Mastering Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Changes

Windows Server 2012 put Hyper-V to the top of the list of the true top hypervisors by
closing nearly every gap it had with other hypervisors and leapfrogging the
competition in many areas. This entire book focuses on many of the changes in
Windows Server 2012, but here I call out some of the biggest improvements and new
features.

One of the key reasons for the huge advancement of Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012
was not only the big focus on virtualization (to enable Hyper-V to compete and win
against the competition) but also the success of Microsoft’s public cloud service,
Azure. I briefly cover the types of cloud services later in this chapter and in far more
detail later in the book, but for now, realize that Azure is one of the largest public
cloud services that exists. It powers many of Microsoft’s cloud offerings and runs on
Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. All of the knowledge Microsoft gained operating Azure
and the enhancements it needed went into Windows Server 2012, and the engineering
teams are now cloud-first focused, creating and enhancing technologies that are then
made available as part of new Windows Server versions. This is one of the reasons the
release cadence of Windows Server has changed to an annual release cycle. Combining
the development for the public and private cloud solutions makes Hyper-V a much
stronger solution, which is good news for organizations using Hyper-V.

SUCALABILITY

The first grouping of changes relates to scalability, which previously was one of the
weakest areas. Windows Server 2008 R2 did not change the scalability of virtual
machines from Windows Server 2008 (although there were some modest
improvements to the Hyper-V host limits). Windows Server 2012 made some big
changes, as shown in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1: Scalability Changes from Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server
2012

ATTRIBUTE WINDOWS

2008    R2

WINDOWS 2012 IMPROVEMENT

Logical processors  on

hardware

64 320  (640    without

Hyper-V role)

>   5x

LP:VP   ratio 8:1   (12:1   for

Windows 7   VDI)

No  limit

Physical    memory 1TB 4TB 4x

Virtual processors  per

host

512 2,048 4x

Virtual processors  per

virtual machine

4 64    (includes   NUMA

awareness)

16x

Memory  per virtual 64GB 1TB 16x