Donovan Brown

Technology Blog

Start and stop Hyper-V VMs from Release Management

06 May 2014 Donovan-Brown Work (0)

While preparing my Demo for TechEd North America 2014 on Release Management I ran into a challenge that required me to add additional custom tools. I thought I would blog about one of the tools I decided to add.

One of the goals of my Release Management demo was to deploy to Azure which is an amazing cloud service from Microsoft.  I was able to get the demo to work perfectly from home.  Then I realized that I would not be able to have the network at the George R. Brown Convention Center, where TechEd was being held, to forward port 1000 to my laptop. This would be a requirement so the Microsoft Deployer Agent running on my Azure VM would be able to connect to the Release Management Server on my laptop.

I really wanted to be able to show how you could use a Proxy Deployer to start and stop a virtual machine as part of your deployment.  However, I would have to show this in a way that would not have me rely on the network being configured to forward port 1000 to my laptop.  I got the idea to substitute Hyper-V for Azure.  If I could start and stop a Hyper-V VM as part of my demo the attendees would be able to witness the full workflow with Hyper-V playing the role of Azure for the demo. 

To make this work I was going to have to add a custom tool to Release Management that would be able to start and stop VMs in Hyper-V just like Release Management does out of the box for Azure.  One of the things that makes Release Management such a great tool is how easy it is to extend and add new tools.  All I would have to do is add a custom PowerShell script that can start and stop Hyper-V VMs.

PowerShell was designed for system administration, built on the .NET Framework.  It allows Windows users to control and automate many aspects of Windows.  PowerShell is also a pillar in the foundation of Release Management.  If you can write a PowerShell script to perform any task than that task can be performed during a deployment with Release Management.

Many technologies create PowerShell modules that contain functionality you can use to control the technology.  Hyper-V is no exception. If you have the Hyper-V role enabled on a Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 machine you have a PowerShell module for Hyper-V you can use to perform all sorts of tasks with Hyper-V.  I used that module to create a PowerShell script I could use to start and stop VMs in Hyper-V.  You can download the script below.

Once I created the script using the Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) it was time to add it to the Release Management tool inventory.  You can add a tool to Release Management using the procedure described below.

  1. Open the Release Management client.
  2. From the Inventory tab select Tools.
  3. Click New and enter the following information:
    • Name: Hyper-V VM Controller
    • Description: Start and Stop Hyper-V VMs
    • Command: powershell
    • Aruguments: -File ./ControlHyperVVM.ps1 -Command ACTION -ComputerName __ComputerName__ -Name __Name__
  4. Click the Add button under the Resources section.
  5. Select all the required files.  This could be an executable and the required assemblies, a batch file or in this case just the PowerShell file.  All the resources are copied to the Deployer Agent when required.
  6. Now click Save & Close.

Once the tool has been added to the Tools Inventory we can add Actions to the Inventory as well.  Release actions define the deployment sequence for each stage of your release.  An Action is defined by the tool and a set of arguments.  We are going to add two actions using the newly added Hyper-V VM Controller tool added above.

  1. Open the Release Management client if not open already.
  2. From the Inventory tab select Actions.
  3. Click new and enter the following information. Note how we change the place holder "ACTION" defined when we added the tool to the actual action we wish to perform.  You will also have to add the Hyper-V category by clicking New next to the Categories drop down.
  4. Add the Start Action
    • Name: Hyper-V VM - Start
    • Description: Start a VM in Hyper-V
    • Categories: Hyper-V
    • Tool: Hyper-V VM Controller
    • Arguments: -File ./controlHyperVVM.ps1 -Command Start -ComputerName __ComputerName__ -Name __Name__
  5. Add the Stop Action
    • Name: Hyper-V VM - Stop
    • Description: Stop a VM in Hyper-V
    • Categories: Hyper-V
    • Tool: Hyper-V VM Controller
    • Arguments: -File ./controlHyperVVM.ps1 -Command Stop -ComputerName __ComputerName__ -Name __Name__

With the tool and actions added you can now create a release sequence using these actions to start and stop a Hyper-V VM.

ControlHyperVVM.ps1 (3.18 kb)

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