Microsoft Hyper-V

A core component of Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V provides an enterprise-capable solution for virtualising Windows or Linux-based servers. This latest incarnation of Hyper-V is improved in a number of key areas, giving it core capabilities similar to those available in solutions from vendors such as VMware and Citrix.  

Hyper-V Key Benefits 

• Reduce the number of physical servers in your environment, enabling a reduction in capital costs while still maintaining logical separation of applications.
• Virtualise more servers on the same hardware configurations by taking advantage of Windows 2008 R2’s improved scalability, memory management, networking and performance improvements. 
• Reduce undesirable downtime for users through the implementation of Hyper-V high availability solutions such as cluster shared volumes, hot-plug memory, hot-plug storage and Live Migration, which allows virtual servers to be migrated between physical hosts without any impact to users.
• Enable improved disaster recovery by creating server snapshots or replicating data and running on different hardware.  

 Hyper-V Capabilities  

• Virtualisation - Run multiple logical servers on a single physical server.
• Scalability - Up to 64 logical processors per host, 4 logical processors per guest and 1TB memory across all virtual machines.
• Live Migration - Migrate running servers between physical machines with no visible interruption to user operations.
• Dynamic Memory - Enables memory as a shared resource that can be dynamically allocated across virtual machines, in reality allowing virtual machines to be configured with more memory than is physically available.
• Multiple OS Support - Supports various guest operating systems including Windows 2003, 2008, 2008R2 and Red Hat or SUSE Linux.
• Live Backup Support - Enables live backup of running virtual machines without downtime.