The Register guide to Windows Server 2012: Hyper-V

In February we published the The Register Guide to Windows Server 2012 as a free ebook. To date there has been about 8,000 downloads. To give you a flavour of the book, co-written by Trevor Pott and Liam Proven, we are publishing our third and final extract, about Hyper-V - but to read it all you need to get downloading. …

[CalmHandOnTheTiller]

Righteous Stance Has Survived Scrutiny

I chose to ignore VMware a long time ago and follow the MS VM Path to this point in time and space ...

Glad I did.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got two hypervisor machines in my home lab - both HP Microservers, one runs Hyper-v and the other VMware. I like both, there are a couple of issues with Hyper-v, no USB mapping to the VM and no migration from VMware (or other) to Hyper-v, that's about it as far as I can tell, although it's still early days.

There does seem to be a general interest in this version of Hyper-v (I work in backup/storage and we're getting lots of customer queries specific to Hyper-v, hence why I thought I should learn it) I've also seen the press release from EMC about how great VMware is and how poor Hyper-v is, which is usually a telling sign that a company is cacking it.

[CalmHandOnTheTiller]

Envy

Hyper-V Server 2012 (it really is FREE) with CentOS VMs in my Dev/Test and also Live environment.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Envy

Yes - Hyper-V currently outperforms and out scales the KVM Hypervisor, and provides very similar performance to the latest VMware ESXi

[Tezfair]

dipped my toes

Over xmas 2012 I treated myself to a new server, chucked 16Gb and virtulised my live SBS 2011 with disk2vhd. Dropped it into Server 2012 hyperV and it pretty much ran without issue, and has been solid since. This is now part of my DR plan for customers.

Only issue I had was that im not able to make auto snapshots because I use direct access to a hard drive rather than a VHD so all I do is pause the sbs, take it offline, copy the vhd and restart the sbs vm.

My lad has a Virtual XP running a minecraft server in hyperV too.

This version is far easier to use than any others, shame the gui on server 2012 is metro-y, but classic shell helps :)

[Anonymous Coward]

"This version is far easier to use than any others, shame the gui on server 2012 is metro-y, but classic shell helps :)"

You are not meant to use the local GUI in normal use. It doesn't even install by default. Install The RAT on your PC...

[Andrew Baines]

>> but classic shell helps

Must be an idiot to start mucking about with stuff like that on a server. Change happens, get over it.

HyperV really is great in the latest release. Just need to get my DC onto Server 2012, but it's a slow process when migrating from SBS - just too much to lose if it goes wrong.

[Tezfair]

Re: >> but classic shell helps

"Must be an idiot to start mucking about with stuff like that on a server. Change happens, get over it"

My personal server so its fine. besides, I can navigate around server environment far faster than having to spend 30 seconds each time running the mouse into corners to get anything to appear or having chuffing great coloured blocks appear on the screen and then looking to see which one is relevant.

People like CLI, I prefer GUI although I do 'do' CLI when I have to.