This tip came to me from a question someone posed internally that we had to find an answer for by hunting someone down .

This property isn’t exposed in Server Managers’ UI, so you can set it by calling this powershell command:

Set-RDVirtualDesktopCollectionConfiguration –CollectionName <farm> –CustomRdpProperty “redirectcomports:i:1”

Now the Remote Desktop Client will redirect its COM1 port to the Server.  Why is this needed?  Think Serially connected devices such as say, Smart Card readers, for instance.

Hope this helps!

The Dude

Optimizing and Troubleshooting Hyper-V Networking - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0790145383068.do

Optimizing and Troubleshooting Hyper-V Storage - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0790145382924.do

Check them out, no, seriously, check them out!

Modifying a Virtual Machine

This is a multi-part series that starts here:  http://blogs.technet.com/b/jeff_stokes/archive/2013/04/15/building-up-a-learning-lab-based-on-windows-8-and-hyper-v.aspx

In the previous blog post we created a virtual machine named “Great Lyrics”.  We’re going to modify that virtual machine as the default settings are fairly low power and the Dude is all about performance.  So in your virtual machine management console, right click your new shiny virtual machine and select “settings”.

This may be intimidating at first, lots of options, but I think you’ll find most of them are fine with the default values and you’ll want to modify them.  The first one you want to modify is “Processor” so click that bad boy now and behold the screen you are presented with:

Neato tito!  We’ve got a screen.  Lets increase our cores available to the VM to 2 instead of 1.  There are a lot of arguments for and against doing this involving complicated concepts such as CPU scheduling of the physical core and hyper-visor that you would want to take into consideration on a production system so as to not over-over-subscribe the host.  But in a lab I’m more concerned with the VM not taking forever to install and boot and do the work I tell it to do so bump it up please.  You’ll thank me later.  Click “Apply” when you are done.

Now go down to your “DCD Drive” under “IDE Controller 1” and lets connect an ISO for Windows Server 2012 to the VM so we can begin installing Windows Server 2012 on it!

Apply and OK until you are done with the settings for your DC.

For the next steps click here:  http://blogs.technet.com/b/jeff_stokes/archive/2013/04/18/building-up-a-learning-lab-based-on-windows-8-and-hyper-v-part-iv.aspx

Installing your Virtual Machine Windows Server 2012 Virtual Machine

This is a multi-part series that starts here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/jeff_stokes/archive/2013/04/15/building-up-a-learning-lab-based-on-windows-8-and-hyper-v.aspx

So in the previous post we modified our virtual machine, now we’re going to start it up and run through the installation process.  So double-click that bad boy in the hyper-v manager and lets roll!

As you can see, the machine is turned off.  So lets fire it up and turn it on.  Click the green button!

If you’ve never stood up a Windows Server 2012 before, welcome!  If you have, well, welcome?!

Click next!

Now click “Install now”.

Put in your product key.  (this blog is assuming an audience of MDN/TechNet subscribers with a license for a lab).  Note if your license file is in your clipboard, you cannot paste it into this field.  The reason for this is the WinPE session currently running is not Hyper-Visor enlightened.  So to put your clipboard into the VM click at the top of the window and select “Clipboard” and select “Type clipboard text”.

Now that the licensing is out of the way, what edition and whatnot does your key provide you?  Core or Non-Core install?  Select on the screen and click next.  For the novice/intermediate user I recommend you stand up a non-core host (Server with a GUI).

Next we have the EULA / Licensing screen.  Provided you accept, check the box and hit next.

And here we have the installation type screen.  Note we want the Custom Option, default is “upgrade”..

Do take note here.  Although in Windows Explorer, the hard drive (vhdx file) for this VM is only 4 MB, here it detects as 127 GB.

Click Next here as we want Windows Server 2012 to format the whole volume.  Now let Windows Server 2012 install as below.  Do note that the Hyper-V additions (Integration Components/Enlightenments/etc.) come native with Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8.

While this runs on your host, pat yourself on the back, you’ve just started a Windows Server 2012 install on your Windows 8 machine.  Yay!

Next, how to configure the Domain Controller!

Creating a Virtual Machine

This is a multi-part series that starts here:  http://blogs.technet.com/b/jeff_stokes/archive/2013/04/15/building-up-a-learning-lab-based-on-windows-8-and-hyper-v.aspx

So right click your virtual machine host in the Hyper-V Manager console and select “New/Virtual Machine”.  You should be rewarded with a screen like this:

So lets make a domain controller!  The dude is a fan of old school rap so I’ll give it a fun name as I walk you through the wizard.  By the way this doesn’t HAVE to be the machine name, it can be a friendly name as you see in a moment…

Note:  Some will say you need to store the VM in a different location, etc, etc.  This is a lab, don’t run production here, etc.

:

In this screen, you can specify the memory available to the VM.  The default is 512 (obviously) but this isn’t really enough for a healthy experience at startup, so I generally set this to 2048 MB of RAM and then check the box for dynamic memory so if a system is not using the memory it frees it up, etc.  Granted, it all depends on how much memory you have in your VM host.

Next we connect (or provide) the virtual network we created in the switch manager to the virtual machine we are creating by using the drop down to select our network we created in the previous blog post.  In retrospect I should have instructed you to name it something other than “New Virtual Switch”…

Hitting next on that window we proceed to the creation or attachment of a virtual disk to the virtual machine.

As you can see, the name of the vhdx file is set to the name of the virtual machine, in this instance, “Great Lyrics”.  “Great Lyrics” is getting a 127 GB vdhx by default because that’s well, the default.  Its also a dynamically expanding vhdx.  In production, you’d generally want to specify static sized vhdx files but for a lab, dynamic is quite fine and shouldn’t incur a performance penalty.  Do note if you have a machine, say, with more than one hard drive attached, or even removable storage such as a USB 3 drive, that is certainly an option for storage placement as well.  You may of course attach to an existing static sized vhdx here, as well as skip the step completely by selecting the bottom radio button.  In this example I’ll go with the defaults.  “Great Lyrics” is going to be a domain controller running Windows Server 2012 for my lab environment and I don’t anticipate the disk needing to be much larger than 20-30 GB anyway, and since this is dynamic, it only consumes the size of the data in the disk, not the whole 127 GB, yay!

On the next screen of the wizard we have a few options as you can see to install an operating system.

We may do the default, which is to skip the step entirely, pick a DVD drive or ISO image for installation (which won’t happen exactly now anyway) or use a virtual floppy disk.  As well, if I were not on an airplane flying over the Atlantic ocean with no wifi onboard, we’d have the option to do a network based install using the virtual network (assuming it were bound to a physical network card and was an ‘external’ virtual switch.

Anyway for this page I select “next”, as we are going to make some modifications to the virtual machine after creating it, prior to OS install.  After that we get the window below that shows us what we’ve selected and a finish button.  Congratulations!

Next step is to modify the virtual machine “Great Lyrics” for production use.

*Q:  Why did you pick “Great Lyrics” for a name, makes no sense?  A:  Great Lyrics, more than anything else (IMO) make a great rap song.  Lyrics in the 80s and early 90s in particular are really (if you think about it) urban poetry with music.  Not to down play the creation of phat beats, we’ll get to that with other machine names, promise.

Next blog post will be on modifying the virtual machine to make it ‘demo ready’ in the Dudes eyes.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/jeff_stokes/archive/2013/04/18/building-up-a-learning-lab-based-on-windows-8-and-hyper-v-part-iii.aspx