7.1 Benefits for Hyper-V
These new capabilities of SMB
3 mean that Hyper-V hosts can store VM files, including the
configuration, VHD, and snapshots in file shares on Windows Server 2012
file servers. You can implement this kind of solution for stand-alone
Hyper-V servers. You also can implement it for clustered Hyper-V
servers where file storage is used as shared storage for the cluster.
The benefits that enterprises can experience from these scenarios
include simplified provisioning, management and migration of VM
workloads, increased flexibility, and reduced cost.
You can view and manage many SMB 3 capabilities by using PowerShell.
To see what cmdlets are available for doing this, you can use the Get-Command cmdlet, as shown in Figure 9.
For example, Figure 10 shows how to use the Get-SMBServerConfiguration cmdlet to determine whether SMB Multichannel is enabled on a file server running Windows Server 2012.
Windows Server 2012: Enabling the “Storage LAN”
The process used for importing
VMs onto Hyper-V hosts has been improved in Windows Server 2012. The
goal of these improvements is to help prevent configuration problems
from happening that can prevent the import process from completing
successfully.
In Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2, when you imported a VM onto a
host, the VM and all its files were copied to the host, but they
weren’t checked for possible configuration problems. However, Hyper-V
on Windows Server 2012 now validates the configuration of VM files when
they are imported to identify potential problems and, if possible,
resolve them.
An additional enhancement to the process of importing VMs in Hyper-V
on Windows Server 2012 is that now you can import a VM after manually
copying the VM’s files to the host. In other words, you don’t have to
export a VM from one host before you can import it into another
host—you can simply copy the files from the first host to the second
one and then initiate the import process.
VHDX is the new default format for VHDs
in Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012. This new format is designed to
replace the older VHD format and has advanced capabilities that make it
the ideal virtual disk format going forward for virtualized workloads.
Some of the features of this new format include the following:
-
It supports virtual disks up to 64 TB in size, so you’ll be able to
use it to virtualize even the largest database workloads and move them
into the cloud.
-
It aligns to megabyte boundaries to support large sector disks (4 KB
sector disks), so you can take advantage of new low-cost commodity
storage options.
-
It uses large block sizes to provide better performance than the old format could provide.
-
It includes a new log to protect from corruption due to power
failure, which means the new format has much greater resiliency than
the old format.
-
You can embed custom user-defined metadata into VHDX files; for
example, information about the service pack level of the guest
operating system on the VM.
