Microsoft showed the latest version of Hyper-V at build conference together with Windows 8 and Windows Server 8. Microsoft showed a lot of new Hyper-V features which turn Hyper-V in really powerful hypervisor.

Some days ago I posted a blog post about new features which Microsoft showed before the build conference, now it’s time to extend the list of new features. There are a lot of even more powerful features than the once I posted back then.

Windows Server 8 as Cloud OS

First let’s start with Windows Server 8 as the base of Microsoft Cloud strategy. Microsofts focus in Windows Server 8 was to make it easy for all to build public and private cloud solutions. There are a lot of improvements to manageability, security, scalability, extensibility, predictability and reliability which will also improve the possibilities with Hyper-V. In technical terms Microsoft made a lot of improvements how you can manage a lot of servers and services, Storage, Networking and Powershell. Of course there is a lot more, but this are the parts I think are the most important. And here are some keywords to the improvements in Windows Server 8:

Storage improvements – SMB 2.2, SMB transparent Failover, Data deduplication, Storage Spaces, online filesystem repairs, 64TB NTFS volume etc.
NIC Teaming
Powershell v3 – You can now just do everything in Powershell and even more with 23000 PowerShell cmdlets.
Server Dashboard – The new Dashboard lets you manage all servers, or even better, all Services from one place.
Multi-tenant – everything seems to be made for that
Performance Counters

Hyper-V Host improvements

Hyper-V gets not only a lot of improvements to Virtual Machine, also the Hyper-V Hosts get some new limit improvements.

up to 160 logical CPUs
supports up to 2TB RAM
no more vCPU:pCPU ration limit

Hyper-V Virtual Machine improvements

Microsoft did a lot to extend the existing Virtual Machine hardware to support even high workload Virtual Machines. I will not write a lot about this because the facts here will tell more that a lot of words.

VHDX Format – supports up to 64TB Virtual Disks
32 CPUs per VM
512GB RAM per VM
Support for Fibre Channel Adapters
Supporting Virtual Active Directory Servers

Hyper-V Networking improvements

Hyper-V got a lot of improvements in terms of networking. Microsoft realized that networking features are really important if you start to create private and public cloud scenarios and now even create a mix of public and private cloud scenarios without creating a lot of work for the IT teams to reconfigure Virtual Machines.

QoS and flexible bandwidth allocation
Support for SR-IOV (Direct Access to the physical Network adapter)
Network Virtualization
PVLAN support
Dynamic Virtual Machine Queue (D-VMQ)
Receive Side Coalescing (RSC)
DHCP Guard
Extensible virtual switch
IPsec Task offload

Hyper-V Clustering improvements

Hyper-V gets also a lot of Cluster improvements. But you have to be aware that Clusters are for really high availability and this adds a lot of costs to projects and solutions. Microsoft is working on Cloud solutions which will give great availability to low cost. For example Hyper-V Replica or Live Migration to another host over the Ethernet without the need for a shared storage. But if you need real HA you will need the Failover Cluster.

supporting up to 4000 VMs per cluster
supporting up to 64 Cluster nodes
improved Cluster Manager Console
VM Monitoring – Application health detection inside the virtual machine
New Placement policies – Virtual Machine Priority and enhanced placement
Storage Live Migration
Hyper-V Replica supporting clustering
No need for Block Storage – you can use SMB Shares
Support for Storage Spaces
Automated Node Draining – like Maintenance mode in SCVMM
Cluster Aware Updating (CAU)
Cluster Shared Volume Improvements – BitLocker support, a lot of performance improvements, Self-Healing
Live Migration Queing
Migrate multiple Virtual Machine at the same time

Hyper-V Storage improvements

A I mentioned earlier Microsoft made a lot of improvements in terms of storage in Windows Server 8 and Hyper-V can take advantage of those which are quiet impressive. For example with the new features in SMB 2.2 you can now use SMB file shares to store your Virtual Machines.

VHDX
ODX
RDMA
SMB 2.2 – Transparent Failover
4K native disk support
Data Deduplication
Virtual Fiber Channel
VM boot from SAN

Hyper-V Management Improvements

As everywhere in Windows Server 8 PowerShell is the key. And the new Server Manager Dashboard Microsoft enable to create Server Groups to manage multiple servers from a single console.

Powershell for Hyper-V
Powershell Workflows – Commands and Tasks across servers
Hyper-V Extensible Switch – lets vendors to create “plugins”. Could be very interesting for Cisco UCS installations.
Server Manager Dashboard – lets you manage multiple Hyper-V host from a single console.
SCVMM 2012 – not a part of Windows Server 8 but will add great management solutions

Hyper-V HA and Data Protection

Now I think this is maybe the greatest new feature. You can now live migrate a Virtual Machine from one Hyper-V Host to another without Shared Storage or Cluster configuration. And with this option Microsoft also included a new feature called Hyper-V Replica which includes the option to replicate Virtual Machine to another host which can be hosted in the same network or even in the cloud.

Live Migration
Live Storage Migration
Live Migration to another Hosts (Not clustered) over the Ethernet
Hyper-V Replica – Replicated Virtual Machines to another Hyper-V host on-premise or public cloud
BitLocker support for CSV

This are not all of the new features Windows Server 8 Hyper-V has to offer but I tried to list the important ones. And if Microsoft sticks with their licensing model, it will be a really strong competitor to the VMWare vShpere 5.

Powershell Header

If you need some functions a lot in different scripts you create maybe external function files. This is a good way to clean up your code. To get this functions running in your mainscript.ps1 you can call this other file “dotsourced”:

. C:\PSscript\output\sayhello.ps1

If you have more than one external function you have to call each file:

. C:\PSscript\Modules\Output\sayhello.ps1
. C:\PSscript\Modules\Output\saygoodday.ps1
. C:\PSscript\Modules\Output\saybye.ps1

In Powershell v2 you can create your own modules, which you can call by:

Import-Module C:\PSscript\Modules\Output

Now how can you create this output module?

First you create a directory for the all modules, called Modules
Secound you create a directory for the Output module, called Output
Than copy all of your Powershell Scripts (.ps1 files) in to this folder
Now create a file called Output.psm1. Its important that this file has the same name as the folder

In this file write the following code (for each file in this folder):

. ./Modules/Output/sayhello.ps1
. ./Modules//Output/saygoodday.ps1
. ./Modules//Output/saybye.ps1

Now you can use the Import-Module to import your own module called output.

There are a lot of other things you can use to make everything a little bit easier, like system variables for the module and script paths.

Tag Archives: Module

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