This book is a standalone chapter that complements the book, An Administrator's Guide to Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Essentials.
The topic of virtualization is a high-intermediate to advanced topic. The tremendous decrease in the cost of hardware has made it affordable for small businesses to purchase servers that are capable of performing much more than the operating system could require. As such, virtualization has become a hot topic in the IT world today. The concept of virtualization basically involves making a “super” computer (your brand new fast and powerful server) into a virtualization host server and running the actual workload servers (WS2012E and the other servers you may have in the network) as virtual servers on the host. The processing, memory and storage resources on the host server are shared to the virtual servers (called Virtual Machines or VMs). Since a general purpose server normally sits idle most of the time (an average of 2-5% usage), the computing power can be shared around to other VMs.
This chapter is not a full blown virtualization book on running and managing a Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V server. There are many resources already out there, and the Resource section at the end of this chapter will list a number of these. This chapter will cover the very basic aspects of virtualization with Hyper-V, how to install the host server, and how to set up the WS2012E server as a VM. We will examine some tips and tricks that will make the process smoother and keep the installation running efficiently that are particularly useful in the small business environment, where there is normally only one or two host Hyper-V servers.
For more information on the book, please visit http://AdminGuide.ws2012e.us.
The topic of virtualization is a high-intermediate to advanced topic. The tremendous decrease in the cost of hardware has made it affordable for small businesses to purchase servers that are capable of performing much more than the operating system could require. As such, virtualization has become a hot topic in the IT world today. The concept of virtualization basically involves making a “super” computer (your brand new fast and powerful server) into a virtualization host server and running the actual workload servers (WS2012E and the other servers you may have in the network) as virtual servers on the host. The processing, memory and storage resources on the host server are shared to the virtual servers (called Virtual Machines or VMs). Since a general purpose server normally sits idle most of the time (an average of 2-5% usage), the computing power can be shared around to other VMs.
This chapter is not a full blown virtualization book on running and managing a Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V server. There are many resources already out there, and the Resource section at the end of this chapter will list a number of these. This chapter will cover the very basic aspects of virtualization with Hyper-V, how to install the host server, and how to set up the WS2012E server as a VM. We will examine some tips and tricks that will make the process smoother and keep the installation running efficiently that are particularly useful in the small business environment, where there is normally only one or two host Hyper-V servers.
For more information on the book, please visit http://AdminGuide.ws2012e.us.
