Copying Files into a Hyper-V VM with Vagrant

Brass Contributor

Mar 22, 2019

First published on TECHNET on Jul 18, 2017

A couple of weeks ago, I published a https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/virtualization/2017/07/06/vagrant-and-hyper-v-tips-and-tricks/ with tips and tricks for getting started with Vagrant on Hyper-V. My fifth tip was to "Enable Nifty Hyper-V Features," where I briefly mentioned stuff like differencing disks and virtualization extensions.

While those are useful, I realized later that I should have added one more feature to my list of examples: the "guest_service_interface" field in "vm_integration_services." It's hard to know what that means just from the name, so I usually call it the "the thing that lets me copy files into a VM."

Disclaimer: this is not a replacement for https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/synced-folders/ . Those are super convienent, and should really be your default solution for sharing files. This method is more useful in one-off situations.

Enabling Copy-VMFile

Enabling this functionality requires a simple change to your Vagrantfile. You need to set "guest_service_interface" to true within "vm_integration_services" configuration hash. Here's what my Vagrantfile looks like for CentOS 7:

# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
config.vm.box = "centos/7"
config.vm.provider "hyperv"
config.vm.network "public_network"
config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant", disabled: true
config.vm.provider "hyperv" do |h|
h.enable_virtualization_extensions = true
h.differencing_disk = true
h.vm_integration_services = {
guest_service_interface: true #<---------- this line enables Copy-VMFile
}
end
end

You can check that it's enabled by running


    Get-VMIntegrationService

in PowerShell on the host machine:


    PS C:\vagrant_selfhost\centos>  Get-VMIntegrationService -VMName "centos-7-1-1.x86_64"
    

    

    VMName              Name                    Enabled PrimaryStatusDescription SecondaryStatusDescription
    

    ------              ----                    ------- ------------------------ --------------------------
    

    centos-7-1-1.x86_64 Guest Service Interface True    OK
    

    centos-7-1-1.x86_64 Heartbeat               True    OK
    

    centos-7-1-1.x86_64 Key-Value Pair Exchange True    OK                       The protocol version of...
    

    centos-7-1-1.x86_64 Shutdown                True    OK
    

    centos-7-1-1.x86_64 Time Synchronization    True    OK                       The protocol version of...
    

    centos-7-1-1.x86_64 VSS                     True    OK                       The protocol version of...

Note : not all integration services work on all guest operating systems. For example, this functionality will not work on the "Precise" Ubuntu image that's used in Vagrant's "Getting Started" guide. The full compatibility list various Windows and Linux distrobutions can be found https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/virtualization/hyper-v/supported-linux-and-freebsd-virtual-machines-for-hyper-v-on-windows . Just click on your chosen distrobution and check for "File copy from host to guest."

Using Copy-VMFile

Once you've got a VM set up correctly, copying files to and from arbitrary locations is as simple as running


    Copy-VMFile

in PowerShell.

Here's a sample test I used to verify it was working on my CentOS VM:


    Copy-VMFile -Name 'centos-7-1-1.x86_64' -SourcePath '.\Foo.txt' -DestinationPath '/tmp' -FileSource Host

Full details can found in the https://technet.microsoft.com/itpro/powershell/windows/hyper-v/copy-vmfile . Unfortunately, you can't yet use it to copy files from your VM to your host. If you're running a Windows Guest, you can use


    Copy-Item

with PowerShell Direct to make that work; see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyper-v-on-windows/user-guide/powershell-direct#copy-files-with-new-pssession-and-copy-item for more details.

How Does It Work?

The way this works is by running Hyper-V integration services within the guest operating system. Full details can be found in the https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyper-v-on-windows/reference/integration-services . The short version is that integration services are Windows Services (on Windows) or Daemons (on Linux) that allow the guest operating system to communicate with the host. In this particular instance, the integration service allows us to copy files to the VM over the VM Bus (no network required!).