Manipulate Hyper-V from .NET

Question

Are there any means for a .NET application to create, delete, start, and stop Hyper-V virtual machines?

I would like to create an automated means of starting and stopping (the create & delete are bonus) virtual machines from a C# application. I figured that (atleast) there would be a means of doing this via P/Invoke, but I cannot find anything discussing how to do this.

Any links to some good walkthroughs or documentation would be preferable.

Answer 1

Much of the Hyper-V automation is through WMI. WMI isn't explicitly a .NET API, but it's pretty easy to work with from .NET.

The Hyper-V WMI API docs are at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc136992(VS.85).aspx

Answer 2

WMI wrapper in C# for Hyper-V available at http://hypervlib.codeplex.com

Answer 3

Don't forget to take into consideration that in newest releases of hyper-v, the namespaces have been moved to v2. For example from root\virtualization in Hyper-V 2008, the namespace has changed into root\virtualization\v2 in 2012. (Windows Server version) Check this post for more details.

This helped me a lot in newest versions of Hyper-V

Hope it helps.

Answer 4

System Center Virtual Machine Manager comes with a very good set of .NET assemblies, which you can freely reference in your app. It also has an excellent Powershell interface for easy scripting.

However, if you're working with raw Hyper-V and not SCVMM, then I don't know. See if you can get your boss to spring for SCVMM.

Answer 5

You can do that and much more with this. http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/ddc It is for hosters but can be easily installed on premise.