As I described in an earlier post about why you should think about creating VM´s with Windows 2012 now when the Windows 2012 R2 have arrived I have now tested the online VHDX resize function.

And as I already have emphasized is that you can only online resize VHDX´s that are connected to a SCSI controller, and it is only on Generation 2 VM that your Hyper-V VM´s can have the boot disk connected to the SCSI and also that limits the number of OS´s (Windows 2012/2012R2 and Win 8/8.1)

I have not yet successfully migrated a Gen 1 VM´s system disk to a Gen 2 but I am working on it 😛 (the Gen 2 uses UEFTI and GPT) and some kind of backup/restore will probably be required..  I will post updates in my pursue of this task.

In the following part of this post I want to show you how I resize both a VHDX with the system and boot partition on it and an additional VHDX with data on the VM running on the Generation 2.

As you can see with this PowerShell I can easily extend the VHDX and also with the following command I can get the minimum size that I can shrink it to, this depends on the volume inside and that can also be shrunk online of course, that has been possible since Windows 2008. I have also gone through this case in an earlier post, the main difference here with R2 is that it can be done online.

When checking the help for the Hyper-V PowerShell module in R2 it can be noted that the help information has not been updated as it says still that it is an offline operation 😛

So to resize during the VM is running is shown here in the following screendump, and as you can see, both the system drive and the L-drive are extended.

And here you can see how we can shrink the VHDX also, note that I have extended the system volume with 3 GB inside the VM also so the minimum have gone up all this when the VM was running!

Here is the Powershell

Get-VHD (Get-VM winshrink | Get-VMHardDiskDrive).path | Select @{Label="SizeGB";Expression={"{0:N0}" -f ($_.Size/1GB)}},@{Label="MinSizeGB";Expression={"{0:N0}" -f ($_.MinimumSize/1GB)}}

Get-VHD (Get-VM winshrink | Get-VMHardDiskDrive).path | where Path -match winshrink.vhdx | Resize-VHD -SizeBytes 30GB

Get-VHD (Get-VM winshrink | Get-VMHardDiskDrive).path | where Path -match L.vhdx | Resize-VHD -SizeBytes 60GB

Get-VHD (Get-VM winshrink | Get-VMHardDiskDrive).path | where Path -match winshrink.vhdx | Resize-VHD -ToMinimumSize

Get-VHD (Get-VM winshrink | Get-VMHardDiskDrive).path | where Path -match L.vhdx | Resize-VHD -ToMinimumSize

Happy extending and shrinking your SCSI attached VHDX hdd

I read Hyper-V.nu great blog article about Christian Edwards script that checks both hosts and clusters for hotfixes and updates and found some things I wanted to improve in the script, first of all I wanted an object list instead of just some Write-Host with cool colors.. Then I can use the fabulous techniques of PowerShell to just show the once that I do not have installed or make a decent report for my cluster or just standalone hosts.

The next improvement I thought of was the automatic download of all hotfixes.. Well registering at the web page and downloading each hotfix can work for some but not many, so I extended the XML files with the DownloadURL and also changed the script to support either a host or a cluster object. The download parameter will not check what´s installed or not, it will just download all hotfixes that I found URL´s for so bare with me if it is not complete and make a comment or send me a tweet and I will try to update the xml file

Here you can see how I can run it and also as I have the result as objects filter on installed or not

And here you can see when I check a cluster and also add the parameters for downloading and the path to where the downloaded files shall reside

And here is a screendump of some of the hotfix files that are downloaded, as you can see in the script I utilize the BITS engine to download the files 🙂

Updated with hotfixes to 2013-07-15! Here is the script and the xml files with the extended DownloadURL are in this download zip file-> hyperv12updatescheck.

