Does this scare you?

HVS2008R2

This, if you don’t know, is Hyper-V Server 2008 R2.  No proper GUI, pretty-much command-line oriented, and without doubt, in my eyes, the optimal way to deploy Hyper-V into businesses of all sizes.  Why this, over the GUI version of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V?  Well, there’s less going on, reduced patches, reduced services, and it’s kind of like the Ronseal version of Hyper-V – it does exactly what it says on the tin (that’s more for the UK guys!) i.e. it’s Hyper-V, and Clustering, and no other roles.  Sure it has the driver model, and the core kernel, but that’s pretty much it.  It’s still manageable and deployable like your normal Windows OS’s, it’s just, well, smaller.  Best of all, is it’s free for everyone and unlike others, we don’t skimp on the features of our free version.  Live Migration, High Availability, Hot-Add and more, it’s all in there, for free.

Question is, how to you deploy it, configure it, and manage it, and how quick can you do it?

Answer – watch this video, and be up and running in about an hour!

HVS2008R2Slide

In this one-off video, I walk through a bare-metal installation of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (RC) on 2 physical nodes, hook them up to an iSCSI SAN, configure the SAN storage, and then, from a Windows 7 (RC) laptop, validate, and build a Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (RC) Cluster.  The end result?  A Highly Available, Live Migratable, Virtual Machine!

Duration: 48m 34s

Download the video, and more, from the VirtualboyTV site