Uninstall integration services in 2008 R2 and Win7
How to uninstall the integration services in 2008 R2 / Windows 7 guests? Below the steps with additional information
Before uninstalling the integration Services below is the way of installing them from a disk.
Start the Hyper-V management console
Start and Connect to your Virtual Machine
Click on Action > Insert Integration Services Setup Disk
Authenticate with your username name and password on your VM and open the cmd.exe
At the command prompt browse to the Integration Services Setup Disk (D:\ in most cases)
At the command prompt browse to D:\support\amd64 or D:\support\x86 depending on the architecture of the VM
To Uninstall the Integration Services, just type in the command prompt > Setup.exe /uninstall
Restart the VM to make sure that the uninstallation process worked
Intro
First things first, let's start with the background. When you install the Hyper-V Integration Services inside your guest Windows (different OS architecture / flavour) VM, it allows the VM to access the host hardware resources in a much more efficient way then if it is without it. Sometimes it may be needed to uninstall those Integration Services in order to gain some raw information on how the VM will perform without native Hyper-V support or you run in software conflicts such as there is no networking at all in the VM etc.
Usually, we would want to remove the integration services when doing different checks on the guest VM. This checks might include performance checks for the given VM. Another scenario would be for example if the OS that is running is not supported as a guest OS in the chosen virtualization platform, in our example Hyper-V is used or for troubleshooting different software incompatibility scenarios. Please note that not supported doesn't always mean it would not work but it rather means it is not supported (for example if you want to raise a ticket to the Microsoft Professional team).
Uninstall Hyper-V Integration Services from Windows Guest Virtual Machine
For this blog post, I consider that you have a Windows Server 2008 guest OS and the Integration Services already installed. After that I will show how to uninstall them. In this example Windows Server 2008 OS, is used but this can be done with the other versions as well like: Server 2003 (not supported, end of life), Vista, XP (not supported, end of life) and 2000 (not supported, end of life). Please note that another blog post will be showing you how to accomplish this under 2012 /R2 OS.
Unfortunately the Integration Services cannot be just clicked on in order to be uninstalled but it is possible to uninstall the Integration Services (components) if you know and understand a little about the MS Installer (MSIEXEC).
The Integration Services will not show up in the Add/Remove Programs or Programs and Features sections in the Control Panel, but it is possible to quickly uninstall them.
Below you can find how to steps in order to accomplish this uninstalltion of the Integration Components:
Insert the Integration Services Setup Disk as shown before
Start the Hyper-V management console
Start and Connect to your Virtual Machine
Click on Action > Insert Integration Services Setup Disk
Open the cmd.exe
Note: Please note that for those changes to occur you should have admin permissions / run as administrator on the corresponding machine
Authenticate with your username name and password on your VM and open the command prompt
At the cmd.exe go to the Integration Services Setup Disk, usually this will be the CD/DVD marked as drive D:
At the cmd.exe go to the D:\support\amd64 or D:\support\x86 (depending on your guest architecture - x86 for 32bit OS and x64 for 64 bit OS).
Uninstall the Integration Services
In order to remove the corresponding Integration Services from your Windows (VM), simply type the following at the command prompt (run as administrator cmd.exe):
Setup.exe /uninstall
Please note that in order for the changes to take effect you should restart the machine as much as needed.
Conclusion
This blog post showed just some of the prerequisite knowledge on the Hyper-V Integration Services. The post also demonstrated an easy way to uninstall them. By using the setup.exe /uninstall switch I was able to quickly and easily uninstall the Integration Components (IC) from the required machine.
