Getting Hyper-V up and running on Windows 8.1 - SharePoint Tutorial

- Getting Hyper-V up and running on your Windows 8.1 host is actually not difficult. But there's a couple things I found that are very helpful that I like to do before I actually activate that, in order to keep track of everything and allow me to create my Hyper-V SharePoint environment with the most accurate information possible. So there's some information I wanna keep track of because it's gonna directly impact the decisions I make as I allocate resources to my virtual machines that I need to know about that I have available for my host machine. So I wanna know how many processor cores I have, how much memory I have, and how much storage I have available on my host machine. And what I like to do is, I actually like to create a file where I'll be keeping these types of information together, in a folder on the desktop, and I'll be referring back to that as I go throughout creating my environment. Now, this serves two purposes. Number one, I have the information easily accessible for me as I'm going through the process. And number two, I actually will refer to these notes the next time I'm creating an environment that might be similar, and I'll have maybe some information that will be helpful as I go through the next time I create the environment. So to do that, I'm gonna go to my desktop, right-click, and create a new folder where I'm gonna keep all this stuff. I'm gonna call this folder "InstallationNotes." I'm gonna go into that folder, right-click, and say New, Text Document. I'm gonna call this "InstallationNotes." Gonna go into that, and I'm gonna create a section for each of the pieces of information I'm starting to collect. So I'm gonna say, Processor, Memory, and Storage. And then I'm gonna collect this information as it relates to the host, and I'm gonna put that information in each one of these. It might even be helpful to start to say Host here because I'm gonna be creating sections for each of the virtual machines I create, as well. I'm gonna hit File and Save, and make sure to save this. First I'm gonna find out how many cores I have in my processors. I'm gonna hit the Windows key, I'm gonna type in "computer," I'm gonna right-click and I'm gonna say Manage. I'm going to expand Device Manager by clicking on it, and come over here to Processors and expand that little arrow right there. And I'm just gonna count the cores. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. I have eight cores. So I'm gonna enter that here under Processor. I have eight cores. I wanna find out how much memory I have. So I'm gonna go ahead and type "computer" again, right-click This PC and say Properties. On the Properties screen, I can see that I have 32 gigabytes of installed memory. That's awesome. So I'm gonna add that in here under Memory, 32GB. Now, in Storage, I'm gonna type in "computer," and I'm gonna click This PC. And then I see that the C drive, which is where I'm gonna be keeping the files, has 769 gigabytes free of 931. So I'm gonna go ahead and enter an approximate value this time. I'm gonna say 700 GB. Now that I have this information, as I'm planning out and creating my virtual machines, this will directly affect how much actual resources from the host I can apply to each of the virtual machines. So I'm gonna save this file, and then I'm gonna get back over here and take a look at what I have left to do. The last thing I'm gonna do is, enable Hyper-V. Now, Microsoft has been kind enough to provide us with a very handy step-by-step process on their website. You say, "To enable Hyper-V on Windows 8.1," go to Programs, Programs and Features, Turn Windows Features on or off, select Hyper-V, click OK and click Close. So that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go back to the desktop, I'm gonna type "control Panel," I'm gonna click Programs, I'm going to stay, Turn Windows features on or off, and then I'm gonna find Hyper-V and I'm gonna check it. If I expand that, you'll see that it automatically checked all the sub check boxes. So that's great. I'm gonna click OK. It's gonna go through the process of enabling the Hyper-V role on this Windows 8.1 machine. When it's done, I'll come back to this screen and we'll see what happens. All right. We're all done. And you can see that it's prompting me to restart. That took about a minute and a half on this machine. Your mileage may vary, but it shouldn't take really that long, certainly not as long as some of the things we'll be doing in this course. I'm gonna go ahead and click Restart now. And when I'm done, we'll come back and finish up. So I've turned on Hyper-V and I'm ready to validate my install. The machine has just rebooted and I'm gonna go to my desktop and type in "hyper," and right away, I can see a Hyper-V Manager link or icon appearing here. I'm gonna right-click that and say Pin to Taskbar. Then I'll go ahead and open it. There's the name on my machine host, and the Hyper-V manager opens quite nicely. I'll mouse down here and yes, there's a shortcut on my taskbar. So that is a fantastic sign. I'm very happy to see that. So we've activated Hyper-V and we've taken careful inventory of the hardware resources available on the host, which are gonna allow us to make good decisions when partitioning resources to the individual virtual machines in our SharePoint environment.