Microsoft Virtualization Secrets

Using Hyper-V with Windows Server 2012

Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 provided solid virtualization capabilities with features such as Dynamic Memory, Cluster Shared Volumes, and Live Migration; and all those capabilities are present in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, too. However, the additional changes related to Hyper-V and the complementary Windows Server 2012 features are nothing short of phenomenal. Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 provide the best platform for virtualization.

Live Migration is critical to organizations. No new feature breaks the ability to move a virtual machine between servers without downtime.

I have done a lot of Windows Server 2012 briefings, and Figure 8-14 shows the first slide I use for Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V features. It shows the main new capabilities—not all of them, just the major ones. This gives you some idea of the sheer scale of improvements in this version. In this section, I cover the major Hyper-V features introduced in Windows Server 2012 that can greatly affect how machine virtualization is implemented in your organization and how it stacks up against the competition.

Figure 8-14: New features of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V

Scalability Changes

Four virtual CPUs and 64GB of memory per virtual machine seemed like plenty when Hyper-V was first introduced, as did 2TB VHD files; but as larger workloads are being virtualized, ...