Hyper-V 3.0 in Windows Server 2012

Turf War

Article from ADMIN 11/2012

By Thomas Joos

In the old Hyper-V hypervisor from Microsoft, many features for professional use were missing. The new version 3.0 has been significantly improved and is slowly catching up to VMware.

Microsoft delivers a new version of its Hyper-V virtualization technology with Windows Server 2012. This version offers several improvements compared with its predecessor, and because the technology is included in the server operating system, companies can use Hyper-V 3.0 with no additional cost. In this article, I give an overview of the most important innovations in the new Hyper-V. Those who want to try out Windows Server 2012 can download the release candidate online [1].

More Memory

Future Hyper-V hosts can use 2TB of RAM and manage 160 CPUs; virtual machines themselves use 512GB of RAM. Virtual machines can be prioritized in Hyper-V clusters, and with live migration, they can be moved between cluster nodes while in full operation. If one node breaks down, Hyper-V 3.0 first moves the virtual machines with the highest priority.

Snapshots allow virtual servers to be backed up and restored to a specific point in time. On domain controllers, snapshots also back up the Active Directory (AD) database. Until now, resetting to a snapshot on a domain controller (DC) could lead to inconsistencies in the AD database, which also influenced other domain controllers because, in an Active Directory, all objects have a specific Update Sequence Number (USN). Every DC keeps a list of these USNs and is also in this list. If a snapshot is restored, the DC changes the USNs of many objects, which will very probably lead to inconsistencies. In any case, the other DCs will disconnect the restored DC from the network.

Thanks to Active Directory improvements in Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V 3.0, virtualizing domain controllers with Windows Server 2012 is easier, and creating snapshots for domain controllers is not a problem.

To clone a virtual domain controller with Windows Server 2012, you don't need additional tools. Administrators can

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