Latest release offers inexpensive way to extend a Hyper-V server farm
The first implementation of Microsoft’s free standalone hypervisor, Hyper-V Server 2008, was, let’s face it, a little disappointing, with limited scalability and no Quick Migration support like that in the full implementation. The R2 release, however, has a lot more going for it, including Live as well as Quick migration options. But it’s not all good news, especially if you’re looking for a complete virtualisation solution, which Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is not.
What you get with the R2 release is more or less the same, now very scalable, hypervisor as in the full Windows Server 2008 R2 product. That means the ability to run on hosts with up to eight processors and 1TB of RAM, as well as live migration of virtual machines and support for the Windows failover clustering which is needed to enable it.
You don’t get the Windows guest licences included in the full Server package, but it is free, requires far less server resources and is very easy to deploy.
We simply downloaded the ISO image from the Microsoft web site, burned it to DVD, and then used that disk to boot our test server. There was no need for a host operating system and the setup process was much like installing an ordinary Windows server, only much quicker and with far fewer questions to answer.
In all it took us around 20 minutes, after which our server rebooted and the hypervisor was up and running. At which point, unfortunately, we came face to face with one of the biggest drawbacks: the lack of any bundled management tools.
Unlike the free ESXi hypervisor from VMware or XenServer from Citrix, all you get from Microsoft is the hypervisor together with an implementation of Windows Server Core. There’s no GUI or management tools of any description, just a simple text-based configuration utility to give the server a name, join it to a workgroup or domain, change the network settings and so on.
