Virtual machines can help you recreate computing environments faster and more easily than by using only physical computers. The following table identifies the basic tasks required to configure a development and test environment.
| Task | Reference |
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Determine the networking requirements, including network isolation, of your test environment. Create virtual networks to support these requirements. |
For information about planning virtual networks, see Configuring Virtual Networks ( |
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Create virtual machines to recreate the computing environment you want to test. |
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Install the appropriate guest operating system on each virtual machine. |
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As necessary, log on to the virtual machine to interact with the guest operating system. |
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Take snapshots of the virtual machines before and after making changes that you want to verify or might need to revert. |
For instructions about using snapshots, see |
Additional considerations
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By default, membership in the local Administrators group, or equivalent, is the minimum required to complete this procedure. However, an administrator can use Authorization Manager to modify the authorization policy so that a user or group of users can complete this procedure. For more information, see Using Authorization Manager for Hyper-V Security (
https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=142886 ).
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You can use virtual machine snapshots to capture the state of a virtual machine while it is running. You can take multiple snapshots of a virtual machine and then revert the virtual machine to any of the previous states by applying a snapshot to the virtual machine. This can make it easier to diagnose the cause of errors by reducing the number of times you need to repeat a task or sequence. Use Hyper-V Manager or Virtual Machine Connection to take snapshots.
Additional references
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For more information about Hyper-V, see the Windows Server 2008 Technical Library (
https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=93752 ).