Last week on the NIC keynote we could hear Jeffrey Snover talk about Windows 2012 and also that the preferred version when installing is Core, but then you will not have the Hyper-V manager locally (yes you could use the PowerShell module….).

So how do we enable our management station for remote Hyper-V tasks…

If you have a Windows 2012 you can easily just enable the Remote Server Administration Tools for Hyper-V and that preferably with PowerShell

And if you want to check if you have the Hyper-V management features installed you can use the Get-WindowsFeature

I usually also add the Failover cluster RSAT feature also to be able to manage the cluster.

Add-WindowsFeature RSAT-Hyper-V-Tools -IncludeAllSubFeature
Add-WindowsFeature RSAT-Clustering -IncludeAllSubFeature

If you want to add the Hyper-V tools in a Windows 8 you would guess that you have to use the DISM tools and there are some DISM cmdlets, You might have noticed that the Hyper-V tools are not part of the RSAT package for windows 8 this as the client Hyper-V role is part of the OS. But either I am doing something wrong or someone in Redmond has not thought this part through regarding the enabling of features in PowerShell for Win8!

because when I try the following Cmdlet with parameters

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -FeatureName Microsoft-Hyper-V-Tools-All

The PowerShell console barf out an error because when trying to add the Management tools with the powershell cmdlet I get info that it needs a parent feature which would be the Hyper-V feature and in this virtual windows 8 client that is not what I want,

When using the Control Panel, Add/Remove software/Windows Features you can add the Hyper-V Management tools in your Windows 8 without adding the Hyper-V Platform!

I will pursue this with some smart PowerShell gurus and see if they have an answer to why this happens 🙂

In the meantime good luck in creating your management pc!