Introduction to Hyper-V in Windows 10 Part 3
In the previous two posts I covered Hyper-V Manager and creating a Generation 1 virtual machine, in this post I'll cover creating a Generation 2 VM, as well as a quick look at support for production checkpoints. I'll start with the creation of Generation 2 VM, and highlight some of the differences.
The initial stages of the New Virtual Machine Wizard are the same as we don't specify which generation the VM is at this point.
For the sake of easily locating this VM amongst the other VMs on this machine I'll give it a generic name, as I'm not going to be keeping it long term.
At the Specify Generation screen we need to select Gen 1 or Gen 2, and we are provided with some reasons why one would select one versus the other. Note that the list of differences presented here is not extensive, refer to Part 2 of this series to get all the differences.
The Assign Memory screen is the same as what we saw in the Gen 1 VM walkthrough.
The Configure Networking screen is the same as what we saw in the Gen 1 VM walkthrough.
The Connect Virtual Hard Disk screen isn't exactly the same, the difference here is that we can choose to use VHD files instead of VHDX files with Gen 1 VMs, but Gen 2 VMs do require VHDX files, which provide better performance and are more reliable.
There are a couple of differences in the Installation Options screen as well. We can't install Gen 2 VMs from physical media, and we can't install from a bootable floppy drive, which Gen 1 VMs can do. I have specifically selected Install An Operating System From A Network-Based Installation Server here because this option will now use the synthetic Hyper-V network adapter rather than an emulated 100Mb/s adapter, allowing for faster installs, better system resource utilisation, and less of a need to reconfigure the VM's network adapters after installation.
Once done we click finish, and we are ready to customise beyond the basics of the wizards.
In the Settings for the new VM we can't add support for the legacy/emulated network adapter in Add Hardware, and on the left hand side you will see we now have the ability to boot from SCSI. There is no support for legacy IDE.
Gen 1 BIOS options make way for Gen 2 UEFI setings.
And UEFI allows for Secure Boot and TPM support.
The final thing that is worth mentioning before I wrap up this post is that Production Checkpoints are now supported. Previously the recommendation wasn't to use checkpoints in production environments, but instead to use them for lab, dev and test purposes. This is a major change that Windows Server 2016 will introduce into larger scale deployments, but for now we have support for it in current Windows 10 builds.