Benefits of Hyper-V

Microsoft's Hyper-V is a virtualization platform that gives you the ability to manage all your physical and virtual resources from a single set of integrated management utilities. Microsoft's Hyper-V can help an organization with all of the following:

Server Consolidation This is one of the major benefits that Hyper-V offers. Server consolidation allows an organization to run many versions of server (even non-Microsoft versions) on a single box. Each one of these versions is isolated from the other versions running on the same machine. This allows an organization to have a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) while maintaining all the services and servers that are required to make the network operate properly.

Downtime and Recoverability Two major concerns that all organizations face are downtime and recoverability. Downtime includes not only unscheduled events (such as machine errors or hardware failure) but also scheduled events like backups and maintenance. Microsoft's Hyper-V has many features like live backup that help reduce the server downtime for an organization.
Recoverability is also something that all IT staff members should be concerned about. Most organizations could not afford to lose their data and still stay in business. Disaster recoverability is supported by Hyper-V through clustering and backups, thus reducing downtime and saving an organization money.

Testing and Development One of the nice benefits of using Microsoft's Hyper-V is the ability to test or develop software in a safe virtual machine operating system. Any operating system, including Windows 7, can be used in a Hyper-V environment.
If you have been in this industry long enough, you have run into the situation of loading a service pack or utility and watching your system crash because of that install. By testing it in Hyper-V, an administrator can reduce the chances of network downtime on a live server.

Dynamic Datacenter Hyper-V virtualization allows you to design and create a dynamic network environment that not only addresses network problems but anticipates higher demands of network resources.

Features of Hyper-V

Now that you have seen some of the benefits of Microsoft Hyper-V, let's look at some of the new features included with Microsoft Hyper-V:

Symmetric Multiprocessors (SMP) Support Hyper-V allows a virtual machine environment to use up to four processors, allowing for SMP support.

New Architecture Design Hyper-V was designed to run on a 64-bit processor that allows an administrator to use many different types of devices. This 64-bit architecture also allows for better system performance.

Operating System Support Hyper-V allows an organization to run both Microsoft and non-Microsoft operating systems (Windows, Linux, UNIX, etc.), giving an organization more flexibility. The operating systems can be both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

Virtual Machine Migration A nice feature of Hyper-V is the ability to migrate virtual machines from one server to another without long periods of downtime. Let's say that you have a server that is having hardware problems; you can switch the virtual machine to another server running Hyper-V without rebuilding the bad machine immediately.

Network Load Balancing Hyper-V gives an organization the ability to use Network Load Balancing (NLB). The NLB can be placed across multiple virtual machines even if they are on different physical machines.

Hardware Architecture With the new Hyper-V hardware architecture, all hardware resources in a virtual machine (disk, network card, RAM, and so forth) have access to those resources on the physical machine.

Scalability Microsoft's Hyper-V gives an organization the ability to place large number of virtual machines on the same physical machine. This gives an organization the ability to grow a network without purchasing additional hardware.

Now that you understand the benefits and features of Hyper-V, in the next section we install Hyper-V.