I am fairly new to using Hyper-V. I am trying to learn the best practice for shutting down and restarting my server when virtual machines are running on it.
I have a physical server running MS Windows Server 2012 R2. I have two Virtual Machines running under Hyper-V on this Windows server. One VM is running a guest operating system of Windows 7 Professional. The other VM is running Ubuntu 14.10.
My question is, do I need to shut down each virtual machine before shutting down the physical server or will the virtual machines be shut down by the physical server as part of its shutdown?
I have not been able to find any information on this process. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Thank you
Best Answer
It depends on how your configured your Virtual machines.
If you have your VMs configured to 'Turn OFF', then shutting down the host OS would be close to equivalent to pulling the power from the VMs. If your VMs are configured this way, and you want them to safely shutdown, then you need to shut them down first. You could also use the other options like suspend, or shutdown the guest OS.
Do keep in mind that the shutdown the guest, requires that you have guest additions properly installed on the guest. I believe without them, you will have the 'turn off' effect, but I am not certain.