Hyper-V Virtual Machine creation

As part of a Lab setup, I expect to create and destroy the VM's regularly. To reduce the pain of recreating manually, I use a PowerShell script to create the Hyper-V VM's with certain specifications.

Prerequisite

To use this script, you must have already have a working Hyper-V. You can refer to this link Enable Hyper-V on Windows 11

Before running the script, do create a Hyper-V Virtual External network with the name internet . Ensure to match the exact name, else the PowerShell script will fail to create the alpine1 with the correct configuration.

Refer to following screenshot for the relevant steps.

One key point to pay attention to is the step 5 ensure the selected Network has connectivity to the internet. This is key to ensure connectivity to the Internet.

The PowerShell script to create the VM can now be executed.

Download ISO files manually

In some cases the PowerShell script will fail to download the ISO files. If this occurs the Hyper-V Virtual Machines will not be created correctly.

To fix this will make the steps more complex, to avoid this download the ISO images manually.

If you ran the PowerShell script and hit the error you can restart by deleting all the Hyper-V virtual Machines and download the ISO images to the working folder $workingfolder set in the script.

# download using a browser
# save the iso to the $workingfolder\iso = "G:\kubernetes-project-lab\iso"
# download both these images
https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.18/releases/x86_64/alpine-standard-3.18.4-x86_64.iso
https://releases.ubuntu.com/focal/ubuntu-20.04.6-live-server-amd64.iso

PowerShell script to create Hyper-V Virtual Machines

To use this script:- - run Powershell ISE as Administrator. ( Right click PowerShell ISE select Run as Administrator)

• Open the file C:\kubernetes-lab\srv\scripts\hyper-v_Host\001-Kubernetes-Create-HyperV-VM.ps1

• Check the work drive for $workingfolder to ensure the correct path is used this can be c:\ or d:\ depending on your configuration.

• Save any changes and click on the Green Play button, this will execute the script.

// method to access Video-- QR code?

Here is a video that might help

Lessons Learned

1. Ensure the Hyper-V Virtual Switch named internet is created prior to executing the script.
2. Hyper-V VM Memory needs to be at minimum 1GB. Any lower the Ubuntu will fail to install. Wasted a few days to catch this.
3. If you are using the download ISO to memory then you need to have a minimum of 4GB on the Hyper-V VM to load the ISO to memory.

Once the Virtual Machines are created proceed to 100-alpine1-setup steps.