Unix Tipz & Tricz

Introduction:

Administrators want flexibility in allocating computing resources for specific tasks. Virtualization technologies provide this flexibility by decoupling the hardware from the workload being performed. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V RC1 offers a robust, scalable hypervisor-based virtualization platform allowing enterprises to provision and manage virtual server workloads.

Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V RC1 offers the following benefits over Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2:

• Full integration with Windows Server 2008 (installed as server role).

• Support for both 64-bit and 32-bit guest OSs.

• Ability to assign up to four virtual CPUs and 32 GB RAM to each guest OS.

• Improved management interface.

• Extensible VMBus architecture that improves performance by lowering the overhead of guest OS I/O.

Applicable environments

Microsoft defines the following scenarios as target environments for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V RC1:

• Production Server Consolidation: Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V RC1 can be beneficial for organizations wanting to consolidate servers to better utilize hardware resources or reduce power and space constraints in their data centers.

• Business Continuity Management: Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V RC1 can minimize the impact of unscheduled downtime for an efficient and flexible disaster recovery solution.

• Software Test and Development: Administrators can allocate a child partition to development resources to reduce the amount of server hardware required in the data center.

• Dynamic Data center: Administrators will have the capability to dynamically add resources to virtual machines and move them across physical machines without affecting users.

New in Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V RC1

Below is a list of new technologies included in Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V RC1:

• Quick Migration: The ability to move running virtual machines from one host server to another with minimal downtime.

• High Availability: Support for host-to-host connectivity and cluster support for all virtual machines running on a host server.

• Server Core Role: Support for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V RC1 as a role within Server Core based installations of Windows Server 2008.

• Server Manager Integration: Installation of the role available within the Server Manager administrative console.

• Live Backups with VSS: Support for Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) enabling live snapshot backups of running Virtual Machines.

• Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) Tools: VHD tools to enable compaction, expansion, and inspection of VHDs created with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V RC1.

• VM Manageability: The ability to clone virtual machine characteristics across different hosts through backups of imported or exported virtual machine configurations.

• Linux Integration Components: Support for SLES 10 SP1 (x86 and x64 editions).

• Improved Performance: Fixes that will improve system performance.

• Improved access control with Authorization Manager (AzMan): Secure role-based access control models for improved administration is available through AzMan.

• Remote Management: Support for remote management as well as a Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V RC1 Microsoft Management Console only installation option for separate management nodes.

• Increased Virtual SCSI support: Support for up to four Virtual SCSI controllers per virtual machine.

• Increased Memory Support: Support for up to 64 GB of memory per virtual machine.

• Quick Reset: Option to quickly reset checkboxes and delete saved credentials when connecting to virtual machines.