The Windows Server Virtualization Calculators provide two ways to estimate the number and cost of Windows Server Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition and Datacenter Edition licenses needed for your virtualization scenarios to help you determine the most cost-effective edition of Windows Server.

Click here http://www.microsoft.com/Windowsserver2008/en/us/hyperv-calculators.aspx to start to use the calculators.

Hyper-V 2.0

Microsoft's initial release of Hyper-V, introduced with Windows Server 2008 in June 2008, was an attractive -- if limited in comparison to VMware -- entrance to the virtualization marketplace. Hyper-V lacked a live migration feature, scalability and some cluster integration features.

Now, with this version, Microsoft is so confident in the robustness of Hyper-V 2.0 that it placed the public Microsoft.com Web site platform on it, serving around 15,000 requests per second, over 40 million hits per day and over 1.2 billion page hits per month.

Arguably the most important inclusion in Hyper-V 2.0 is Live Migration. LM is, of course, Microsoft's response to VMware's popular VMotion technology, which allows you to move a virtual machine from one physical host to another with no down time -- a seamless transition from the perspective of your users. While the existing release of Hyper-V supported quick migration, there were a few seconds of downtime associated with the move; that has been removed. This is great for system maintenance scenarios: If you have a host that needs software updates or hardware maintenance, you can live-migrate VMs from that host to another -- all while keeping user connections and service up -- and then perform whatever changes or fixes are necessary on the now-unloaded host. Then, when done, you can migrate the appropriate VMs back, all without bothering your users.

One unheralded feature of Hyper-V 2.0 is the Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) feature. Essentially, if you tried to set up a cluster using Hyper-V virtual machines in the original release, for each virtual hard drive (VHD) you had to carve out a LUN on your SAN where that VHD could reside. Since you would likely have 24 or fewer drive letters free, you could end up using Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs), those long and clunky alphanumeric identifiers, which could turn into a management disaster.

Enter CSV, which allows you to place multiple VHDs on a single LUN, while the VMs themselves still act as if each VHD is on its own LUN. All CSV volumes are stored in the ClusterStorage root directory, so navigating the different volumes is as easy as clicking through Windows Explorer or navigating directories in the command line.

Hyper-V 2.0 also supports up to 64 logical processors on the host computer and includes the ability to add to a running virtual machine (and remove them) without needing to reboot the OS on that VM. You can also dynamically allocate memory without any interruption of service. Finally, the processor compatibility feature allows live migration across different CPU versions within the same processor family (for example, Intel-to-Intel and AMD-to-AMD), but not across processor families. (VMware has the same limitation.)

Hyper-V 2.0, with all of its improvements, is what some customers have been waiting for before settling on Hyper-V for their virtualization solution. Hyper-V now offers feature parity with VMware's enterprise solutions in some scenarios.

More detail at ComputerWorld Review

 

'Virtual keys' are designed to be used when installing products that require activation in virtualized environments or on a hypervisor layer. The virtual key will allow you to change most virtual hardware configurations - such as memory or CPU - without requiring re-activation and will allow you to move instances of the product from one virtual environment to another without requiring re-activation. 

 

For products like Windows Server 2008, Small Business Server 2008, two keys are provided. Both are 25 character keys. One is for installing the operating system in the physical operating system environment, and the other is for installing the operating system in a virtualized operating system environment.

In Hyper-V, UNDO is not an available option on the virtual disk menu anymore, you now have snapshots. If you want the ability to protect your VHD from any changes getting merged you need to do this.

Before you first power on a VM (the same point you would have enabled UNDO in Virtual Server), take a snapshot and call it something like UNDO DISCARD. This just makes your VHD effectively read only and all changes are written to a working AVHD file.

Power on your VM and work away.  When you want to effectively “Turn OFF and Discard” all changes, then apply revert (under action menu) to the UNDO DISCARD snapshot and it is all gone…start a new test scenario. Just remember that if you made any changes to the VM settings, they are also discarded.

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 is a free product available for download from Microsoft Download Center.
 
It is important to note that the product does not require Host Server license. Each Windows guest Virtual Machine which is running on it requires a license, though. In comparison Windows Server 2008 standard edition Host Server License includes 1 Physical and 1 Virtual Machine license, the Enterprise edition – 1 Physical and 4 Virtual machines, and the datacenter edition – 1 Physical and unlimited VMs.

 

Microsoft Hyper-V Server is a perfect choice for you, if you do not plan to use more than 4 CPUs on the host server, and more than 32 GB of memory. It also lacks some of the advance Virtualization features like Clustering and Quick Migration. In addition, it lacks most of the Server Roles which you are used to see on Server Core. Here is the list of Server Roles, available in Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008:

 

- BitLocker
- BitLocker-RemoteAdminTool
- Microsoft-Hyper-V
- Microsoft-Windows-RemovableStorageManagementCore
- MultipathIo
- NetworkLoadBalancingHeadlessServer
- SNMP-SC
- TelnetClient
- WindowsServerBackup

Only the Microsoft Hyper-V role is installed by default.

 

Hyper-V Server requires:
- An x64-based CPU
- Hardware-assisted virtualization (Intel VT or AMD-v)
- Hardware Data Execution Protection (DEP)

 

Find answers to frequently asked questions about Microsoft Hyper-V Server at http://www.microsoft.com/servers/hyper-v-server/faq.mspx