Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Cookbook: To master the administration of Windows Server Hyper-V, this is the book you need. With over 50 useful recipes, plus handy tips and tricks, it helps you handle virtualization using best practice principles.

Microsoft has done a very good job with Windows 2012 and its new version of Hyper-V. Most of the new and cool features such as Storage Migration, Hyper-V Replica, Hyper-V Extensible Switch, and many more, focus on virtualization, increasing mobility, scalability, and reliability of your datacenters. With all of them together, we can now say that Windows Server 2012 provides the ultimate private cloud operating system. This means that you will have more flexibility, automation, and better management of virtual and physical servers, in creating your local private cloud infrastructure.

Having said that, the migration plan of the existing environment will still happen. You will probably want to start using all these features. However, the upgrade process needs attention, planning, and special configurations.

With Hyper-V 3 virtual machines, upgrades, and migrations are easier than never before. You can migrate the Virtual Machine (VM) from old Hyper-V versions using the Export/Import...

One of the easiest ways to adopt Windows Server 2012 in an existing environment is the in-place upgrade. You might have a scenario with a fresh installation of Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V, where you want to update to Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V on the same hardware. In case you only have Hyper-V running with all the applications and drivers on the host computer being supported on Windows Server 2012, you can use the in-place upgrade option for upgrading. This will guarantee that your host computer will be easily upgraded to Windows Server 2012 with all the configuration and files preserved.

However, in other examples where applications or drivers might not work on Windows Server 2012 or the old installation of Windows Server 2008 R2 with lots of modifications caused by uninstalled applications, the best way would be migration to a new operating system.

It does not matter what your decision is, you need...

If you don't want to perform an in-place upgrade from Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2012, the migration from an old Hyper-V version to Windows 2012 is not so complicated either. You need to install a new server with Windows 2012, enable Hyper-V, export the virtual machine from the old server, and import them back to your new server. That's it! This is the same process that we have been using since the first version of Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008. However, the previous versions of Hyper-V had some limitations; for example, you could import only a virtual machine that had been exported before and lots of other issues regarding different configurations in the source and destination host.

The next few steps will guide you through the new process and options to import and export virtual machines introduced in Hyper-V 3.0.

Most people think that the process to migrate the virtual machine from one host with a previous Hyper-V version, to another one with a newer version, is simply done by the export and import process shown in the previous task. You will probably notice some strange behavior in the VMs such as mouse integration, slow performance, and some other issues. You will understand with the next steps why this problem occurs and how to migrate the virtual machine without such problems.

Microsoft has been using the same Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format since the one created by Connectix in 1995. That was created to allow Windows 3.1 to run on Mac computers. It has been improved, but as with any other product's lifecycle, its life ended. On Windows Server 2012, the default format is VHDX and provides lots of features and enhancements compared to its previous version.

It has been designed to work well with all the new modern storage options and has capabilities to provide reliability and store large scenarios. VHDX now supports 64 TB against 2 TB of VHD. Also, it supports larger logical sector sizes up to 4 KB, and large block sizes up to 256 MB, to optimize the virtual disk performance.

Another interesting feature is the use of the log in order to ensure the security and resiliency against corruptions that can occur in power failures, for example.

With all these excellent features, it will be very good practice to convert the existing virtual...

In a virtual environment, with thousands of physical and virtual servers, it is normal to face some problems or limitations that require reallocating a virtual machine to another location. Let's list some examples of the issues you might encounter:

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V introduces a new feature to help you in these scenarios called storage migration, providing the ability to reallocate the virtual machine storage while it's running.

This recipe will walk through all the details and steps to show you how to move the virtual machine storage using the storage migration.

Mobility! That's the word that comes up when talking about Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. On previous versions of Hyper-V, the Live Migration was introduced as a feature that allows you to move virtual machines from one node to another in a cluster with no downtime. It basically moves the virtual machine memory and the VM configuration from one node to another and switches the server access to the storage. It is handy when you need to run any maintenance task on the host server or in case of scalability, for example. The only problem was the dependency of a shared storage in a cluster environment.

Although Live Migration still exists on Windows Server 2012 with lots of improvements, Hyper-V 2012 can now move any running virtual machine from one server to another and the only requirement is a network connection, simple as that. There is no need for clustered environments to move your VMs across your servers. For a cloud infrastructure...

Every day we can see companies implementing virtual servers to explore the virtualization benefits such as cost reduction, flexibility, automation, and so on.

That's why physical to virtual migration is still very common and it's important to make sure that the existing servers running under old and unnecessary hardware can be converted into virtual machines.

In this recipe, you will see how to convert a physical server into a virtual machine using the tool Disk2vhd.