Managing Hyper-V

@dbeato said in Managing Hyper-V:

@scottalanmiller YEah, it is free. I will start the testing.

In my crude testing it appears that one can start, stop, pause, reset a VM.
One cannot modify its settings, access the console, nor create/destroy.

It does provide some basic guest details such as cpu, memory, network configuration, replication status, etc.

It is a little slower than I'd like.

Limited, but not completely useless.

dbeato

@scottalanmiller Another thing that can be done is PowerShell Web Access
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831611(v=ws.11).aspx
Found about that today

R3dPand4

Late to the party....but just my two cents...haven't found a situation in which I'd want to join my hosts to a domain. The only consideration I could see here is if you're configuring failover clustering, but I'm fairly certain that applies to pre-2016. Generally when we're talking about Hyper-V Hosts and management pc's I have a dedicated workstation/laptop that's off domain and then create a mirrored Administrator account on the Hyper-V Hosts that's also off domain.

JaredBusch

@r3dpand4 said in Managing Hyper-V:

Late to the party....but just my two cents...haven't found a situation in which I'd want to join my hosts to a domain. The only consideration I could see here is if you're configuring failover clustering, but I'm fairly certain that applies to pre-2016. Generally when we're talking about Hyper-V Hosts and management pc's I have a dedicated workstation/laptop that's off domain and then create a mirrored Administrator account on the Hyper-V Hosts that's also off domain.

Why go through all this work if you have a domain already? Just join it and be done.

It certainly does not have to be, but if you have a domain already it also certainly does not hurt.

R3dPand4

@jaredbusch Because I have never needed the very thing supporting my infrastructure to be dependent on one of the vms inside of it. Also I'm not sure why you're saying this like it's a lot of work, it's literally no more or less work than creating a user account for management in AD and joining members to a domain. I wasn't arguing that it would hurt anything, it's just personal preference in all honesty, wasn't trying to be confrontational I just like having my management separated from the rest of the environment. I can imagine the headache that would come from a Host dropping Trust.

Dashrender

@r3dpand4 said in Managing Hyper-V:

@jaredbusch Because I have never needed the very thing supporting my infrastructure to be dependent on one of the vms inside of it. Also I'm not sure why you're saying this like it's a lot of work, it's literally no more or less work than creating a user account for management in AD and joining members to a domain. I wasn't arguing that it would hurt anything, it's just personal preference in all honesty, wasn't trying to be confrontational I just like having my management separated from the rest of the environment. I can imagine the headache that would come from a Host dropping Trust.

I thought this whole thread was about how much of a PITA non domain joined Hyper-V and control stations where to use? That would be the reason to join everything to a domain.

Have you some way that makes passing authentication from your non domain joined PC to the non domain joined Hyper-V work easily? Though many would probably argue that you having to maintain yet another PC that is soley for this use, it's pretty expensive.

R3dPand4

@dashrender Again I am late to the party so I haven't read all 270+ posts, but just from my own experience it's nowhere near as difficult as people make it out to be. As long as you're launching Hyper-V manager on the management PC with a mirrored Administrator credential from the Host then you're good to go. I generally have one mirrored Administrator account for my hosts, if you have multiple domains across different Hosts then you're able to manage them still from one PC and one account. Maintaining a PC is neither expensive nor difficult, Win10 comes with almost all of the Management Tools you would ever need.

Dashrender

The following might read as an attack, or that I'm angry - I am neither, and instead am simply trying to understand how you're controlling your environment.

@r3dpand4 said in Managing Hyper-V:

@dashrender Again I am late to the party so I haven't read all 270+ posts, but just from my own experience it's nowhere near as difficult as people make it out to be. As long as you're launching Hyper-V manager on the management PC with a mirrored Administrator credential from the Host then you're good to go.

Sure, so this means logging out of the domain and logging into the PC as a local user with the same username/password as you have setup on the Hyper-V host - what a PITA.

I generally have one mirrored Administrator account for my hosts,

OK sure, see above

if you have multiple domains across different Hosts then you're able to manage them still from one PC and one account.

Why do you have multiple domains, and how would you manage them all from a single PC if the domains aren't trusted, etc?

Maintaining a PC is neither expensive nor difficult, Win10 comes with almost all of the Management Tools you would ever need.

Of course, managing a single machine for an admin shouldn't be hard. But I'm clearly not understanding how you are accomplishing this in any type of easy manner.

For example, I have a Windows 10 Pro machine joined to my domain, it manages my Domain easily through the use RSAT and the right click run as admin ability I use for those tools.

But I can't easily manage a non domain joined Hyper-V host because my PC user account is a domain account, and Hyper-V isn't on the domain. I suppose I could build an account on the Hyper-V host that has the same creds as my user account on my PC, but damn, each time I change my password on my domain account (granted not frequent) I'd have to change it on the Hyper-V host.

Plus, if my PC is compromised, the now compromised PC has unfettered access to the Hyper-V host - that's not good.

JaredBusch

@r3dpand4 said in Managing Hyper-V:

@jaredbusch Because I have never needed the very thing supporting my infrastructure to be dependent on one of the vms inside of it.

Joining it to the domain does not mean that a local login no longer exists. Why would you think that it requires the guest VM with AD to be running? First your credentials are cached, so you will likely be able to log in anyway. Second, if they are not, you only have to log in with the local account and do whatever you need to reboot the AD VM to regain AD auth.

R3dPand4

@dashrender No worries, maybe I'm not explaining myself very well.

