We’ve been walking you through Virtualization Mode’s “Add resource” wizard step-by-step, first with a adventurous overview, then a no-nonsense networking walkthrough, followed by a shagadelic storage summary. We’re almost finished!
But our wizard would not be complete without the final member of our trio—Compute. Configuring Compute when onboarding Hyper-V (compute) systems to Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode (vMode) through the Add resource wizard is as simple as counting to four.
Compute configuration
On the Compute page, you’re configuring Hyper-V settings for your system. Doing this through vMode’s Add Resource wizard is especially beneficial when you’re adding multiple machines. Manually configuring all these settings yourself, on every machine you want to manage, is a recipe for inconsistency. Instead of worrying about whether a script ran correctly or triple-checking that you set the proper values on all machines, vMode takes care of that for you.
1: Removing non-essential features
If you’ve ever set up a Windows Server, you’re probably familiar with the Get-WindowsFeature PowerShell command. Microsoft provides a plethora of roles, role services, and features for configuring a server exactly the way you need it to run for your business needs.
And that’s awesome! But often, many of these features will go unused on your systems. Even without use, these features will still need to be patched and serviced, creating increased operational overhead. When you select this checkbox, vMode will go ahead and remove all features not required for running compute workloads and those not already installed on the system already.
Removing Windows Features that aren’t essential keeps the host OS leaner and reduces the system’s attack surface. It also lowers patching and servicing overhead over time, helping improve uptime and reduce operational cost.
2: Enable Enhanced Session Mode
Hyper-V Enhanced Session Mode lets you connect to a Windows VM through Virtual Machine Connection (VMConnect) using Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), which enables a richer console experience than basic mode. Enabling it makes the VM window resizable and high-DPI aware and allows convenient host-to-VM integration—like shared clipboard, file copy/paste, and device redirection—so day-to-day admin tasks are faster and less error-prone.
This is another setting where manual configuration can cost you precious time. You have to configure this setting for both the system and the user. Forget to do one and you’ll spend hours trying to figure out where you went wrong (and might feel quite silly when you figure it out). Select this checkbox and we’ll just set these settings for you, possibly saving hours of frustrating debugging time.
3: Configure concurrent migrations
Enabling concurrent Live Migrations (often called “simultaneous live migrations”) lets Hyper-V move more than one running VM at a time, which is valuable when you need to drain a host quickly for patching, hardware maintenance, or cluster rebalancing. In well-provisioned environments, increasing concurrency can reduce the total time it takes to complete a batch of migrations and get hosts back into service—while still giving you a knob to tune so migration traffic doesn’t overwhelm CPU, storage, or network bandwidth.
In vMode, you can select 1, 2, 4, or no concurrent migrations. This is another case where we’re ensuring consistency in your setup by configuring multiple settings for you at once, saving you the pain of manual configuration.
4: Setting your default virtual machine path
The last setting we ask you to configure is your default virtual machine path. Historically, Hyper-V has set two different paths for your virtual machines and virtual hard disks—you can see this If you navigate into the tool today.
Having a different path for every VHD can make it challenging to find what you’re looking for. In vMode, we ask you for one path that is accessible for all machines you added in the beginning of the wizard, and we’ll use this same path for all machines. Even if the path doesn’t exist yet, we’ll create it for you as long as the drive letter exists and the path is valid. Your VHDs will appear in nested folders under this directory.
Your options for this are dependent on what you told us about on the “Storage” screen. If you added storage, it will appear in the dropdown menu. If you elected to use storage already provisioned for a cluster, the dropdown may be greyed out—this path should default to a location like %SystemDrive%\Virtual Machines or… Additionally, if you elected to use storage already provisioned for the system, and you added one or multiple standalone hosts on the “Getting started” screen, the dropdown menu will contain all local drives that appear on all the standalone systems. If one system doesn’t have a particular drive, it will not show up in the menu.
What happens next
After proving we can count and hit submit, vMode will configure Hyper-V settings on all systems based on your selections. We’ll install the following features on all Compute systems:
- Hyper-V
- Network ATC
- Data Center Bridging (required for Network ATC)
- Failover Clustering (required for Network ATC and used for HA Hyper-V)
- AD RSAT PowerShell tools (required for storing VMs on file shares)
- Multipath-IO (only installed if SAN storage was configured)
And uninstall everything else (while leaving features already installed outside of this wizard alone).
This song and dance will require a reboot, and we’ll do that for you. When dealing with existing clusters already running workloads, it can get a bit complicated. vMode will perform node drain and ensure seamless reboot of your cluster nodes.
Summary
On the Compute screen, vMode reduces the time you have to spend fiddling with Hyper-V settings by performing smart configurations for you, getting you up and running faster. The Add Resource wizard is designed to make your system onboarding experience as easy as possible, simplifying your networking, storage, and compute configuration. Public Preview 2 is dropping with the features we’ve discussed here and more very soon. Give vMode a try and leave us feedback at aka.ms/wacfeedback!
Thanks for reading,
Davanna White
Microsoft