Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V New Features - Provide Better Administration and Guest Support

Better Administration Support. Hyper-V guest sessions can be administered by two separate tools. One tool, the Hyper-V Administration tool, comes free out of the box with Windows Server 2008. The other tool, System Center VMM, can be purchased separately. Some overlap exists between what the Hyper-V Administration tool and the VMM tool do. For the most part, however, the builtin tool enables you to start and stop guest sessions and to take snapshots of the sessions for image backup and recovery. The VMM tool provides all those capabilities, too. But, it also enables an administrator to organize images across different administrative groups, as. Thus, the VMM tool allows for the creation and management of template images for faster and easier image provisioning, provides a way to create a virtual image from existing physical or running virtual sessions, and provides clustering of virtual images across multiple VMM manage host servers.


Better Guest Support. Hyper-V added several new features that provide better support for guest sessions, such as 64-bit guest support, support for non-Windows guest sessions, and support for dedicated processors in guest sessions.

Hyper-V added the ability to support not only 32-bit guest sessions as earlier versions of
Microsoft’s Virtual Server 2005 product provided, but also 64-bit guest sessions. This
improvement allows guest sessions to run some of the latest 64-bit-only application software from Microsoft and other vendors, such as Exchange Server 2007. And although
some applications will run in either 32-bit or 64-bit versions, for organizations looking for faster information processing, or support for more than 4GB of RAM, the 64-bit guest
session provides the same capabilities as if the organization were running the application
on a dedicated physical 64-bit server system.

With Hyper-V, you can also dedicate one, two, or four processor cores to a virtual guest
session. Instead of aggregating the performance of all the Hyper-V host server’s processors and dividing the processing performance for the guest images somewhat equally, an administrator can dedicate processors to guest images to ensure higher performance for the guest session. With hardware supporting two or four quad-core processors in a single server system, there are plenty of processors in servers these days to appropriately allocate processing speed to the server guests that require more performance.

Support for non-Windows guests, such as Linux, was an indication from Microsoft that they are serious about providing multiplatform support within their Hyper-V host servers. Linux servers are not only supported to run as guest sessions on Hyper-V, but Microsoft has developed integration tools to better support Linux guest integration into a managed Hyper-V host environment.

Source of Information : Sams - Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Unleashed 08