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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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