Working with VM groups

VM groups are a feature of Hyper-V that allow you to group VMs for the purposes of automation. With Hyper-V, there are two types of VM groups: a VMCollectionType and a ManagementCollectionType. A VMCollectionType VM group contains VMs, while the ManagementCollectionType VM group contains VMCollectionType VM groups.

The might enable you to have two VMCollectionType VM groups, SQLAccVMG (that contains the VMs SQLAcct1, SQLAcct2, and SQLAcct3) and a group, SQLAccVMG, that contains the VMs SQLMfg1 and SQLMfg2.

You could then create a ManagementCollectionType VM group, VM-All, containing the two VMCollectionType VM groups.

Getting ready

You run this recipe on the HV2 Hyper-V server, which you created in the Installing and configuring Hyper-V recipe. This Hyper-V server has a number of VMs defined. For the purposes of this recipe, you can create the necessary VMs using the following:

# Create HV2 VMs for Hyper-V Chapter
$VMLocation  = 'C:\Vm\VMs'
# Create VM1
$VMN1        =...