Hyper-V 3.0 and Windows 8
Now that the Build Conference is over and the buzz is starting to wear off, I’d like to wrap up the things I’m most excited about when it comes to Hyper-V 3.0 and Windows 8.
First off, the fact that we now have Hyper-V on the client version of the OS made me dump my old dual boot setup and install Windows 8 Client as the main OS on my laptop. I’m very satisfied with how it runs so far, so it’ll probably remain that way until the Beta/RC versions come out.
But even cooler are the new features added to Hyper-V 3.0 – and here I’m thinking of things like:
- 160 LPs (logical processors) and up to 2TB of RAM support on the host
- 32 vCPUs (virtual-CPUs) and 512 GB of RAM support inside guests
- NUMA architecture support inside the guest
- Multiple concurrent Live Migration tasks (along with Live Migration queuing support in Failover Clustering)
- Live Migration without Failover Clustering
- Live Migration with no shared storage
- Hyper-V Replica (a feature which was announced a few months ago, Hyper-V Replica allows replicating a virtual machine to another Hyper-V host without the need for expensive storage hardware and replication software – it even works with local storage!; this brings in new Disaster Recovery scenarios which were very hard to achieve previously)
- Support for NFS storage (using SMB 2.2)
- Storage Live Migration without the need of a shared storage solution and a clustered setup
- Online Snapshot merge (the root cause of many issues with Hyper-V in the past was that the snapshot merge could only be done while the virtual machine was offline, and it usually took a *very* long time)
- VHDX format (the 2TB limit on VHDs is now raised to 16TB with VHDX)
- Offloaded Date Transfer (ODX) – enables Hyper-V to take advantage of the storage features on backend storage systems, i.e. when performing file copies, an ODX-enabled SAN will handle the data transfer itself with zero to minimal CPU utilization
- Dynamic Memory now allows you to specify a minimum memory value in addition to the startup and maximum values, as well as enables changes while the VM is running allowing you to increase the maximum or decrease the minimum memory
- Fiber Channel support inside guests
- Extensible Virtual Switch (the new virtual switch has a number of additional capabilities such as bandwidth shaping, while also being extensible and allowing a number of new features)
- Virtual machine priority on Failover Clustering setups (allows VMs to be started according to their set priority in case of a cluster node failure)
- Hyper-V now works fine with a wireless NIC as well (no more wireless connection sharing workarounds)
- In-box Metering – support for tracking virtual machine utilization (CPU, memory, network and disk space), currently only available via PowerShell cmdlets and not exposed in the GUI (this is amazing if you want to add a billing component to your virtualized infrastructure setup, for instance)
- Speaking of PowerShell, Hyper-V 3.0 now comes with a complete set of native PowerShell cmdlets – basically allowing you to script anything you can do via the UI
- Support for backing up virtual machines in Windows Server Backup
Windows 8 itself brings a number of new features as well, some of which do contribute to the overall Hyper-V experience, such as NIC teaming (finally!) and the native ISO and VHD support (no need for 3rd party tools to mount ISOs anymore).
If you want to test out Windows 8 (Server/Client), a Developer Preview version of the Windows 8 Client OS is available for free. In case you want to run it inside a virtual environment, this blog post should help you out. Also, as Ben Armstrong mentioned on his blog, while the Windows 8 Developer Preview does run under Hyper-V – there is a known problem with running the Windows 8 Developer Preview on Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2. If you are planning to do this you should have a look at this hotfix: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;2526776
