What is new with Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012

,

I’ve been reading a lot lately about what people have been saying about Microsoft’s latest go at a hypervisor and many say that now with Hyper-V 2012, Microsoft is catching up to VMware in the enterprise virtualization arena (one example from ZDnet).  So what is all the fuss about…really.  I’ll identify some of the key points of what Hyper-V 2012 is bringing to the virtualization world. To summarise:

  • 32 Virtual CPUs and 512GB to a Virtual Machine
  • VHDX File Format for Virtual Hard Disks (16TB of Storage)
  • Native NIC teaming
  • 64 Node Clustering
  • Cluster-Aware updating
  • Hyper-V Replica (Replication of Virtual Machines)

Two of my favourite additions though are the Cluster-Aware Updating and Hyper-V Replica features.
Cluster-Aware Updating helps to manage down time by maintaining availability during windows update time, so you pretty much schedule when you want the updates to occur and let the cluster take care of the rest, automatically moving Virtual Machines,  maintaining services and availability and then moving them back once the server has restarted and updates are completed. Hyper-V Replica, which performs asynchronous replication of VMs to a replica site (either stand alone or cluster).

The last point has been my biggest gripe with using Hyper-V, how do we achieve DR with a relative low-cost.  We already have all the hardware but the licensing and software costs to perform replication were astronomical.  Now our DR solution is quite straight forward and cost-effective thanks to Server 2012.

This post is by no means exhaustive, but simply the features that stand out to me, and the reasons as to why we are planning to move to Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V 2012.


Leave a Reply

More Posts

Password Protection for Entra and On-Prem Active Directory

One thing I like to get going whenever taking on a new tenant or client is the password protection features. By Default, Entra already has some password protection for your cloud users which detects and blocks known weak passwords such as password and password123 or qwerty as well as looking at well-known passwords that are […]

How to log into ASDM for a Cisco ASA when you get the Unable to launch device manager error

I like to keep my client’s devices up to date to prevent any issues from arising and have access to the devices latest features. Unfortunately not everyone is happy to pay that little extra to have an on-going support / maintenance agreement.  I was recently out at a customer who had an ASA 5505 which […]

How to allow an Active Directory Certificate Authority to generate Certificates with a Subject Alternative Name attribute

Starting with Google Chrome 58, Chrome no longer trusts certificates without the Subject Alternative Name attribute, so this makes it a little troublesome for those with internal CAs where you rely on them for Software Development. We noticed last week that some end users couldn’t hit an internal application over HTTPS, but was fine in […]