This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Rob Sewell (b|t) and surprise, surprise, it focuses on Powershell so I thought I’d write a quick post on how I’ve streamlined a pretty much weekly task that I perform, creating VMs.

I’m constantly spinning up VMs and then blowing them away. Ok, using the Hyper-V GUI isn’t too bad but when I’m creating multiple machines it can be a bit of a pain.

So here’s the details on the script I’ve written, hopefully it could be of some use to you too.

First check that your machine has the Hyper-V powershell module installed: –

Get-Module

If it’s not installed, you can either enable through the GUI: –

Or via script: –

Install-WindowsFeature -Name Hyper-V-PowerShell

N.B. – You won’t need to do this if, like me, you’re working with Hyper-V Server 2012 R2

Then you’re good to go creating VMs! All you need is the ISO for the OS that you want the machine to run.

Here’s the code: –

$BootDevice     = Read-Host -Prompt "Set VM boot device"
$ServerName     = Read-Host -Prompt "Enter VM Name"
$VMGeneration   = Read-Host -Prompt "Enter VM Generation"
[int]$VMMemoryGB= Read-Host -Prompt "Set VM Memory (GB)"
$VMCPU          = Read-Host -Prompt "Set Number of CPUs"
$NetworkAdapter = Read-Host -Prompt "Set Network Adapter"
$VHDPath        = Read-Host -Prompt "Set VHD Path"
[int]$VHDSizeGB = Read-Host -Prompt "Set VHD Size (GB)" 
$SecureBoot     = Read-Host -Prompt "Secure Boot On/Off"
$ISOPath        = Read-Host -Prompt "Set ISO Path"
$VMMemory  = ((($VMMemoryGB*1024)*1024)*1024)
$VHDSize   = ((($VHDSizeGB*1024)*1024)*1024)
New-VM -BootDevice $BootDevice -Name $ServerName -Generation $VMGeneration -MemoryStartupBytes $VMMemory -SwitchName $NetworkAdapter -NewVHDPath $VHDPath -NewVHDSizeBytes $VHDSize
Set-VMProcessor $ServerName -Count $VMCPU
Set-VMFirmware -VMName $ServerName -EnableSecureBoot $SecureBoot
Set-VMDvdDrive -VMName $ServerName -Path $ISOPath

Either copy the script here or download it from my GitHub.

Now, I’ve got this saved on my Hyper-V host as CreateNewVM.ps1 and I execute it through a remote powershell session. Here it is in action: –

Thanks for reading!