Last week I blogged about "Running Hyper-V on Nano". Today I want to talk about the opposite process - running Nano from Windows Server 2016 TP3 as a guest on Hyper-V.
There are a number of changes in the TP3 build that make this really easy to do. The first is the inclusion of PowerShell scripts that streamline the process of creating a Nano virtual machine. All you need to do is:
- Mount the TP3 installation media
- Change to the "NanoServer" directory on the TP3 installation media
- Load (via dotsourcing) convert-windowsimage.ps1
- Load (via dotsourcing) new-nanoserverimage.ps1
- Look at the help for "New-NanoServerImage"
- Create a VHD that contains the GuestDrivers package (and any other configuration options you want to choose).
This should look something like this:
At the end - create a virtual machine that uses this virtual hard drive and you should be good to go.
One important note to make: this script produces virtual hard drives for generation 1 virtual machines, so it will not boot if you attach it to a generation 2 virtual machine.
Once you are up and running - there is extra good news. PowerShell Direct now works for Nano guest virtual machines too! This makes it super easy to control and interact with Nano virtual machines:
You can jump straight into a PowerShell session on your shiny new Nano virtual machine without having to worry about network configuration at all.
Cheers,
Ben
Ben