Microsoft’s final version of it has been made available for download late autumn 2008. No we are not talking about the latest update to the Xbox 360 interface featuring avatars! The focus here is on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.
In October I attended a TechNet Server and Tools event keynote held in London, at which Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer announced the release of Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 to an audience of over 700 IT professionals. We had a sneak peak at some of the features of Hyper-V v2.0 such as live migration and dynamic memory distribution to name a few.
I must say virtualization is a revolutionary technology that has been around, funny enough for over 40 years! Now I know that this may not sound so thrilling to some of you, more so since as far as virtualization of operating systems is concerned, VMware has pretty much dominated the market for a number of years, but I recommend that you delve deeper into the technology and read more about the many features and major improvements Hyper-V now offers.
The Many Advantages of Virtualization
Virtualization it is an all-green solution that allows you to save not only on energy costs for powering and cooling your servers, but also on hardware, overhead and overall operational costs by consolidating your servers and network storage. Another reason why you might want to look into virtualization is hardware underutilisation.
Performance logs indicate that on average server CPU utilization is approximately 7 percent only. By running multiple virtual servers on one physical server you can maximise resource usage without affecting performance, in many cases up to a ratio of 1:10, i.e. run 10 virtual servers on one physical server.
Another new and exciting product launched by Microsoft is without a doubt Server Core. This is a pretty bare operating system which is stripped of the .NET framework and therefore can only run certain roles that do not depend on the framework such as Domain Name System (DNS), Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), Network Load Balancing (NLB) and other basic roles.
It is however a powerful OS that, apart from a few GUI tools here and there, can only be configured and maintained through the command line interface, mainly using Windows PowerShell, Microsoft’s scripting language previously codenamed ‘Monad’.
I am sure those of you who are administrators will appreciate the power of automating tasks using scripts and will be keen to learn more about PowerShell and how it can help make our lives easier.
Hyper V Course
So are you ready to jumpstart your IT virtualization projects with Microsoft’s latest technology known as Hyper-V? You should contact your local IT training course company for more details.
If you are new to the virtualization technology and don’t know where to start, why not register for this First Look Clinic which will familiarize you with the concept of virtualization as well as give you the knowledge and understanding you need to kick-start your career in IT virtualization. Please stay posted for a post on excel training courses coming soon!
This post was written by my colleague, the talented Dalia Molokia. A Microsoft Certified Trainer who delivers Excel training at New Horizons. Thanks Dalia!