Sure, so this means logging out of the domain and logging into the PC as a local user with the same username/password as you have setup on the Hyper-V host - what a PITA.

I only ever log into my management PC with this user. There's no logging in or out of anything...

Why do you have multiple domains, and how would you manage them all from a single PC if the domains aren't trusted, etc?

It was mentioned earlier in the thread how you would manage Hosts that were domain connected if you had multiple domains in your environment. Some had mentioned even if Trusts were in place that Hyper-V Manager would ignore this, unless i misunderstood. I was simply offering this as an alternative since you're managing with local admin creds on the Hosts you don't have this issue.

I suppose I could build an account on the Hyper-V host that has the same creds as my user account on my PC, but damn, each time I change my password on my domain account (granted not frequent) I'd have to change it on the Hyper-V host.

This would be correct, however I don't regularly change passwords as it's not necessary or even inherently beneficial, and even if I do it takes less than 5 minutes for a complete update.

No offense taken, thanks for allowing me to clarify, hope this better explains my preferences.

R3dPand4

@jaredbusch

@jaredbusch said in Managing Hyper-V:

@r3dpand4 said in Managing Hyper-V:

@jaredbusch Because I have never needed the very thing supporting my infrastructure to be dependent on one of the vms inside of it.

Joining it to the domain does not mean that a local login no longer exists. Why would you think that it requires the guest VM with AD to be running? First your credentials are cached, so you will likely be able to log in anyway. Second, if they are not, you only have to log in with the local account and do whatever you need to reboot the AD VM to regain AD auth.

I'm aware of local logins and AD. I'm not sure why you'd ever want to rely on cached credentials on your Hosts, but sure it'll work for a time.

" you only have to log in with the local account and do whatever you need to reboot the AD VM to regain AD auth."

This is literally my point....why add steps unnecessarily? This is literally my management preference from default so why am I wrong for removing a step? Again, if you're relying on cached creds to authenticate with a domain joined Host in order for you to manage your vms I don't see that as remotely ideal.

JaredBusch

@r3dpand4 said in Managing Hyper-V:

@jaredbusch

@jaredbusch said in Managing Hyper-V:

@r3dpand4 said in Managing Hyper-V:

@jaredbusch Because I have never needed the very thing supporting my infrastructure to be dependent on one of the vms inside of it.

Joining it to the domain does not mean that a local login no longer exists. Why would you think that it requires the guest VM with AD to be running? First your credentials are cached, so you will likely be able to log in anyway. Second, if they are not, you only have to log in with the local account and do whatever you need to reboot the AD VM to regain AD auth.

I'm aware of local logins and AD. I'm not sure why you'd ever want to rely on cached credentials on your Hosts, but sure it'll work for a time.

" you only have to log in with the local account and do whatever you need to reboot the AD VM to regain AD auth."

This is literally my point....why add steps unnecessarily? This is literally my management preference from default so why am I wrong for removing a step? Again, if you're relying on cached creds to authenticate with a domain joined Host in order for you to manage your vms I don't see that as remotely ideal.

You are missing the point. It is not adding a step because it will normally never happen. The guests normally boot with no action required from the host. So day to day management is never impacted by this.

coliver

@r3dpand4 said in Managing Hyper-V:

@jaredbusch

@jaredbusch said in Managing Hyper-V:

@r3dpand4 said in Managing Hyper-V:

@jaredbusch Because I have never needed the very thing supporting my infrastructure to be dependent on one of the vms inside of it.

Joining it to the domain does not mean that a local login no longer exists. Why would you think that it requires the guest VM with AD to be running? First your credentials are cached, so you will likely be able to log in anyway. Second, if they are not, you only have to log in with the local account and do whatever you need to reboot the AD VM to regain AD auth.

I'm aware of local logins and AD. I'm not sure why you'd ever want to rely on cached credentials on your Hosts, but sure it'll work for a time.

" you only have to log in with the local account and do whatever you need to reboot the AD VM to regain AD auth."

This is literally my point....why add steps unnecessarily? This is literally my management preference from default so why am I wrong for removing a step? Again, if you're relying on cached creds to authenticate with a domain joined Host in order for you to manage your vms I don't see that as remotely ideal.

But you aren't relying on cached credentials. You're using a domain joined account to manage it and have a backup local account just in case of emergencies.

Your process adds several additional steps that don't exist if you managed Hyper-V as part of the domain.

Dashrender

@r3dpand4 said in Managing Hyper-V:

I only ever log into my management PC with this user. There's no logging in or out of anything...

What is a management PC? You actually have a whole other computer (or local VM) that's entire purpose is only servicing the Hyper-V host? seems like $300+ for a Windows license, pretty expensive.

It was mentioned earlier in the thread how you would manage Hosts that were domain connected if you had multiple domains in your environment. Some had mentioned even if Trusts were in place that Hyper-V Manager would ignore this, unless i misunderstood. I was simply offering this as an alternative since you're managing with local admin creds on the Hosts you don't have this issue.

That's true, I had forgotten about that bit, but your solution is instead of having separation, you'd have all Hyper-V hosts have the same single account, managed by your one PC that has that - that's not an enterprise solution. And I'll agree that MS hasn't given us one either.

coliver

@dashrender said in Managing Hyper-V:

And I'll agree that MS hasn't given us one either.

MS has given an enterprise solution. Use Active Directory to manage user permissions and logon rights for your Hyper-V hosts. If you need to go further then that look at SCVMM to manage the hosts that will for the most part have to be added to the domain to get all the functionality.