How to kick off multiple copies of a VM in Hyper-V?

Question

I got my VHD in Hyper-V and it's running great. Since I got a great big server, I'd like to fire up a number of copies of this VHD. How do I do that? I didn't see anything obvious in the UI.

Answer 1

You can't run multiple copies of the same VM, but you can clone it and start up multiple individual machines.

I'm going to assume this is straight Hyper-V without any SCVMM installed. So it's a two-step process.

1. Right-click on the powered-off VM and choose "Export". Run through the export wizard.
2. On the right-hand bar, click "Import VM".
   • Make sure you select the option "Duplicate the files" so that you can import it multiple times
   • Make sure you select the radio "Copy" (otherwise you end up with duplicate MAC addresses and whatnot)