Creating a System Center Virtual Machine Manager library - Hyper-V Tutorial

- [Narrator] Now that we've got System Center Virtual Machine Manager up and running, I want to take a moment and set up a library server. Now, a library server is really just a server that has a Windows share enabled on it, through the System Center Virtual Machine Manager console. So, let's take a look at how to set up such a library. So here I am on a brand new server, And even though we don't have to use a dedicated machine, I'm going ahead and using a dedicated machine, just to make things a little bit cleaner. So, the first thing that we need to do is to create a folder. So, I'm going to go ahead and open up File Explorer, and I'll go to This PC, and you can see that I've got a couple of disk on this one. I'm using C as my operating system disk. And then I've created another disk that I'm calling E. I'll go ahead and open up E. And you can see that I've created a folder called ISO. And if I double-click on this, I've got various ISO files in it. An ISO file, for anybody who might not be familiar with the term, is essentially just a CD or DVD disk image. It's commonly used for installing software. For example, the Windows installation media is available as an ISO file. And you can see an example of that right here. Here's the Windows 11 installation media. So, why am I doing this? Well, in the world of Hyper-V, there's really no such thing as a data store as it exists in VMware. However, System Center Virtual Machine Manager allows you to create libraries, which are kind of the closest thing to a datastore. Now, you don't create virtual machines and place them in a library. It doesn't really work that way. But you can use a library to store resources that are useful in a Hyper-V environment. In this case we're storing ISO files. So, if we were to need to create a new virtual machine, for example, we could pull an ISO file directly out of a library. It's right there, ready and waiting for us to use it. People also use libraries to create virtual machine templates, and other similar resources. So, let me go back to the root of my E drive. So, as you've seen, I've already created the ISO folder, and I've already filled it with ISO files. For anybody who's not familiar with how to create a folder, all you have to do is right-click within File Explorer and then go to New, and then go to Folder. And then just call the folder whatever you want. I'll call this one Example. (keyboard clicking) I'll press Enter, and the new folder is created. I'm going to go ahead and delete the Example folder, because I don't need it. So, I'm just going to right-click on the folder, and then I'm going to click on Delete. So, now that we've created the ISO folder and we filled it with data, now we need to share that folder. So to do that, I'm going to right-click on the ISO folder. I'll go to Properties. And when the Property sheet opens, I'm going to click on Sharing, and then I'll click Share. And now we have to choose who we want to share this folder with. And I'm going to share it with my RunAs account. Now, we haven't linked the RunAs account to System Center Virtual Machine Manager yet. We'll do that later in another video, but I'm going to go ahead and use the RunAs account. (keyboard clicking) So I typed in RunAs, I clicked Add, and now my RunAs account has been added. And right now, the RunAs account has read permissions to this folder. But I'm going to go ahead and set this to Read/Write, just because you never know when we might need to add another ISO file to the folder. So, now that that's done, I'll click Share, and the share has been created. And you can see that the path to the share is \\Library\iso. So, I'll go ahead and click Done, and I'll close this out. And now I need to switch over to my System Center Virtual Machine Manager server. So here I am on my System Center Virtual Machine Manager server, and I'm going to go ahead and open up the Administrative console. And I'm just going to log in using the session identity. So I'm not going to enter any credentials. I'll just click Connect. And now we're taken into the console. So, the next thing that I want to do is click on the Library tab. And now I'm going to right click on Library Servers. And I'm going to choose the Add Library Server option. So this is going to launch the Add Library Server wizard, and we have an option of either using an existing RunAs account, or specifying a set of credentials. For now, I'm just going to specify a set of credentials, because we haven't linked our RunAs account to Virtual Machine Manager yet. So, I'm going to choose Enter a username and password, and I'll enter my credentials. (keyboard clicking) I'll click Next. Now we have to specify the location for the library that we want to add. And so the first thing that I have to do is make sure that the domain name is correct. It's set to poseyLab, which is correct. Then I have to specify the name of the computer where the library share exist. In my case, that computer is actually called Library. So, I'm going to go ahead and type in library, and I'll click Add. And so the library machine has been added. I'll click Next. Now we have to choose what share we want to add. And there's only one share, and it's the ISO share that we created a moment ago. So I'm going to select the ISO checkbox, and I'll click Next. And then I'll click Add Library Servers. So now the Jobs window appears, and we can see that the library server is being added. And the job completed, so I'll close the Jobs window. And you'll notice that right now the Library Servers tab is selected. And right away we can begin to see all the ISO files show up here. However, we also have a listing right here for library.poseylab.com. And then here's our ISO folder. And if I click on the ISO folder, we can see all of the ISO files that exist within that folder. So, those ISO files are now available for us to read. So, again, we don't really have the concept of storing ISO files in a datastore the way that we would do in a VMware environment. But if you do want to have a collection of ISO files at your disposal, this is one convenient way of doing it.