Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V

I have already done a couple upgrades of Hyper-V from R1 to R2 and must say that Microsoft has taken a huge leap in their data center virtualization offering! I think most everyone who follows virtualization knows about the BIG improvement, LIVE MIGRATIONS. But Live Migrations are not the only new feature/enhancement with the R2 Hyper-V release. One of the small features that might not get a lot of notice but I really appreciate is a check mark on the Virtaul switch that allows you to turn off administrative access on a physical NIC when connected to a virtual switch. This to me not only reinforces the best practice to have a separate, dedicated NIC for admin access to the host computer but really cleans up the Network Interface connections on a host computer. With R1 each time you created a Virtual Switch a "duplicate" Network Interface was created and without proper naming (side note: ran into this at a client sight, they did not properly name the Network Interfaces and it made troubleshooting and administration a nightmare) would result is numerous Network interfaces only differentiated buy a number appended to the end of the standard name. Now check the check box does not create this second Network Interface, nice work Microsoft.

Another cool feature, and what actually enables Live Migrations, is Clustered Shared Volumes. Along with allowing for multiple hosts to access a single LUN at the same time, it eliminates the requirement for creating and individual LUN for each virtual machine. This provides for better utilization of shared storage space. Now you can create a single large LUN and present it to all hosts in the cluster and place multiple VMs within this LUN separated by simple folders.

More to come!