Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Installation and Configuration Guide

Aidan Finn, Patrick Lownds, Michel Luescher, Damian Flynn

• Publisher: Sybex
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118651438
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatica
• Subtopic: Virtualizzazione

Go-to guide for using Microsoft's updated Hyper-V as a virtualization solution

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-Voffers greater scalability, new components, and more options than ever before for large enterprise systems and small/medium businesses. Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Installation and Configuration Guide is the place to start learning about this new cloud operating system. You'll get up to speed on the architecture, basic deployment and upgrading, creating virtual workloads, designing and implementing advanced network architectures, creating multitenant clouds, backup, disaster recovery, and more.

The international team of expert authors offers deep technical detail, as well as hands-on exercises and plenty of real-world scenarios, so you thoroughly understand all features and how best to use them.

• Explains how to deploy, use, manage, and maintain the Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V virtualization solutions in large enterprises and small- to medium-businesses
• Provides deep technical detail and plenty of exercises showing you how to work with Hyper-V in real-world settings
• Shows you how to quickly configure Hyper-V from the GUI and use PowerShell to script and automate common tasks
• Covers deploying Hyper-V hosts, managing virtual machines, network fabrics, cloud computing, and using file servers
• Also explores virtual SAN storage, creating guest clusters, backup and disaster recovery, using Hyper-V for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), and other topics

Help make your Hyper-V virtualization solution a success with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Installation and Configuration Guide.

Part 1
The Basics

• Chapter 1: Introducing Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V
• Chapter 2: Deploying Hyper-V
• Chapter 3: Managing Virtual Machines

Chapter 1
Introducing Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V

One thing has remained constant in IT since the invention of the computer: change. Our industry has moved from highly centralized mainframes with distributed terminals, through distributed servers and PCs, and is moving back to a highly centralized model based on virtualization technologies such as Hyper-V. In this chapter, you will look at the shift that has been happening and will learn what has started to happen with cloud computing. That will lead you to Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.

With the high level and business stuff out of the way, you’ll move on to technology, looking at the requirements for Hyper-V, the scalability, and the supported guest operating systems.

You cannot successfully design, implement, manage, or troubleshoot Hyper-V without understanding the underlying architecture. This will help with understanding why you need to install or update some special software in virtual machines, why some features of virtual machines perform better than others, and why some advanced technologies such as Single-Root I/O Virtualization exist.

One subject that all techies love to hate is licensing, but it’s an important subject. Correctly licensing virtualization means that you keep the company legal, but it also can save the organization money. Licensing is like a sand dune, constantly changing and moving, but in this chapter you’ll look at how it works, no matter what virtualization platform you use.

We cannot pretend that VMware, the company that had uncontested domination of the virtualization market, does not exist. So this chapter presents a quick comparison of their solution and Microsoft’s products. This chapter also gives those who are experienced with VMware a quick introduction to Hyper-V.

We wrap up the chapter by talking about some other important things for you to learn. The most important step of the entire project is the assessment; it’s almost impossible to be successful without correct sizing and planning. Microsoft makes this possible via the free Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit. One of the most important new features in Windows Server 2012 is PowerShell. This might not be a PowerShell book, but you will see a lot of PowerShell in these pages. We introduce you to PowerShell, explain why you will want to learn it, and show you how to get started.

In this chapter, you’ll learn about

• Virtualization and cloud computing
• Hyper-V architecture, requirements, and supported guest operating systems
• Sizing a Hyper-V project and using PowerShell

Virtualization and Cloud Computing

You have to understand where you have come from in order to know where you are going. In this section, you are going to look at how the IT world started in the mainframe era and is now moving toward cloud computing. You’ll also learn why this is relevant to Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.

Computing of the Past: Client/Server

How computing has been done has changed—and in some ways, almost gone full circle—over the past few decades. Huge and expensive mainframes dominated the early days, providing a highly contended compute resource that a relatively small number of people used from dumb terminals. Those mainframes were a single and very expensive point of failure. Their inflexibility and cost became their downfall when the era of client/server computing started.

Cheap PCs that eventually settled mostly on the Windows operating system replaced the green-screen terminal. This gave users a more powerful device that enabled them to run many tasks locally. The lower cost and distributed computing power also enabled every office worker to use a PC, and PCs appeared in lots of unusual places in various forms, such as a touch-screen device on a factory floor, a handheld device that could be sterilized in a hospital, or a toughened and secure laptop in a military forward operating base.

The lower cost of servers allowed a few things to happen. Mainframes require lots of change control and are inflexible because of the risk of mistakes impacting all business operations. A server, or group of servers, typically runs a single application. That meant that a business could be more flexible. Need a new application? Get a new server. Need to upgrade that application? Go ahead, after the prerequisites are there on the server. Servers started to appear in huge numbers, and not just in a central computer room or datacenter. We now had server sprawl across the entire network.

In the mid-1990s, a company called Citrix Systems made famous a technology that went through many names over the years. Whether you called it WinFrame, MetaFrame, or XenApp, we saw the start of a return to the centralized computing environment. Many businesses struggled with managing PCs that were scattered around the WAN/Internet. There were also server applications that preferred the end user to be local, but those users might be located around the city, the country, or even around the world. Citrix introduced server-based computing, whereby users used a software client on a PC or terminal to log in to a shared server to get their own desktop, just as they would on a local PC. The Citrix server or farm was located in a central datacenter beside the application servers. End-user performance for those applications was improved. This technology simplified administration in some ways while complicating it in others (user settings, peripheral devices, and rich content transmission continue to be issues to this day). Over the years, server processor power improved, memory density increased on the motherboard, and more users could log in to a single Citrix server. Meanwhile, using a symbiotic relationship with Citrix, Microsoft introduced us to Terminal Services, which became Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2008.

Server-based computing was all the rage in the late 1990s. Many of those end-of-year predictions told us that the era of the PC was dead, and we’d all be logging into Terminal Servers or something similar in the year 2000, assuming that the Y2K (year 2000 programming bug) didn’t end the world. Strangely, the world ignored these experts and continued to use the PC because of the local compute power that was more economical, more available, more flexible, and had fewer compatibility issues than datacenter compute power.

Back in the server world, we also started to see several kinds of reactions to server sprawl. Network appliance vendors created technologies to move servers back into a central datacenter, while retaining client software performance and meeting end-user expectations, by enabling better remote working and consolidation. Operating systems and applications also tried to enable centralization. Client/server computing was a reaction to the extreme centralization of the mainframe, but here the industry was fighting to get back to those heady days. Why? There were two big problems:

• There was a lot o...