In the beginning, Hyper-V was an afterthought to most enterprise users, just another native Windows Server tool with little business value. Slowly but surely, the perception changed as the product continued to evolve. Some of the biggest improvements came in the launch of Windows Server 2012. Dubbed “3.0”, this version of Hyper-V introduced a number of exciting new features, including a few we’ve yet to really dig into, such as:
More VMs. The enhanced clustering capabilities in Hyper-V 3.0 highlight some of the strengths it draws from Windows Server 8. Thanks to the underlying OS, it can support as many as 63 nodes and up to 4,000 VMs (or 8000 depending on who you ask) on a single host, which is considerably more than what VMware handles.
Bigger VMs. The enterprise community couldn’t help but give consideration to the trending alternative when learning of the beefier support for workloads. Hyper-V 3.0 supports as much as 32 cores in virtual processing power and 512 GB of RAM, allowing for type of scalability high-volume businesses demand.
More virtual disk space. The VHDX feature is another scalability improvement made by Microsoft. VHDX trumps the original virtual hard disk (VHD) format by supporting 16TB in storage, while enabling virtual environments to enjoy better storage, performance, and data protection.
VM replication. Hyper-V Replica allows administrators to replicate the state of a live virtual machine from its primary location to a backup location of sorts. With no need for special storage or network hardware, this feature may come in handy for recovery efforts should disaster strike at the primary site.
VM grouping and isolation. Version 3.0 also includes support for affinity and non-affinity rules. Like the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) rules in VMware, these options allow you to determine whether or not VMs with similar resource needs run on the same host.
