Some Things I've Learned about working with Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 R2

This was published as soon as the idea came about, but will undoubtedly have more things added to it in the coming days and weeks.

  • Use descriptive and complete names for your virtual hard drives, or pre-make sub directories for each VM underneath the Virtual Hard Disk folder. Otherwise, things are going to get messy. I find that leaving all the VHDs in one directory bothers me visually, so I made sub directories, but this complicates "moves" later, since you end up manually specificing where you want each component to go, just so you can put the VHD into the subfolder.

  • When "moving" a virtual machine's storage you want to pick the subdirectory immediately below the standard folders (virtual machine, snapshot, smartcaching). It will add the files in the appropriate subdirectory. If you try to add the config file for example into "virtual machine" directly, it will actually end up making another virtual machine folder underneath the original so that you end up with something that looks like
                         c:\Hyper-V\Virtual Machine\Virtual Machine
  • If you specify a limit to the number of "Storage Migrations" on a Hyper-V host, rather than queue up like when you preform a "Live Migration", the move will simply fail. Fortunately, it fails early and with a pretty dialog box that's self explanatory to anyone who should be doing this job.