libvirt: Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor driver
Description: libvirt, virtualization, virtualization API

# Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor driver

- Project Links
- Connections to the Microsoft Hyper-V driver
  - URI Format
    - Extra parameters
  - Authentication
- Version Numbers

The libvirt Microsoft Hyper-V driver can manage Hyper-V 2012 R2 and newer.

## Project Links

- The Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor

## Connections to the Microsoft Hyper-V driver

Some example remote connection URIs for the driver are:

    hyperv://example-hyperv.com                  (over HTTPS)
    hyperv://example-hyperv.com/?transport=http  (over HTTP)

Note: In contrast to other drivers, the Hyper-V driver is a client-side-only driver. It connects to the Hyper-V server using WS-Management over HTTP(S). Therefore, the remote transport mechanism provided by the remote driver and libvirtd will not work, and you cannot use URIs like `hyperv+ssh://example.com`.

### URI Format

URIs have this general form (`[...]` marks an optional part).

    hyperv://[username@]hostname[:port]/[?extraparameters]

The default HTTPS ports is 5986. If the port parameter is given, it overrides the default port.

#### Extra parameters

Extra parameters can be added to a URI as part of the query string (the part following `?`). A single parameter is formed by a `name=value` pair. Multiple parameters are separated by `&`.

    ?transport=http

The driver understands the extra parameters shown below.

Name | Values | Meaning
--- | --- | ---
`transport` | `http` or `https` | Overrides the default HTTPS transport. The default HTTP port is 5985.

### Authentication

In order to perform any useful operation the driver needs to log into the Hyper-V server. Therefore, only `virConnectOpenAuth` can be used to connect to an Hyper-V server, `virConnectOpen` and `virConnectOpenReadOnly` don't work. To log into an Hyper-V server the driver will request credentials using the callback passed to the `virConnectOpenAuth` function. The driver passes the hostname as challenge parameter to the callback.

Note: Currently only `Basic` authentication is supported by libvirt. This method is disabled by default on the Hyper-V server and can be enabled via the WinRM commandline tool.

    winrm set winrm/config/service/auth @{Basic="true"}

To allow `Basic` authentication with HTTP transport WinRM needs to allow unencrypted communication. This can be enabled via the WinRM commandline tool. However, this is not the recommended communication mode.

    winrm set winrm/config/service @{AllowUnencrypted="true"}

## Version Numbers

Since Microsoft's build numbers are almost always over 1000, this driver needs to pack the value differently compared to the format defined by `virConnectGetVersion`. To preserve all of the digits, the following format is used:

    major * 100000000 + minor * 1000000 + micro

This results in `virsh version` producing unexpected output.

Windows Release | Kernel Version | libvirt Representation
Windows Server 2012 R2 | 6.3.9600 | 603.9.600
Windows Server 2016 | 10.0.14393 | 1000.14.393
Windows Server 2019 | 10.0.17763 | 1000.17.763