We Have Moved, please visit us @ http://scorpiotek.com/blog

I have been testing Windows Hyper-V for quite some time.  There have been some things that make me want to lose it and some others that I just sit back and let my jaw drop in admiration.  This post is about the latter, and yes – there will be a future post about the former

No More Admin Web Page

Being a web developer, I’d be the first one who admits that Web Applications are the way of the future in terms of compatibility, portability, and ease of management.  However, I was not really a fan of the interface on Virtual Server.  Windows Hyper-V spots a spanking MMC snap-in that makes it very very fast to carry out all sorts of operations.   The interface is very similar to any other roles in Windows Server 2008; so once you get the hang of it, you can leverage your knowledge and apply it to other roles.

Snapshots

This is by far my favorite feature yet.  VMWare has had something similar for quite some time, but I really like Hyper-V’s implementation a lot better.  Snapshots are restore points to which you can go at any given point in time.   Think of it as multiple undo disks.  Snapshots can be taken at any state (on, off, paused) and can be a blessing when it comes to demos.  For instance, right now I am preparing a demo on Windows Server HPC 2008 deployment.   I will take various snapshots to show the audience the point in which the VM is being deployed, and when the VM reaches the end of the operation, something that would take about an hour to showcase (due to the sluggishness of my USB HD).

Multiple VMRC Connections

When you are working with Hyper-V and and want to take control of a machine, just double click its screen preview.  You will be presented with a window that allows you to control the VM directly.   The only think I don’t like too much is the icon used to represent the VMRC connection – it resembles WAY too much the RDC connection icon; recipe for confusion.

Export Facilities

If you want to take VM from one server to the next, you have to merge differencing disks and move them over.  Undo disks have to be kissed goodbye as well.   With Hyper-V, you can select to export the machine as is at any state!   You will be asked to choose a folder and in here you would get the VM’s VHD (and any dependent VHDs as well), snapshots, and VM configurations.  Move that folder to the new server, import the VM and you are good to go.   This procedure preserves (in theory) undo disks, which I think is amazing

Speed

Who doesn’t like things to move faster when it comes to computers?  With Hyper-V, I am running a virtual high performance computing  cluster with a MacBookPro on external USB drives and 4 GBs of RAM.   The result is quite impressive, and even though my bottleneck is the USB bus, things move, and a lot faster than when running any virtualization software I have used with this machine.

If you have some spare time, take Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V for a spin.   Right now all you need to do is install Windows Server 2008, do a system update and then install the Virtualization role.