Understanding Windows 8 Client Hyper-V

Understanding Windows 8 Client Hyper-V

 

The Windows guy in the team, Yash Tolia, will be our guy for the discussions on the new Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. Here, he is going to discuss the new features of Windows 8, starting with Client Hyper-V.

Remember the good old days of using Windows XP mode in Windows 7 Operating Systems? Well, it is not that far in the past as well. Windows XP mode was a part of the feature called Virtual PC, that was available in Windows 7. But with Windows 8, there is a paradigm shift in the virtualization technology. With Windows 8, Microsoft provides Hyper-V in the client itself.

Just take a moment and try to think how beneficial this can be. I can setup a test environment on my Windows 8, optimize the solution, and then, move it to my production server once the bosses are satisfied with my work. Or imagine giving a Windows 8 tablet to my developers and they can test their code on various Operating Systems while travelling on a train or watching a chick flick .

So, for being able to do it, you need to make sure that the hardware that you are going to use should be 64-Bit and have Second Level Address Translation (SLAT). you need 4 GB of RAM on your computer running Client Hyper-V. This is allocated and deallocated dynamically as required by the virtual machines. Also, Client Hyper-V supports the same storage migration capability that is included in Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012. This means you can have your virtual machines fairly independent of the underlying storage. You can move a virtual machine’s storage to and from one local drive to another, to a USB drive, or to a remote file share without needing to stop the virtual machine.

So, how can you enable this on your Client OS? There are 2 simple steps you need to take:

1. Go to the "Turn Windows Features On or Off” setting.

2. Select the Hyper-V feature to be enabled.

 

 

You can even enable it by a simple PowerShell command as well:

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature –FeatureName Microsoft-Hyper-V -All

Once you install the feature, it will ask for a reboot, that will complete the installation once it is done.

 

Then, you can open the Hyper-V manager, and you will notice that the look and feel of the console is pretty similar to the console available in Windows Server 2008 R2.

 

 

If you see the hard disk format, it is a new version of Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) called VHDX. VHDX has a much larger storage capacity than the older VHD format. It also provides data corruption protection during power failures and optimizes structural alignments of dynamic and differencing disks to prevent performance degradation on new, large-sector physical disks. This is the same version that is used in Windows Server 2012 as well, giving

In the end, a lot of reasons to use Client Hyper-V.

Hope this helps. Happy reading!

- A-team