Ohad Saban CTO High Networks

A compression engine is built into Live Migration in Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V. The CPU in hosts is often underused. Hyper-V will monitor the utilization of CPU resources on the host and throttle compression to prioritize guest.

Virtual hard disks of the VHDX format that are attached to the SCSI controllers of virtual machines can be resized without shutting down the virtual machine. VHDX files can be up- and down-sized. Downsizing can only occur if there is unpartitioned space within the VHDX. This feature supports both Windows and Linux guests. Live Resizing of VHDX files will be huge value to those running mission critical workloads

New storage metrics for IOPS have been added to WS2012 R2. With these metrics, you can determine the IOPS requirements of virtual machines and put caps on storage activity. This will limit how much physical disk activity that virtual machines can create, and therefore limit the damage that activity spikes can cause to other virtual machines and their guest services. One of the concerns with shared storage is the possibility of a race for storage throughput. Enabling Storage QoS will limit the damage that any virtual machine or tenant can do in a cloud.

WS2012 R2 Hyper-V allows you to clone a running virtual machine. This will create an exact copy of the virtual machine that is stored in a saved state. This feature supports GenerationID. That means you can use Live Virtual Machine Cloning to create Active Directory supported clones of a virtual domain controller that is not the PDC Emulator. This feature will be useful for situations where you need to debug a production system or you want to perform tests, such as guest OS upgrades.

You can export a virtual machine with a checkpoint (formerly known as a snapshot) You can also export a checkpoint of a virtual machine.

You can configure up to 64 virtual machines to share a single VHDX file on some shared storage (such as CSV or SMB 3.0). The VM sees the shared VHDX as a shared SAS disk with SCSI-3 persistent reservations. This is for data volumes to create guest clusters, and not for shared boot volumes. It works with down-level guest OSs, such as W2008 R2 with the WS2012 R2 Hyper-V Integration Components installed. This feature is supported by Service Templates in VMM 2012 R2. This will really simplify guest clustering, where virtual machines are used to create a highly available service at the application layer.

The default period for asynchronous replication of the Hyper-V Replica Log is every 5 minutes, but this can be changed to every 30 seconds or every 15 minutes. This allows companies to choose the allowed recovery point objective (RPO) – the maximum allowed amount of data loss in time. Hyper-V Replica can now be extended to a third site. This is an A-B-C extension, and not an A-B/A-C extension. The performance and scalability of Hyper-V Replica has been improved. Maintaining historical copies of virtual machines in the secondary site is costly (IOPS). This has been reduced, so maintaining historical copies of your replica VMs will not punish your storage in the secondary site.

The criticized virtual machine connection of the past (VMConnect.exe process) is being replaced by a Remote Desktop experience that is built into the virtualization stack. This has no dependency on the virtual machine’s networking. By default, this feature is disabled in WS2012 R2 Hyper-V and enabled in Windows 8.1 Client Hyper-V. Things that Remote Desktop VM Connect allow you to do include: Copy & paste text and images. Copy files to/from the client desktop. Do session-based USB redirection. This means you might use a USB stick to copy files. It is not a USB dongle solution.

You can live migrate a virtual machine from WS2012 Hyper-V to WS2012 R2 Hyper-V. This could eliminate downtime when deploying WS2012 R2 Hyper-V. For example, you can deploy a WS2012 R2 Hyper-V host/cluster alongside an existing WS2012 Hyper-V host/cluster. You can then live migrate the virtual machines from the older platform to the new platform with zero downtime to the availability of the services provided by the virtual machines. Note that you cannot do a Live Migration downgrade from WS2012 R2 Hyper-V to WS2012 Hyper-V. It is a one-way upgrade path.

If the parent partition is activated, and if it is running Windows Server 2012 R2, the Windows Server 2012 R2 guest partition is automatically activated without any intervention.

Similar to the StorSimple appliance, Windows Server 2012 R2 can measure the “heat” of storage needs. “Hot” portions of files (block levels) are moved to Solid State Drives (SSDs) and cold data to slower magnetic drives. This allows a favorable balance between capacity and performance. Administrators can assign files to specific storage tiers. This could be a master “gold” vhd for a business customer.

Performance gains of over 50% can be had by having process awareness of the common blocks that are referenced by deduplication.

64 Tb is the addressable space of Windows Server 2012, and a.VHDX can be 64 Tb in size. Now.VHDX virtual disks can be used with iSCSi in Windows Server 2012 R2.

Live Migration can be configured to leverage SMB Direct (Remote Direct Memory Access, or RDMA) on hosts that that NICs with support for this feature. This feature will provide hardware offloaded accelerated copy of memory pages using SMB 3.0 NICs. This can take advantage of SMB Multichannel to span multiple networks. SMB Direct Live Migration provides the fastest way to live migrate virtual machines (not including storage) from one host to another. Memory speed will be the rare bottleneck on a host with PCI3 support and three RDMA NICs for Live Migration.

Dynamic Memory will be supported in Linux Guest OS’s on Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V. This will give much better memory optimization for Linux virtual machines, and it'll allow for much greater densities. Linux distributions with this built-in Linux Integration Services for Hyper- V HyH support are already available. There will be support for online backup of Linux guest OSs. This is not Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for Linux, and it does not give an application consistent backup. Instead, a file system consistent backup is created by freezing the file system. This feature does require an upgrade of any already deploy Linux Integration Services.

PowerShell 4.0 adds new cmdlets for: VPN configuration Start Screen customization DISM NAT TPM WMI TCP/IP Systems Management Storage

This is the first time that Windows Server (and thus Hyper-V) is being developed with and released at or close to the same time as System Center. There has been closer than ever before cooperation within Windows Server and System Center (WSSC). That means you can deploy System Center immediately and follow it up with WS2012 R2 Hyper-V, without the long delays of the past.

Feature or functionalityNew or updated Shared virtual hard diskNew Resize virtual hard diskUpdated Storage Quality of ServiceNew Live migrationsUpdated Virtual machine generationNew Integration servicesUpdated ExportUpdated Failover Clustering and Hyper-VUpdated Enhanced session modeNew Hyper-V ReplicaUpdated Linux supportUpdated ManagementUpdated Automatic Virtual Machine ActivationNew

Feature or functionalityNew or updated Shared virtual hard disk Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview enables clustering virtual machines by using shared virtual hard disk (VHDX) files. Resize virtual hard disk Hyper-V storage has been updated to support resizing virtual hard disks while the virtual machine is running. Storage Quality of Service Storage QoS enables you to manage storage throughput for virtual hard disks that are accessed by your virtual machines Live migrations Hyper-V live migration has been updated to allow the administrator to select the optimal performance options when moving virtual machines to a different server. Virtual machine generation Virtual machine generation determines the virtual hardware and functionality that is presented to the virtual machine: Secure Boot (enabled by default) Boot from a SCSI virtual hard disk Boot from a SCSI virtual DVD PXE boot by using a standard network adapter UEFI firmware support

Thank You Ohad Saban CTO High Networks Windows Server 2012R2