Create virtual machines - Windows Server Tutorial

- [Instructor] In the old days of computer networking, we had a bunch of computers. These were actual, physical computers that would be connected and therefore networked together. Well, in the world of virtualization, we have something called a virtual machine, which is a virtual representation of a physical computer. So, to demonstrate how to create one of these virtual machines, we're here in the Hyper-V Manager, and we have our Hyper-V server HOST-1. And what I'm going to do is, I'm going to right-click and I'm going to hover the mouse over the word New, and then select Virtual Machine. And this takes me into the New Virtual Machine Wizard. The first screen we have is your typical Before You Begin, just kind of a summary of what you're about to do, so I'll click Next. Now, I have to give this server a name, so I'm just going to call it Demo VM. And then, you have the ability to pick a location, but you'll notice that there is a default location that was established as part of our Hyper-V settings. If we don't want it in the default location, we just check the box saying to store it somewhere else, and then go ahead and browse to wherever we want to put it. In this case, I am going to take the default and click Next. Now, we have to choose whether we want this to be a Generation 1 or Generation 2 virtual machine. And I'm going to tell you, the short answer is, in today's world, Generation 2. Generation 1 is basically still there for backward compatibility. If you need to have an old 32-bit guest operating system or you have some old hardware, then you might need to do Gen 1, but otherwise, you really want to go ahead and go with Gen 2 to take advantage of the latest and greatest technology that we have in Hyper-V. So, I'm going to click Next. Now, I get to choose how much memory we're going to allocate to this virtual machine. It's defaulting to one gig. I'm going to show you just that you can change it, I'm going to change it to two gig, right, so 2,048 megabytes. And then, I could choose if I want to use Dynamic Memory or not. If I choose to use Dynamic Memory, what that would mean is that the two gig of memory is what it will need to launch the virtual machine, but as the machine needs more or less memory, it will take more or less memory from the host. What I will say is, this is a great way to get more virtual machines onto a single host, but there is a performance hit. So, if you know that you have enough memory on your host to support all the memory, then don't use Dynamic Memory, and that's my preferred scenario, so I'm going to not use it here. I'm going to click Next. Now, I need to choose what virtual switch I want to connect to. Okay, and you see here, I have my external, my private, and my internal that we created in the Virtual Switch video. I'm going to go ahead and just choose the External - Internet Access connection so that I do have connectivity with the outside world and the internet. I'll click Next. Now, I need to choose what I want to do as far as a hard disk on this virtual machine. So, the default is to just go ahead and create one. It creates it with a name that matches the name of the virtual machine and it puts it in the default location that was established through our Hyper-V settings. The default size is 127 gigabytes. You can change any of that that you want. I'm going to go ahead and keep all of the defaults here. I can also tell you that if you already have an existing virtual hard disk, you could go ahead and connect to it, or you could choose to say, "I don't even want to "have a hard disk on this computer." It's almost like you're buying a computer without a hard disk in it and you're going to put it in later. Alright, but for now, we're going to go ahead and just create the defaults, and click Next. And now, I need to choose what I want to do as far as an operating system. What I do 99% of the time is, I say that I want to install an operating system later. I'll actually do the installation later on as part of, just like I would if I bought a computer, and then I would install the operating system later. But, there is an option to go ahead and install from a bootable image file, an ISO file. And then, you also have the ability to install across the network, if you are configured to do so. The reason I choose to install the operating system later is because the bottom two tend to be very finicky and problematic. You have to do things exactly right, or else you end up having a problem. So, I'm going to go ahead and click Next. Here's a summary of everything that we're about to do, and I click Finish. And it moves fairly quickly here, it creates the virtual machine, and sure enough, here it is on my host. Here's our virtual machine, Demo Virtual Machine. And right now, it's sitting in an Off state, and we will see how to turn that on and get it going in a later video.