Hyper-V isn’t installed by default so in order to user it you’ll need to enable it from the available Windows features. A quick way there is to hit Win-X and then select Programs and Features. At this point it should be a little more familiar; Turn Windows features on or off is what we are looking for next.
Select the Hyper-V options and then OK and let it run through the installation, a reboot will probably be required.
Once everything is installed and your machine is rebooted, look for the Hyper-V Manager on your start screen. Before you get started creating a new machine, you might want to double check the Hyper-V Settings and make sure the Virtual Hard Disks and Virtual Machines paths are pointing to the location you want (this can also be changed when you create a new VM).
In order to get your VM connected to the internet later, you’ll need to go into the Virtual Switch Manager.
Create a new External Virtual Switch.
Give it a name and map it to the network adapter you wish to use.
It should also be noted that I had VMWare Workstation installed and when I initially tried to configure the external switch I ran into a problem where only one virtual network could be assigned to a given physical network adapter. The error I received:
Setup Switch Failed
Cannot bind to ‘your network adapter’ because it is already bound to another virtual network.
So if you have or only plan on using 1 network adapter on your machine you may have to uninstall any other virtualization software in order to get your VM connected to the internet. Undoubtedly someone has a workaround someplace but for me uninstalling was the easiest solution.
From there we can go ahead and create a new Virtual Machine.
Give it a name and change the storage location if you need to.
Next assign the amount of memory available to the VM. By default Hyper-V keeps a percentage of your system memory available to the host OS. The machine I am running this on has 4GB of memory so the wizard is only allowing me to give just under 2GB (1964MB) to the VM.
Chose the external switch you previous created.
Choose your hard disk settings… if you use a dynamically expanding disk, make sure you assign it way more space then you will ever need. The size on your host machine will only be the actual sized used by the OS and applications but in the VM, the drive will show up with space matching what is configured here. I haven’t personally tried expanding a disk with Hyper-V, but based on experiences with other virtualization software, it is way easier just to give the dynamic disk a huge amount now than to worry about trying to make it bigger later.
Last thing is to chose to install the OS later, via an .ISO or physical media.
Almost there…
After you hit finish before starting the VM to begin the OS to install, assign processors to the VM as the wizard doesn’t appear to give the option.
From here you can go ahead and hit Start and begin installing your OS for your CRM installation.
