Last week I talked about the fact that we had introduced two new technologies for making live migration faster in Windows Server 2012 R2 .  Today I would like to dig in deep on how one of these approaches, live migration with compression, actually...

On Monday I gave a quick introduction to the faster live migration technologies in Windows Server 2012 R2.  Before I start getting into how this all works and what the things to consider are, lets talk about how you configure it. By default – when...

There are a number of things happening with the ever popular Hyper-V architectural posters at the moment.  First, last week updated Hyper-V architectural posters for Windows Server 2012 R2 were made available here: http://www.microsoft.com/download...

There are a number of interesting new features in Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 R2.  One of the ones that I was directly involved in was the work to make live migration faster. Now, most people are pretty impressed with live migration today. ...

I was recently asked how you should go about determining the NUMA topology of a physical computer, for the purposes of planning a Hyper-V deployment.  This is something that is normally quite tricky to do – so we actually included this information...

If you have Hyper-V Replica enabled on a virtual machine, and Hyper-V is not able to send all disk changes across in a timely fashion, the replication relationship will eventually be put into a failed state.  At this point in time you need to perform...

I was recently given a pointer to the following white paper that goes through all the best practices for virtualizing Exchange on top of Hyper-V: http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/A/C/4AC32FD3-220E-45DC-AA97-DBDBE19C15B2/Best_Practices_for_Virtualizing_and_Managing_Exchange_2013...

Hyper-V Replica allows you to configure where replicated virtual machines will be stored.  You can either choose to have all replicated virtual machines stored in a single location, or you can choose to specify a separate location for each primary...

Continuing the story of how I am using Hyper-V Replica in my house – we arrive at the interesting discussion of Hyper-V Replica and Active Directory.  This first thing to point out is that if you are running Windows Server 2012 or later for your...

As you hopefully know – I have been running Hyper-V Replica in my house for about a year now.  In this time I have had a couple of instances when I had to take a step back and ask myself if I wanted to do a planned or an unplanned failover of a virtual...

If you have used Hyper-V Replica, you will know about the replica status column.  This is the part of the user interface where we tell you what the state of replica is: normal, warning or critical.  A simple interpretation of these states is...

Yesterday I posted about my new home setup , which makes heavy use of Hyper-V Replica. When you first setup Hyper-V Replica for a virtual machine – we copy the virtual machine configuration and storage from the primary server to the replica server. From...

A while ago I talked about how I was using Hyper-V in my house . These days I have a quite different configuration in place. I updated my household deployment immediately after Windows Server 2012 was released. I had a couple of goals with my new architecture...

I recently rebuilt a Hyper-V server – where all of my virtual machines were shutdown first and stored on a secondary disk.  Once I had finished installing the operating system and had Hyper-V up and running – I wondered what the most efficient way...

I have been getting more and more questions about how to use the Hyper-V v2 WMI namespace recently – so I have just created a TechNet Wiki article that links to a number of samples / documentation pages about how to do this.  You can get all the...

I was asked this question today.  My first response was: “It doesn’t”.  But after a bit of thought I realized what was going on for the user in question.  Whenever you take a snapshot of a Hyper-V virtual machine, we capture the point in...

The Windows Server 2012 July 2013 update rollup is an important one to install on Hyper-V servers.  Specifically because of this update: 2853952   Active Directory database becomes corrupted when a Windows Server 2012-based Hyper-V host server...

I recently had to do some demonstrations on my laptop – which has a 1366 x 768 display.  This made it hard to use Hyper-V virtual machines, which default to 1024 x 768 and only allow you to configure 4 x 3 resolutions. Luckily, it is actually possible...

Yesterday I gave a presentation on new features in Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 R2.  As part of this presentation I did multiple demonstrations – which involved starting and stopping many virtual machines.  While I was preparing and practicing...

I am currently on my way to TechEd Europe (writing from the airport right now).  I will be in Spain this week and will be giving two presentations: Title : Hyper-V – What’s New in Windows Server 2012 R2 Time : June 25, 2013 from 5:00PM to 6:15PM...

Most people use the built in Hyper-V PowerShell cmdlets to control Hyper-V these days.  That said, there are people out there who program directly to our WMI APIs.  In Windows Server 2012 we introduced a new WMI namespace – and recently I have...

I have just learned about this - and it looks quite handy. The Hyper-V Management Pack Extensions - available for download here: http://hypervmpe2012.codeplex.com/ - take our existing management pack and adds extra capabilities. Quoting the download page...

I have been running Hyper-V Replica in my house for a while now.  A while ago I noticed that some of my virtual machines kept on going into a critical replication state.  It took a while for me to figure out what was happening: Can you spot...

Next week I am heading off to TechED.  What will I be talking about?  It’s a secret… Seriously.  I have two sessions which are currently showing up as: And: And I can’t tell you any more than that.  But, if it is a secret – it has...

When you are managing a large number of virtual machines, it can get tricky to keep track of everything. One thing that I see many people doing to help with this is to make sure that the guest operating system has the same network name as the virtual...