What is Hyper-V?

• Microsoft Hyper-V Definition

  Microsoft Hyper-V Definition

  Hyper-V is a Microsoft virtualization product allowing you to create and run multiple VMs on a physical host.
• How does Hyper-V work?

  How does Hyper-V work?

  A hypervisor can be defined as the software creating an abstraction layer between the virtual OS and the physical host machine. This helps create and run multiple VMs on a single physical machine.

  Similarly, Hyper-V is also known as the virtualization technology using Windows hypervisor to perform its primary function. However, it requires a physical processor with specific features, including VM monitor mode extensions, a 64-bit processor with second-level address translation (SLAT), and up to 4GB of RAM.

  The purpose of a hypervisor is to manage interactions between the physical Hyper-V server and the VMs. The hypervisor provides an isolated environment to the VMs by controlling the access of the host hardware resources. This helps eliminate system crashes and makes VMs more flexible, efficient, and convenient.

  Alternatively, in some configurations, VMs or the OS can directly access the graphics, networking, and storage hardware of the physical host.

  When setting up Hyper-V, it’s essential to understand its different components. They’re collectively known as virtualization platforms and integrated as a set of tools when you install the Hyper-V role in your physical machine. These parts work together to create and run VMs effectively. The virtualization platform includes:

  • Hyper-V Virtual Machine Management Service
  • Windows hypervisor
  • The virtual machine bus (VMbus)
  • Virtualization WMI provider
  • Virtual infrastructure driver (VID)
  • Virtualization service provider (VSP)
    

  Hyper-V also includes management and connectivity tools designed to be installed on a system with or without a Hyper-V role, such as:

  • Windows PowerShell Direct
  • Hyper-V module for Windows PowerShell
  • Virtual Machine Connection
  • Hyper-V Manager
• Advantages of using Microsoft Hyper-V

  Advantages of using Microsoft Hyper-V

  • Capability to create a virtual switch: The role of a virtual switch is to allow VMs to have better communication with each other. Hyper-V creates such switches to intelligently inspect and forward data packets before routing communication or moving them to their destination.
  • Effective use of hardware resources: It helps consolidate servers and reduce workloads by isolating virtual OSes and uses less power, human resources, and infrastructure resources such as systems, storage, CPU, and memory.
  • Establishes the private cloud environment: It’s highly scalable and provides flexibility to use a single physical Hyper-V server as multiple virtual servers. It also offers on-demand IT services by expanding the use of shared resources.
  • Business agility and data security: By establishing and expanding virtual desktop infrastructure with Hyper-V, you can centralize business-critical information, applications, and OSes for better data management and data integrity. It also helps to track, simplify, and streamline various business operations.
  • Efficient development and testing: Hyper-V allows you to install multiple VMs with different OSes on a single Hyper-V server, making it easier and more convenient to develop and test applications.
• Microsoft Hyper-V features

  Microsoft Hyper-V features

  Hyper-V offers several features, including:

  • Computing environment: Hyper-V virtualization offers the basic features of a physical system such as memory, CPU, storage, networking, and more. You can also configure each of these features to meet business-specific requirements.
  • Disaster recovery: Hyper-V Replica is a built-in Hyper-V feature used for disaster recovery. It enables you to replicate and store VMs on another physical host or location for recovering files quickly in case of a disaster.
  • Highly portable: Features such as storage and live migration, import, and export are used to move or distribute VMs efficiently.
  • Optimization: Hyper-V integration services include a bundle of services and drivers installed on a VM. Installing these services improves the integration of VMs with the host machine.
  • Security: Hypervisor-V shields VMs and performs a secure boot to protect the data and OSes from malware, threats, and unauthorized access.
  • Remote connectivity: With its remote connection tool known as Virtual Machine Connection (VMC), Hypervisor-V allows better interaction of VMs. Using this tool, you can easily track the status or activity of a guest VM.
• Hyper-V performance monitoring

  Hyper-V performance monitoring

  It can be challenging to track the performance of each Hyper-V resource, such as storage, IOPS, CPU load, memory usage, and latency, as multiple VMs are using these resources simultaneously. However, if you fail to track the performance of these resources, it can lead to under and over-allocation of resources, system performance issues, bottlenecks, workload issues, and downtime. And it can increase storage costs and affect business productivity.

  Hyper-V VM monitoring tools or resource performance monitoring tools improve resource efficiency in the virtualization environment. They also help meet business-specific VM scalability needs by providing better management of resources. They provide in-depth insights into resource usage and event logs, send instant alerts related to performance issues, and help resolve potential VM sprawl and storage issues. These tools can also track the real-time and historical performance of VMs to drill down into the details of the virtual environment.
• Hyper-V backup and restore

  Hyper-V backup and restore

  Hyper-V allows you to back up VMs from the physical server without running custom backup software. It can back up your VM by using a Hyper-V Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) writer and WMI-based backup.

  Hyper-V WMI offers three methods for reading the actual data from the backup:

  • WMI Export
  • Win32 APIs
  • Remote Shared Virtual Disk Protocol
• What is Hyper-V virtualization?

  What is Hyper-V virtualization?

  Hyper-V virtualization is the process of creating multiple VMs using hypervisor-V on a system running Windows. A VM is a software version of a computer running its own OS and programs. A Hyper-V server can help individual VMs to connect to different networks. As a virtualization platform, it can help your organization virtualize workloads, improve security, and more. It can also allow Windows users to run a Mac OS or Linux on their physical system.