Introduction

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V brings something new to the market. Microsoft marketing materials claim that this release goes "beyond virtualization." That might seem like hyperbole at first, but take some time to look at how you can change the way IT works by building a private, public, or hybrid cloud with Hyper-V as the engine of the compute cluster. Then you'll understand how much work Microsoft put into this release.

The original release of Hyper-V was the butt of many jokes in the IT industry. The second release, Windows Server 2008 R2, brought respectability to Hyper-V, and combined with the System Center suite, was a unique offering. It was clear that Microsoft was focusing on service, not servers, recognizing what businesses value, and empowering IT staff to focus on engineering rather than on monotonous mouse-click engineering. Then came the Windows Server 2012 announcements at the Build conference in Anaheim, California, in 2011. Even Microsoft's rivals were staggered by the scale of the improvements, choosing to believe that the final release would include just a fraction of them.

We now know that Microsoft took an entire year after the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 to talk to customers, gather requirements and desires, and plan the new release. They listened; pain points such as the lack of supported NIC teaming were added, difficulties with backup in Hyper-V clusters were fixed, and little niggles that caused administration annoyance had their corners rounded. More important, Microsoft had a vision: Windows Server 2012 would be "built from the cloud up" (another line from Microsoft's marketing). This is the first hypervisor designed to be used in a cloud rather than trying to build wrappers around something that focuses on servers first. Many features were added and improved to enable a business to deploy a private cloud, or a service provider to build a flexible, secure, and measured multi-tenant public cloud. Much of this release is ready to go now, but Microsoft built for the future too, with support for emerging technologies and scalability that is not yet achievable in the real world.

Usually with a Microsoft release, you'll hear headlines that make you think that the product is designed just for massive enterprises with hundreds of thousands of employees. Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V includes features that honestly are intended for the upper end of the market, but some of the headline features, such as SMB3.0 storage or Hyper-V Replica, were designed to deal with the complexities that small/medium enterprises have to deal with too.

This book is intended to be your reference for all things Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. The book was written by three MVPs and a Microsoft consultant who give you their insight on this product. Every chapter aims to give you as much information as possible. Starting from the basics, each chapter will bring you through concepts, showing you how to use and configure features, and lead you to the most complex designs. Most chapters include scenarios that show you how to use Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V in production, in customer sites or your own.

PowerShell was added in Windows Server 2012, and you'll find lots of PowerShell examples in this book. This was a deliberate strategy. Most IT pros who have not used PowerShell are scared of this administration and scripting language, because it is different from how they normally work. Pardon the pun, but it is powerful, enabling simple tasks to be completed more quickly, and enabling complex tasks (such as building a cluster) to be done with a mouse click. You don't need to be a programmer to get to a point where you use PowerShell. None of this book's authors are programmers, and we use the language to make our jobs easier. If you read this book, you will find yourself wanting to use and understand the examples, and hopefully you'll start writing and sharing some scripts of your own.

The book starts with the basics, such as explaining why virtualization exists. It then moves through the foundations of Hyper-V that are common to small or large enterprises; gets into the fun, deep, technical complexities; and returns to common solutions once again, such as disaster recovery, backup, and virtual desktop infrastructure.

Who Should Read This Book

We are making certain assumptions regarding the reader here. You are

• Experienced in working with IT
• Familiar with terminology such as VLAN, LAN, and so on
• Comfortable with installing Windows Server

This book is not intended to be read by a person starting out in the IT industry. You should be comfortable with the basics of server administration and engineering concepts.

The intended audience includes administrators, engineers, and consultants who are working, or starting to work, with virtualization. If you are a Hyper-V veteran, you should know that this release includes more new functionality than was in previous releases combined. If you have experience with another virtualization product, don't assume that your knowledge transfers directly across; every hypervisor does things differently, and Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V includes functionality not yet seen in any of its rivals.

You don't have to work for a Fortune 500 company to get value from this book. Let's face it; that would be a rather small market for a publisher to sell to! This book is aimed at people working in all parts of the market. Whether you are a field engineer providing managed services to small businesses or an architect working for a huge corporation, we have something for you here. We'll teach you the theory and then show you different ways to apply that knowledge.

What's Inside

Here is a glance at what's in each chapter:

1. Chapter 1: Introducing Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V presents you with the newest version of Microsoft's hypervisor. The chapter starts with a brief history of the evolution of IT, up to the present with virtualization, and introduces you to where businesses are going with cloud computing. The chapter also deals with the thorny issues of licensing Windows Server 2012 and licensing for various virtualization scenarios.
2. Chapter 2: Deploying Hyper-V Hosts is where you will learn how to get Hyper-V up and running. This is the starting point for all deployments, large or small. The chapter also covers the host settings of Hyper-V.
3. Chapter 3: Managing Virtual Machines is a long chapter where you will learn how to deploy and configure virtual machines by using the wizards and PowerShell. This chapter also discusses how Dynamic Memory works in Windows Server 2012 and the all new and bigger Live Migration.
4. Chapter 4: Networking is the chapter that discusses how to connect the services in your virtual machines to a network. The chapter starts with the basics, such as how to create virtual switches, and understanding extensibility, and moves on to more-advanced topics such as supporting hardware offloads/enhancements, Quality of Service (QoS), and converged fabric design. This is also the chapter where you will find NIC teaming.
5. Chapter 5: Cloud Computing is a logical extension of the Networking chapter, building on many of the concepts there to create clouds. You will learn about private VLANs (PVLANs), network virtualization, resource pools, and resource metering, which will give you all the components to start building the computer cluster of your very own cloud.
6. Chapter 6: Microsoft iSCSI Software Targetwill be a popular subject for many readers. Windows Server 2012 has a built-in iSCSI target, allowing you to provide storage over the known and trusted storage protocol. Whether you are a small business that wants iSCSI storage on a budget, or you are building a lab where you need to simulate a SAN, this chapter will give you the material you need.
7. Chapter 7: Using File Servers Storing your virtual machines on file shares is now supported. This is made possible thanks to technologies such as SMB Multichannel and SMB Direct, which, when combined, can match or even beat legacy storage protocols. You'll learn how to use this new tier of storage, as well as how to build the new scalable and continuously available Scale-Out File Server architecture.
8. Chapter 8: Building Hyper-V Clusters gives you the knowledge of how to build highly available Hyper-V virtualization or cloud infrastructures. You'll learn about the architecture, the roles of the networks, and best practices for building these clusters. Other subjects include host maintenance and Cluster-Aware Updating.
9. Chapter 9: Virtual SAN Storage and Guest Clustering reminds us that high availability is not limited to just hosts. The reason we have IT is to have services, and those services often require high availability. This chapter shows you how to build guest clusters, as well as how to take advantage of the new ability to virtualize Fibre Channel SANs.
10. Chapter 10: Backup and Recovery covers this critical task for IT in any business. Virtualization should make this easier. This chapter discusses how the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) works with Hyper-V virtual machines, and how Windows Server 2012 has improved to support better backup of highly available virtual machines, as well as virtual machines that are stored on SMB3 file shares. This chapter also shows you how small businesses and lab environments can use Windows Server Backup to back up running virtual machines with application consistency.
11. Chapter 11: Disaster Recovery has great value to businesses. Being able to keep the business...