Vagrant Windows Hyper-V Provider

Vagrant is a tool for building complete development environments, sandboxed in a virtual machine. It helps enforce good practices by encouraging the use of automation so that development environments are as close to production as possible.

Hyper-V provider is available by default in Vagrant with version 1.5 and up. This plugin is created to provide windows guest support for the Vagrant Hyper-V provider.

Installation

Install Vagrant 1.5.4 http://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html

Install plugin like so: vagrant plugin install vagrant-windows-hyperv

Configuration settings

For more information on general configuration settings please visit the Vagrant Documentation. http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/

##Setting specific to this plugin

Sync Folder configuration

With Vagrant 1.5 SMB share is available by default and vagrant picks the most suitable implementation for the providers.

You can even specify the following options

:smb_id Specify a unique share name, with which the network share will be available. By default vagrant will generate a smb_id if not specified.

   # Mounts the host/path to guest/path and will have realtime sync
    config.vm.synced_folder 'C:/test_sync_2', "C:/Users/vagrant/test_sync_2"

VM Type

• Set the VM guest type

config.vm.guest = :windows

Override user name

• If you're building a custom box and want to customize the user name, you can use the hyper-v custom block to add it in

config.vm.provider "hyperv" do |hv, override|
  override.ssh.username = "myuser"
end

New RDP Command

• A new command vagrant rdp is introduced to connect to the Windows VM vagrant rdp

Customization

• Add customization for adding virtual switch. User can choose either External or Internal switch which will be attached to the VM on vagrant up or vagrant reload

  • NOTE: Vagrant works best with External switch, if you are using an Internal switch make sure the switch is properly configured for vagrant to communicate with the VM and the VM back to the host.

  • Example for configuration

    NOTE: If the adapter part if left blank, a list of available adapters will be displayed and the desired adapter can be selected.

    config.vm.provider "hyperv" do |hv|
      hv.customize  ["virtual_switch", { type: "External", name: "External Switch", :adapter => "Ethernet" }]
    end

Troubleshooting

Remote PowerShell

Vagrant-Windows-HyperV uses remote PowerShell to communicate with the guest VMs, so the guest VMs should have WinRM service running and remote PowerShell running.

To Enable remote PowerShell in the guest. Go to the guest VM, open a cmd terminal and type the following command

powershell Enable-PSRemoting –force

Trustedhosts

With PowerShell being enabled in the remote VM, the host has to trust this guest to establish the connection. One can add the guest IP under trustedhost. Here "*" can be used as a wildcard to trust all hosts, or replace the * with the IP address of the guest..

Type this command from an Administrator cmdshell prompt

powershell set-item wsman:\localhost\client\trustedhosts *

SMB Share

There is a bug in the current vagrant release (1.5.1) you may run into collisions when you create shares. To avoid this, user smb_id option and make sure the share name does not collide with existing shares.

config.vm.synced_folder 'C:/test_sync_2', "C:/Users/vagrant/test_sync_2", :smb_id => "test_my_share"