Building A Hyper-V Test Lab on Windows 8–Part 2 Creating a Reference VHDX

This the second part in a multi-part set of articles. See the first article for the start of the set and to understand better what this is all about – see here: http://www.tfl09.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/building-hyper-v-test-lab-on-windows-8.html.

Base/Parent Disks in Hyper-V
With Hyper-V, you assign one or more virtual disks to a VM. One trick, borrowed from VMware, is the ability to create parent and differencing disks. The parent disk is a normal VHDX drive built out to a certain point. This can be a completed installation, or a partial installation. The differencing disk is then the difference between the base or parent virtual disk and the contents of the combined virtual disk at some later point in time i.e. after installation. Thus if the base disk was the uninstalled image, the differencing disk would only hold the changed made since installation.

 

On my Windows 8 box, the reference disk is 8.2GB while each of the differencing disk are between 2-3 GB.  In all the 4 VMs currently in a configuration I am testing takes up around 23 GB. Were I to create a full separate drive for each VM, I’d need nearer to 40 GB, so the space reduction is useful!

The way I use this in my labs is simple. I create a base disk which contains the uninstalled image of Windows server using the Create-ReferenceVHDX script. Then I use that reference disk in the Create-VM function that actually creates and starts a VM.

Creating a Reference VHDX using PowerShell
Creating the reference VHDX is pretty simple. The Create-ReferenceVHDX.PS1 script file creates a function, Create-ReferenceVHDX, then at the bottom invokes that function to actually create a reference VHDX. In my testing, it takes around 8 minutes to create the reference disk, most of which is taken up by DISM.EXE applying the relevant image to the base disk.

The creation process is as follows:

1. First, we load the DISM module.
2. Next we mount the ISO image used as the basis for the VHDX into the host machine (I.e. the Hyper-V host). The name of the VHDX is passed as a parameter to Create-ReferenceVHDX. We have to get the volume object to then get the drive letter where the IOS is mounted.
3. We read the install.wim from the appropriate spot on the DVD and get the user to specify which installation contained in the WIM is to be used as the basis for the base disk. I use Out-GridVIew for this, but you could I suppose just take whatever the last option is (or the first) as needed.
4. The function then creates a new VHDX file to hold this image, which is then initialised. Sometimes this throws up a dialog box but that can be safely ignored.
5. DISM.exe then runs which applies the chosen install image onto the VHDX. This is quite a long process and can take 10 minutes.
6. Once the image is laid down, BDCBoot ensures the disk can be booted from.
7. Finally, the VHDX is dismounted form the local host and the function finished.

See the script for the details of how these steps are carried out!

Using the Create-ReferenceVHDX Function
Using the reference VHDX is pretty simple – three lines in all:

$Iso          = …    # Path to Server 2012 DVD    
$Refvhdxpath  = …    # Path to where the reference VDHX is to go
Create-ReferenceVHDX -Iso $iso -RefVHDXPath $RefVHDXPath  -Verbose

Using the Reference VHDX
Once the reference VHDX is created, you can use it as the basis for creating differencing disks you can then insert into VMs. See Part 3 of this tutorial to see how to do that.

Getting the scripts
The scripts are all published to a zip file: http://www.reskit.net/powershell/vmbuild.zip. Use carefully and enjoy!

Technorati Tags: PowerShell,Deployment scripts