Add a new Hyper-V host to SCVMM 2012

I’ve recently decided to expand my home lab in order to accommodate a growing number of projects that span Hyper-V 2008 R2, Hyper-V 3 and VMware vSphere 5.  Although I could run these systems inside a VMware Workstation 8 instance, thanks to that product’s ability to pass virtualization hardware information through to running virtual machines, I actually need to build a surprising number of virtual machines to accommodate multiple projects, so I’m taking this opportunity to also explore some additional tools, such as System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager.  In fact, we recently published the first in what will be a long series of articles describing in detail how SCVMM 2012 operates.  However, as a sidebar to that article series, I will also be posting information in this blog regarding VMM.

To get the process started, open the VMM console and right-click the All Hosts entry.  From the shortcut menu, choose Add Hyper-V Hosts and Clusters.

In VMM 2012, there are a number of ways that you can bring Hyper-V hosts under the auspices of VMM 2012’s management.  You can add an existing Hyper-V hosts that exists in the same domain as the VMM server, which is what I’m doing here.  You can also add a Hyper-V host that sits in an untrusted Active Directory domain, a Windows Server computer that resides in a perimeter network and you can simply add an existing physical system that you wish to turn into a Hyper-V host.

I already have a physical host that has the Hyper-V role installed.

The VMM server needs to be provided with credentials that allow it to carry out the task of discovering the intended Windows server and, if necessary, installing the VMM agent.  In the screen below, you can see that I have already created a “Run As” account that is a domain administrator account for the local domain.  I can use this account to carry out these tasks since the target Hyper-V server is already a member of the domain.  I will cover how to create new Run As accounts in a different post.  If you have not created a Run As account yet, you can manually provide credentials for an account with enough rights to complete the process.

Next up, you need to tell the wizard how it should locate the lucky server that will be added to VMM’s list.  You can choose to simply specify the Windows Server computer by name, which I have done, or you can write an Active Directory query that locates the resources you wish to add to VMM.

Assuming that you’ve provided the name or names of servers that are discoverable by the Add Resource wizard and the VMM server, you will be presented with a list of the target resources that were discovered.  Select the target resources that you’d like to add to VMM and click Next.

By default, new hosts will be added to the All Hosts group, but if you’ve created other groups, you can specify here the group to which the selected resources should be added.

Finally, the VMM wizard provides you with a summary page on which you can review your selections to make sure that you didn’t make a mistake  Click the Finish button to proceed,

In the Jobs window, you can see the status of the add process.

Once the process is complete, you can see the details of the new host by going to VMs and Services > Host > Properties.  In the figure below, you can see some of the configuration details for this virtual machine and can see that it already had one virtual machine named COURSE-WSUS deployed on it.