Move Hyper-V VMs Between Hosts Using Live Migration

The Live Migration feature in Hyper-V allows you to migrate a running virtual machine between hosts with almost no downtime. Initially, Live Migration in Hyper-V was only available as part of a Windows failover cluster with CSV shared storage. Starting with Windows Server 2012, Hyper-V Live Migration doesn’t require a cluster and shared storage. To migrate VMs, Hyper-V hosts need to be connected using a fast shared Ethernet network. This type of migration is called a Shared-nothing live migration.

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USB Devices Passthrough over IP Network on Windows with Usbipd-win

The inability to pass through a connected USB device from a Hyper-V host to a virtual machine is one of the major shortcomings of the Microsoft hypervisor. You can use the open-source project usbipd-win to solve this problem (https://github.com/dorssel/usbipd-win). The usbipd-win utility allows you to pass through (redirect USB device or key including HASP) over the network from a Windows host to any Hyper-V virtual machine, remote computer running Linux, Windows, or WSL2.

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Fix Invalid Virtual Machine Status on VMware ESXi

I encounter strange virtual machines with Invalid (Unknown) status on VMware ESXi hosts on several occasions. In this article, we’ll take a look at how to troubleshoot and fix the invalid state of virtual machines from the VMware ESXi command line.

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Install Linux Integration Services (LIS) on Hyper-V VM

If you are deploying a Linux virtual machine on a Hyper-V host, you must install Linux Integration Services (LIS) in the guest operating system. Hyper-V Linux Integration Services allow the guest OS to interact with the host: send its state to the hypervisor, perform backups via VSS, correctly reboot and shutdown the Linux guest. In this tutorial, we’ll take a look at how to install Hyper-V Linux Integration Services on popular Linux distros – CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu.

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How to Install Drivers on VMWare ESXi?

VMware ESXi image includes the common drivers for the most popular server platforms.  Many vendors provide their own custom ESXi images with native drivers for their hardware (HPE, Lenovo, Fujitsu, Dell, Cisco, etc.). If you want to install and use VMware ESXi on non-standard or legacy hardware, or even on a home computer, you will need to download and install the drivers yourself. In this article, we will show you how to manually install the device driver on VMware ESXi.

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Enable Virtual Machine AutoStart on VMware Workstation

VMware Workstation and VMware Player do not have a built-in option to automatically start virtual machines when Windows boots up or when a user logs in. If you want the VM to start automatically, you must create an automated task in the Scheduler.

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How to Backup a Virtual Machine on KVM?

In this article, we will show some options for backing up virtual machines on a KVM hypervisor, as well as recovery scenarios. I would like to note that there are no convenient backup tools for KVM, and every administrator uses their own methods and scripts.  There are two backup scenarios in KVM: when a VM is stopped (the easiest one, but rarely used) and without stopping the virtual machine.

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