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One of the most satisfying aspects of virtualization is the ability to add new hardware devices to a virtual machine, without actually having to purchase and install the physical device. We are, of course, talking about virtual devices. If an additional disk drive is required by the guest operating system, all that needs to be done is to create a new virtual hard disk image file and assign it to the virtual machine. The same is true of virtual network adapters, disk controllers, COM ports and DVD drives.
New virtual hardware devices are added to a virtual machine by selecting the ''Add Hardware'' item in the hardware list located in the left hand panel of the settings dialog, selecting the type of device to be added from the list in the main panel and clicking ''Add''. This will display the device settings page, where the device may be configured to meet the necessary requirements. Clicking ''Apply'' will commit the changes.
In the case of new virtual hard disks and DVD drives, the disk controller to which the disk is to be attached must first be selected, followed by the type of device from the main list. More detailed information about adding and configuring Hyper-V virtual hard disks can be found in the chapter entitled [[Creating and Configuring Hyper-V Virtual Hard Disks (VHDs)]]. In terms of new DVD drive devices, the virtual drive may either be mapped to an existing physical device attached to the host system, or to a CD/DVD ISO image file residing on a host accessible file system.
== Virtual Machine BIOS Settings ==
Just like physical computer systems, a virtual machine has a Basic Input Output System (BIOS). As with physical computer systems, the virtual machine BIOS settings may be changed, although the range of options for a virtual machine is considerably considerably narrower than those of a physical BIOS. In fact, the Hyper-V virtual machine BIOS settings are limited to selecting the device from which the guest operating system is to be loaded from when the virtual machine is powered on and choosing whether or not the Num Lock key is on by default:
The ''Processor'' section of the settings panel allows the number of virtual processors or processor cores to be made available to the virtual machine to be configured. Note that this number will be limited by the number of physical processors or processor cores on the host system. It is not, for example, possible to allocate four virtual processors to a virtual machine running on a host with only two physical processorsor processor cores.
The ''Resource Control'' section of the panel specifies how the physical resources are allocated to the virtual machine:
== Virtual Machine Management Settings ==
Beneath the list of hardware devices in the virtual machine settings page is a section entitled ''Management''. This is a essentially a "catch-all" section where a number of miscellaneous settings may be configured:
* '''Name''' - The name of the virtual machine. This option also allows notes about the virtual machine to be recorded.