# Remake of Christian Edwards script to make it more flexible
# http://blogs.technet.com/b/cedward/archive/2013/05/31/validating-hyper-v-2012-and-failover-clustering-hotfixes-with-powershell-part-2.aspx
#
# Niklas Akerlund 2013-06-28

param
(
    [parameter(ValueFromPipeline=$true,  
                   Position=0)]
    [string]$Hostname,
    [parameter(ValueFromPipeline=$true, 
                   Position=1)]
    $ClusterName,
    [switch]$Download,
    [string]$DownloadPath
)

#Getting current execution path
$scriptpath = $MyInvocation.MyCommand.Path
$dir = Split-Path $scriptpath
$listofHotfixes = @()

#Loading list of updates from XML files

[xml]$SourceFileHyperV = Get-Content $dir\UpdatesListHyperV.xml
[xml]$SourceFileCluster = Get-Content $dir\UpdatesListCluster.xml

$HyperVHotfixes = $SourceFileHyperV.Updates.Update
$ClusterHotfixes = $SourceFileCluster.Updates.update

#Getting installed Hotfixes from all nodes of the Cluster/hosts
if ($ClusterName){
    $Nodes = Get-Cluster $ClusterName | Get-ClusterNode | Select -ExpandProperty Name
}else
{
    $Nodes = $Hostname
}
foreach($Node in $Nodes)
{
$Hotfixes = Get-HotFix -ComputerName $Node |select HotfixID,description

foreach($RecomendedHotfix in $HyperVHotfixes)
{
        $witness = 0
        foreach($hotfix in $Hotfixes)
        {
                If($RecomendedHotfix.id -eq $hotfix.HotfixID)
                {
                    $obj = [PSCustomObject]@{
                        HyperVNode = $Node
                        HotfixType = "Hyper-V"
                        RecomendedHotfix = $RecomendedHotfix.Id
                        Status = "Installed"
                        Description = $RecomendedHotfix.Description
                        DownloadURL =  $RecomendedHotfix.DownloadURL
                    } 
                   
                   $listOfHotfixes += $obj
                    $witness = 1
                 }
        }  
        if($witness -eq 0)
        {
            
            $obj = [PSCustomObject]@{
                    HyperVNode = $Node
                    HotfixType = "Hyper-V"
                    RecomendedHotfix = $RecomendedHotfix.Id
                    Status = "Not Installed"
                    Description = $RecomendedHotfix.Description
                    DownloadURL =  $RecomendedHotfix.DownloadURL
            } 
                   
            $listofHotfixes += $obj
 
        }
}

foreach($RecomendedClusterHotfix in $ClusterHotfixes)
{
        $witness = 0
        foreach($hotfix in $Hotfixes)
        {
                If($RecomendedClusterHotfix.id -eq $hotfix.HotfixID)
                {
                    $obj = [PSCustomObject]@{
                        HyperVNode = $Node
                        HotfixType = "Cluster"
                        RecomendedHotfix = $RecomendedClusterHotfix.Id
                        Status = "Installed"
                        Description = $RecomendedClusterHotfix.Description
                        DownloadURL =  $RecomendedClusterHotfix.DownloadURL
                    } 
                   
                   $listOfHotfixes += $obj
   
                   $witness = 1
                 }
        }  
        if($witness -eq 0)
        {
            $obj = [PSCustomObject]@{
                HyperVNode = $Node
                HotfixType = "Cluster"
                RecomendedHotfix = $RecomendedClusterHotfix.Id
                Status = "Not Installed"
                Description = $RecomendedClusterHotfix.Description
                DownloadURL =  $RecomendedClusterHotfix.DownloadURL
            } 
                   
            $listOfHotfixes += $obj          
        }
}
}
if ($Download){
    foreach($RecomendedHotfix in $HyperVHotfixes){
        if ($RecomendedHotfix.DownloadURL -ne ""){
            Start-BitsTransfer -Source $RecomendedHotfix.DownloadURL -Destination $DownloadPath 
        }
    }
    foreach($RecomendedClusterHotfix in $ClusterHotfixes){
        if ($RecomendedClusterHotfix.DownloadURL -ne ""){
            Start-BitsTransfer -Source $RecomendedClusterHotfix.DownloadURL -Destination $DownloadPath 
        }
    }
}

$listofHotfixes