Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V: Deploying Hyper-V Enterprise Server Virtualization Platform: Get to grips with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V the easy way. This comprehensive tutorial takes you through every step of planning, designing, and implementing Hyper V with clear instructions and screenshots. The only guide you need.

If you are referring to this book for starting your first server virtualization and consolidation project, then this section of the book is the important one for the success of your project. Good planning involves taking all infrastructure portions into consideration and ensuring that all project teams have carefully assessed them.

From a real-world standpoint, I have seen many organizations failing to get most out of their virtualization infrastructure because of poor planning at the early stages of their virtualization project. A sound planning process for a virtualization project not only involves sizing and designing your hypervisor server operating system or hardware, but also involves assessing the required infrastructure, for example, storage, server hardware, hypervisor selection, and many more.

In this section we will be covering the upgrading path of the existing legacy Hyper-V server operating system to the latest Windows Server 2012. Let's say in your organization you have two sets of Hyper-V servers. In the first set you have five standalone Windows Server 2008 R2 based Hyper-V hosts, and in the other set of servers, you have a five node Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V failover cluster hosts.

Now your company is planning to move forward with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V servers, to take advantage of numerous new features added into the Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V version. To continue this section, we have divided this into two parts; in the first part we will see how we can upgrade the standalone Hyper-V hosts to Windows Server 2012 operating system, and in the second part we will see how to upgrade the Hyper-V cluster servers.

Since we have gone through the planning and designing recommendations and best practices, we will now install our first Hyper-V server. In this section, I will show you various methods of installing Hyper-V server, including installing a fresh Hyper-V server, while considering that you are absolutely new to Hyper-V world, and before that you have never ever installed Hyper-V server. Later on, we will touch the other types of Hyper-V installations, such as upgrading existing Hyper-V server to Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V role. We will also go deeper into the Windows Server Core concepts and see how to install and manage a Windows Server Core installation for Hyper-V server, by adding a Hyper-V role to a Windows Server Core.

Installing Hyper-V Server is not difficult, and can be done in a few steps; but before we install Hyper-V server in our environment, make sure that we have gone through the proper planning and designing exercises to better cater our server...

Since we have now learned how to install a Hyper-V server, let's go and configure a few basic settings of Hyper-V, such as creating our first virtual machine. To do this, let's open our Hyper-V Manager for first time. Locate the Hyper-V Manager snap-in by navigating to Control Panel | Administrative Tools.

We will now move ahead with configuring a few of the basic settings of our Hyper-V server.

This chapter mainly focused on two areas, first on the planning and designing steps of Hyper-V implementation, and secondly we discussed the different types of Hyper-V installation. In the planning and designing section, we discussed the various steps, which are highly critical to Hyper-V infrastructure and are also the key factors that measure the success of the project.

In these steps of planning and designing Hyper-V infrastructure, we saw the benefits of Microsoft Solution Accelerators series for Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V. These solution accelerators provide precooked information on all levels of Hyper-V and Windows Server for providing an effective and efficient virtualization platform. Later on in this chapter, we discussed the various types of installation of Hyper-V Windows Server 2012, where we first saw how we can perform a clean installation of Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012 in GUI mode. We then moved to a scenario where we upgraded a pre-Windows Server 2012 Hyper...