Windows Server 2012: inside Microsoft's Enterprise Server OS

The changes in Hyper-V are extensive. Hyper-V Replica is a new feature that lets you easily set up fail-over for a virtual machine (VM), requiring only two Hyper-V servers with replication enabled. Live Migration, for moving a VM between servers, no longer requires Microsoft’s Cluster Shared Volumes, and you can migrate multiple VMs simultaneously. You can now also live-migrate storage, the virtual hard drives used by a VM. Single-root I/O Virtualisation (SR-IOV) lets you assign a network adapter directly to a VM for maximum throughput. A new virtual hard disk format offers up to 64 TB of storage and is more robust. Extensible virtual switches with support for filter drivers enable new network security features. Virtual Fibre Channel lets you terminate a host bus adapter (HBA) with the guest operating system. Taken together these features bring resilient, scalable virtualisation within the reach even of small organisations.