Export VMs from Hyper-V with PowerShell

This morning I’m preparing to change my Windows Server 2012 RC to the RTM version. This server is only acting as a Hyper-v member server on my network so no big deal. My biggest challenge is that I wan to use the VMs that I have on this server again once I finish building the new one. I am performing a clean install so I need to export these VMs or fail them over. Since this is my test environment, I do not have a failover cluster.

For those of you who have manually performed a VM export in Hyper-V, you know that this is a time consuming process. I have 14 VMs with snapshots that need to be preserved. Since I am expecting this process to take some time, I wanted to have some type of visual indicator as to where I was in the export process. Here is the simple PowerShell one liner that I am using.

Get-VM | ForEach {Write-Host $_.Name;

Export-VM -Name $_.Name -Path S:\2012VMs}

This simple code does the following. First we gather all the VM objects from Hyper-V using the Get-VM cmdlet. We then pipe these objects into a ForEach statement that contains 2 different commands. The first simply displays the name of the VM that is being exported. The second performs that actual export.

That is it! I’m looking at my ISE and I am watch the names of each of the 14 VMs being displayed as they are being exported.

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Jason Yoder, MCT

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