A lightweight Vagrant VM with Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2

https://vagrantcloud.com/msabramo/boxes/HyperVServer2012

Note: If you need a VM with SQL Server Express, you may want to checkout https://github.com/msabramo/vagrant_sql_server_express instead.

What is Hyper-V Server 2012?

From http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-hyper-v-server-2012-r2:

Hyper-V Server is a dedicated stand-alone product that contains the hypervisor, Windows Server driver model, virtualization capabilities, and supporting components such as failover clustering, but does not contain the robust set of features and roles as the Windows Server operating system. As a result, Hyper-V Server produces a small footprint and requires minimal overhead. Organizations consolidating servers where no new Windows Server licenses are required or where the servers being consolidated are running an alternative OS may want to consider Hyper-V Server.

From http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithmayer/archive/2013/04/05/getting-started-with-hyper-v-server-2012-hyperv-virtualization-itpro.aspx:

Hyper-V Server 2012 is a FREE (yes, completely free!) purpose-built product that includes the core of Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V.

Prerequisites

• Vagrant
• VirtualBox

Install and start up

The first time that you do this it will download a large Vagrant box file (about 2.7 GB) from the Internet, so you may want to wait until you have a good connection.

vagrant up

If this works, then (perhaps after a long time downloading), a new VirtualBox window should appear and it will boot into a very stripped-down Windows environment with 2 windows and no start menu, task bar, system tray, etc. Once you have the Vagrant box downloaded, doing vagrant up is pretty quick -- it executes for me in less than 2 minutes on my MacBook Pro with VirtualBox 4.3.26.

Details

You now have a VirtualBox VM with:

• Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 – free, stripped-down version of Windows; has very little GUI or admin/desktop tools, but it's good enough to run SQL Server Express and it can be managed remotely via PowerShell.
• Chocolatey (a package manager for easily installing software in Windows)

Tips

• If you want UNIX goodies, you can install Cygwin with choco install -y cyg-get in a command prompt or PowerShell. This will create a basic Cygwin install in C:\tools\cygwin.

• If you accidentally close the command prompt window and need to open another, press Ctrl + Alt + Del and pick "Task Manager". Then in the File menu, choose "Run new task" and type cmd and hit Enter.

• You can RDP to the host by doing vagrant rdp.

• vagrant ssh will not work out of the box, because the guest has no ssh server. If you are determined to use ssh, you can look into installing an ssh server like winsshd (Bitvise SSH Server)], freesshd, the openssh package from Cygwin, etc. but you might be able to live without an ssh server, because you hopefully don't need to do much with the VM, or if you need to customize things, hopefully you can do it DevOps-style and do it by adding PowerShell commands to the Vagrantfile or use ansible (which can also send PowerShell commands over WinRM), etc.

• To see the list of services that are running, you can do net start from the command prompt or PowerShell.