If you are a junior IT admin or an administrative staff member that needs to access the servers on occasion *and* you have Microsoft Hyper-V virtualisation this may help: (It may just confuse you more as well, sorry about that)

Typically in a virtualised environment when you need to access “the server” what you are talking about is the “guest” servers or the ones that run “in” the virtualised environment, this is normally done from the comfort of your desk via the Microsoft Remote Desktop app.

Normally the physical or host server just does its thing and “hosts” the “guest” servers and the Hyper-V virtualisation infrastructure is transparent the normal user or even admin staff that need to log on to “the server” on occasion.

However, every now and then you may need to access your Virtual machines (VM’s) and do something with the magic that happens under the hood.

To start, access the “host” server either physically on the console or via remote access. Open the Hyper-V console (see black arrows below) for the icons in example locations.

 Once the Hyper-V console is open you will see a similar to the the screen below (numbers correspond to the numbers in the image below):

1. Shows the Hyper-V host server you are managing (if there is more than one)
2. Listing of virtual machines by name
3. "State" of VM typically they should be running...
4. Note that "winserver2016" is off
5. In this screenshot the winserver2016 VM is selected, click on "5" to start this VM

Double clicking on the VM in question will open that VM and expose more controls, for the server Win10 (see A below) note the turn off and shutdown buttons B & C below these mimic the hardware buttons on a physical server

Just remember normally you don't need to access the under the hood settings and features, Hyper-V will manage the VM states including when the Host/Physical server is shutdown and restarted.

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