Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V 10 Minute Tour - Redux
Windows Server 2008 is in the RTM process so for all practical purposes, it's shipped. Inside is a beta of Hyper-V. Hyper-V will be setting the stage for a whole new wave of technologies so with that in mind, I thought I'd give you a quick peek at the product via a screencast video I created. I actually published this in September but have re-encoded it for Silverlight streaming.
Hypervisor
I love that name. It's catchy and kewl. It sounds like a supervisor for hyper space or something. It does of course refer to the new thin layer that is installed on Windows Server 2008 also know at the virtualization parent partition. It's also a a term used industry wide so when you hear the term, it doesn't just refer to the Microsoft implementation.
Our hypervisor, code named "Viridian" and now called Hyper-V, is an installable Windows Server 2008 role. After installation of this role, you can start installing one or more child partitions in which to run your virtualization workloads. Installation of those virtual machines is fairly straight forward although there are some things you need to be aware of.
Virtual Machine Additions
In order to use the new high speed VMBUS, you'll want to uninstall any previous additions from Virtual PC or Virtual Server, then install the integration components for Hyper-V. We're looking at making that transition as painless as possible, but you'll have to work through some of this manually until we get that work done.
Snapshots
You'll notice when you start looking at the CTP (and the screencast demo below), that we've added the ability to take snapshots of your virtual machines in either an online or offline state. This gives you a look into the VSS capabilities that are coming. This is going to offer much more flexibility in your high availability and disaster recovery planning. |
Double click the player for a full screen view. |
Management Tools
We do of course ship a management console with Hyper-V which you'll see in the demos. However, our strategy is to take advantage of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 product for advanced management of the virtualization partitions, VM workloads, monitoring, reporting, resource assignments, etc. You simple won't believe what's coming and I'm not going to spill all of the beans just yet, but you can count on some deep dives later.
The Screencast
Take a look at the screencast and go on a tour of Hyper-V. The video is a little over ten minutes in length and I tried to hit some of the key areas so you can get a quick technical overview of the product. If you want to save this local and review it offline, please right mouse click the second link and "SAVE AS".
Save Local - http://msinetpub.vo.llnwd.net/d1/keithcombs/ws2008/WSvTour.wmv
Other Resources
A number of new websites have gone live in the past week or so. Here are a few of my favorites. You haven't seen anything yet. We are just getting started.
http://www.microsoft.com/scvmm
http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization
http://technet.microsoft.com/scvmm
