If you have gone the Hyper-V route in any capacity, you’ve likely become familiar with the Hyper-V Manager administrative console. This is the central spot to do administrative tasks on virtual machines in Hyper-V. This includes basic points such as powering on a virtual machine, taking a snapshot of the virtual machine, and opening its console, as well as creating virtual machines.

While you may administer Hyper-V on the actual server running Windows Server 2012 with the Hyper-V role, you also can remotely run Hyper-V administrator on a Windows Server 2012 system (you also can do this on Windows 8 as well). The important thing to consider is to not add the Hyper-V role to all Windows Server 2012 systems, but instead add only the Hyper-V Manager tool to the systems which you want to administer Hyper-V. Hyper-V as a server is added via a role. To administer it, we’ll need the feature. This feature is located in the Remote Server Administration Tools section shown in Figure A below.
Figure A

Adding the Hyper-V administrative components.

You can also add this role via PowerShell. These few lines will query to see what Hyper-V administrative components (the features) are added and then install the administration tool and the PowerShell extension for Hyper-V. The lines are below:

Get-WindowsFeature Hyper-V*

Install-WindowsFeature Hyper-V-Tools


Install-WindowsFeature Hyper-V-PowerSHell

Get-WindowsFeature Hyper-V*

Running these simple lines in a PowerShell screen will query the Windows Server to see which (if any) of the Hyper-V administrative components (the features) are installed with an ‘X’ in the box and then install them. Lastly, the script will query again what components are installed and, for default installations of Window Server 2012, you will see that there is now an ‘X’ in the box for the Hyper-V GUI (Hyper-V Manager) and the PowerShell extension. This script executing is shown in Figure B below:

Figure B

The same task can be done via PowerShell as well. Click to enlarge.

Adding Hyper-V Manager to your favorite administrative server will be a good practice point. You don’t want to log onto a server system if you don’t need to. Further, this will be the best way to administer the hosts running Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V in a core installation (no server GUI) or the standalone Hyper-V Server 2012 operating system.

Do you administer Hyper-V remotely? If so, how? Share your comments below.