Today's server administrators eat, sleep, and breathe virtual machines. They are flooding our computing infrastructure, quickly replacing physical servers in all facets of our technology. Thankfully, entrance into the world of virtualization is quite easy once you know which pieces of the puzzle need to work together in order to start building and hosting virtual machines. I have worked with many server administrators who manage the virtual machines themselves once they are online, but in bigger organizations it is usually someone on the backend who is creating these VMs in the first place. This means that even someone who works with Windows servers every day might not have a lot of experience with using the Hyper-V Management Console, and this is the reason why a chapter about Hyper-V itself is important to include in this book on Windows Server 2016. This chapter will cover the following topics:
- Creating a Windows Server that runs Hyper-V
- Creating a Hyper-V Server
- Networking your VMs
- Building your first virtual machine
- Using the VM Settings page
- Editing virtual hard disks
- Using Checkpoints as rollback points
When talking about server virtualization, it is important to note the difference between a virtualization host and a virtual machine. The host server is the big dog, the (usually) physical platform that provides all of the resources to the smaller virtual machines. There are two major players in the virtualization host category. A company called VMware is popular in both personal and enterprise deployments, and of course Microsoft's own Hyper-V. Since I live in the Microsoft world, and this is a Microsoft-centric book, we are going to be focused on the virtualization capabilities provided by Microsoft Hyper-V inside the new Windows Server 2016 operating system. The best part about Hyper-V is that it is available to anyone who is running the Windows Server operating system, so even if you aren't using virtualization technology in your business today, with just a few mouse clicks you probably could be. Furthermore, if you have a VMware shop today, make sure to check out the latest offers from Microsoft regarding your migration to Hyper-V. The release of Windows Server 2016 brings with it some heavy discounts and incentives for companies who are looking to switch to Hyper-V!
Virtualization is an enormous topic and there will certainly be complete books written on all the ins-and-outs of Hyper-V. This chapter will focus on the steps you will need in order to start using it and on the cornerstones of running a virtualized environment. Beyond the scope of the recipes in this book, make sure you read up on topics like Hyper-V Clustering and Replication as you can now build an environment where all of your servers have hot-standby duplicates sitting on the sidelines, waiting to be called into the game. Hyper-V can be a central piece in your disaster recovery plan. Also new in Server 2016 is the idea of nested virtualization, where you can now take a virtual machine that is running inside Hyper-V, and install the Hyper-V role onto that virtual machine itself! Why in the world would you want to do that? "To use containers," is the number one answer to that question, as you start to expand your DevOps capabilities by using Windows Server and Hyper-V Containers to provide tiny, secure, standardized platforms for application development and expansion.