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Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Powershell Direct in Action

Powershell Direct is one of the feature in Windows Server 2016 which allow you to interact with guest VM from the host without any firewall or network requirement. The best part is without remote management configuration.

In previous post, we have talked about it here:- http://www.ms4u.info/2015/08/win-2016-tp3-hello-powershell-direct.html

With Powershell Direct feature, we able to execute powershell command and communicate  to guest VM from the Hyper-V Host.

How about leverage on Powershell Direct to backup application aware processing without
  • network communication
  • firewall configuration
  • remote configuration management
This is useful especially your test environment is not connected to network but want to able to execute powershell command or backup application data. Check out below on how to use Powershell Direct in action.

Our test scenario:-
  • Hyper-V Host running Windows Server 2016
  • Guest VM running Windows Server 2016 with network disconnected



  • Veeam Backup & Replication v9.5 to backup VM.
  • Enable Application Aware Processing
  • Enable Guest File System Indexing


Start backup the VM

Without Powershell Direct, your backup job will fail because it cannot communicate to guest VM via network to backup application aware processing data .

However, with Veeam Backup & Replication v9.5, backup job has completed 100% without any error. From history, we able to see that the system has failed over to use Powershell Direct to complete the backup.