRUE"
hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = "FALSE"

Open in new window

2014-12-10-14-41-08--vmfs-volumes-2868ea

Save the file, and exit WinSCP. Browse to the location of the virtual machine folder on the datastore, and register the VMX file with the Inventory.

Right Click the VMX File > Add to Inventory

2014-12-10-14-45-00-vcenter.net.dcs.hull

TOP TIP: If the files icon appears like a "blank notepad" -- examples of this are the files beneath the FS01.vmx file -- the VMX file you have updated is not correct or corrupted. This could be something as simple as missing quotation marks!

Power-up and start the virtual machine.

Click through the wizard, and select the Hyper-V role.

Click Add Features.

Follow by Next to continue (it's at this point usually the error message is displayed,

Hyper-V cannot be installed: A hypervisor is already running.

as shown at the start of this article).

Continue with the wizard, and Click Install to complete the installation of Hyper-V. Tick the box to Restart the destination server automatically if required.

The installaton will start.

A Progress bar is displayed as installation progresses

A Progress bar is displayed as installation progresses.

The server will restart to add the Hyper-V role and features.

Click the Hyper-V Manager icon on the start menu.

The Hyper-V Manager will show the Inventory. You are now ready to create virtual machines.

Congratulations you have successfully ENABLED and RUN Microsoft Hyper-V in a VMware vSphere Virtual Machine.

How to Run Hyper-V in vSphere 5.1

Hyper-V cannot be installed

If you are running Hyper-V on a physical server (with no virtualization hypervisor in between) then either your CPU really is not compatible or you need to enable Intel-VT or AMD-V in your server’s BIOS.

However, if you are trying to run Hyper-V in a virtual machine (and your physical server has Intel-VT / AMD-V enabled) and you are getting this message in a VMware product then you need to make the tweaks below.

Step 1

If you are using vSphere 5 or greater then you need to modify the vmware config file on the ESXi host that will run the Hyper-V virtual machine. To edit this file, ssh to the server and vi /etc/config/vmware. Add the line vhv.allow = “TRUE” to the file and save it with “wq”.

Step 2

Next, power off the Hyper-V VM and remove it from inventory. Browse the datastore that the VM is stored on and download the VMX configuration file to your local computer. Use Wordpad, or a similar text editor, to edit the VMX configuration file that you downloaded.

Change the guestos line to read:

guestOS = “winhyperv”

Save the file and upload it back to the datastore using the datastore browser.

Right-click on the virtual machine’s VMX configuration and use “Add to Inventory” to add the VM back to the ESXi host that it was on (where you added the vhv.allow line).

Step 3

Finally, upgrade the virtual machine hardware to hardware version 9 by right-clicking on the VM and clicking Upgrade Virtual Hardware.

Now, power on the virtual machine and you shouldn’t have any trouble adding the Hyper-V role, as you see below.

With this configuration, you’ll also be able to run 64-bit nested virtual machines inside this virtualized Hyper-V host. In the example below, you can see Windows Server 2012 running inside Windows 2008 R2 as a Hyper-V VM, which is running inside vSphere 5.1 as a virtual machine (that’s a VM in a VM, all running inside vSphere).

Cloning a VM without vCenter :-

In this example .

vSphere client connection

First connect to the VSphere using the vSphere client and power off the source VM.

vSphere client User Interface

Select the Configuration tab and Storage settings on the left menu. The Datastores list will come up on the right pane.

vSphere Datastores

Right click on the datastore of the source VM and select Browse.

Datastore

Right click on the root folder on the left tree and create a new folder. e.g Application

Copying the files

Select the source folder of the VM to be cloned (2008R2 Machine in this example) and select the configuration file (.vmx) and the virtual disk file (.vmdk). Right click and copy them to clipboard. Now select the destination folder and paste the two files. Finally, right click the copied .vmx file and select Add to Inventory.

Add to Inventory wizard

Enter the name of the cloned VM and finish the wizard. Now the VM has been created to the vSphere hypervisor.

In case of using a VM as a template you should make sure that the template is unique everytime. So you must use sysprep utility to generalize the VM. In case of windows 2008R2 sysprep is included in the windows installation, under the folder c:\windows\System32\sysprep. This utility exists for other Windows versions as well.