First published on TechNet on Oct 23, 2017
Hello, my name is Michael Godfrey and I am a Platform's Premier Field Engineer (PFE) at Microsoft. I have been a Fabric Administrator for the past few years and have made it a habit of building quite a few Hyper-V Hosts. I was always looking for a way to ensure my team and I knew the exact way to build a Hyper-V or ESXi host in the same way, consistently. I used many different methods of deploying hosts, including the Bare-Metal Deployment method in System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Yet I was always looking for the next great method of deployments, one that could be used not just for Hypervisors, but for virtual machines and physical machines and in varying different methods of configurations. Recently, I started to learn PowerShell DSC for one of my customers and we came across an issue regarding Hypervisor Host health. We were finding inconsistencies in the way the hosts were built and we wanted a way to streamline the deployment process for our hosts, as well as a way to monitor their compliance. So, naturally I decided to build out a DSC Configuration for a Hyper-V Host. I wanted to share that process, and start with a several part series on deploying a Hyper-V Host via DSC. I want to let the code do the work for me, so that I can scale this solution for future builds. So, I wanted to set some goals in the deployment and will use this series to track my progress:
- Deploy Hyper-V Role and PowerShell Modules for Management
- Deploy Failover Clustering Role and PowerShell Modules for Management
- Ensure Remote Management is enabled and Basic OS Security/Compliance settings are present.
- Set default folder locations for VM and VM Checkpoints
- Ensure SCVMM Agent is installed and Running
- Ensure OMS Agent is installed and Running
- Configure a Highly Available Cluster with Cluster Shared Volumes and Quorum
- Set Software Defined Networking vSwitches, in a HA configuration
In each blog posting, I will address another item in our checklist and by the end, we should have a Highly Available Server 2016 Hyper-V Cluster with a well-defined cluster network and storage solution. This will be fun. To start, let’s begin with the configuration itself. We need to define the configuration name and node definitions. We will be using a single configuration, so we will not need to define node variables, but if we wanted, we could use a technique called Partial Configurations. Here is a great article on that: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/dsc/partialconfigs In our example though, we will be keeping things simple and defining our configuration for one purpose, to deploy a Hyper-V host. 
#BEGIN POWERSHELL SCRIPT
Configuration Hypervisor {
Import-DscResource -ModuleName 'PSDesiredStateConfiguration', 'xRemoteDesktopAdmin', 'xTimezone','xHyper-V', 'xComputerManagement'
Node Hypervisor{
#Windows Features Installations
WindowsFeature Hyper-V {
Ensure = 'Present'
Name = "Hyper-V"
IncludeAllSubFeature = $true
}
WindowsFeature Failover-Clustering {
Ensure = 'Present'
Name ='Failover-Clustering'
}
WindowsFeature Multipath-IO {
Ensure = 'Present'
Name=' Multipath-IO'
IncludeAllSubFeature = $true
}
WindowsFeature RSAT-Shielded-VM-Tools{
Ensure = 'Present'
Name='RSAT-Shielded-VM-Tools'
IncludeAllSubFeature = $true
}
WindowsFeature RSAT-Clustering-Powershell{
Ensure = 'Present'
Name='RSAT-Clustering-Powershell'
IncludeAllSubFeature = $true
}
WindowsFeature Hyper-V-PowerShell{
Ensure = 'Present'
Name='Hyper-V-PowerShell'
IncludeAllSubFeature = $true
}
#Base OS Settings
{
xUAC UAC{
Setting = "NotifyChanges"
}
xTimeZone ServerTime{
TimeZone = "Eastern Standard Time"
}
xRemoteDesktopAdmin RemoteDesktopSettings {
Ensure = 'Present'
UserAuthentication = 'secure'
}
}
#HyperVisor Host Settings {
#VM Folder Directory
File VMs {
Ensure = 'Present'
Type = 'Directory'
DestinationPath = "$($env:SystemDrive)\VMs"
}
#VM Host Switch
xVMSwitch InternalVSwitch {
DependsOn = '[WindowsFeature]Hyper-V'
Name = 'IntvSwitch'
Ensure = 'Present'
Type = 'Internal'
}
}
}
Hypervisor
#END POWERSHELL SCRIPT