Hyper-V VM Groups

Windows Server 2016 TP comes with another great feature regarding Hyper-V, which is the possibility to create VM groups. It’s nice to see that Microsoft is listening to the feedback given by the people on the user voice site and that they make things possible.

VM groups makes the management of multiple virtual machines easier, because this way if you need to do a task on multiple VMs, you can do it directly on the group. It’s also nice for organizing your VMs in the console, for example if you want to group all your SharePoint or SQL vms, or if you want to group them based on some project team.

VM groups comes in two types:

• VM collections: which is a logical collection of VMs on which you can take some actions at the level group.
• Management collection: is a logical collection of VM collection groups.

If you want to create VM groups it’s only possible from Powershell:

• Create a new VM Group: New-VMGroup -Name TestVMGr -GroupType VMCollectionType
• Add VMs to the group: Add-VMGroupMember -VMGroup $TestVMGr -VM $TestVM

You can also check if the vm belongs to a VM collection running Get-VM | ft Name,  state, groups or you can check the VM group members with Get-VMgroup * | ft Name, vmembers.

The command for creating a Management Collection is the same, the difference is that at -GroupType  you have to write ManagementCollectionType.

I recommend you to download the Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview book and check all the new features. You can download the book here.