This document discusses new features in Windows Server 2012 R2 that enhance private cloud capabilities. It introduces Generation 2 virtual machines that improve performance and security. Features like live migration and replication now offer faster speeds. Storage can be resized online and virtual machines cloned live. The document also explores extending private clouds to Microsoft Azure for additional scalability and flexibility across hybrid cloud environments.
3. Windows Server 2012 R2: Overview
New levels of performance
and cross-platform support
High performance and resiliency at a
fraction of the cost
Increased management
efficiency for a diverse
datacenter
Modern apps built and deployed
to scale on-premises and in the
cloud
Consistent and flexible user
access to corporate resources
while protecting data
Great performance, easy to
deploy and cost-effective
Hybrid networking with breakthrough
levels of flexibility and performance
4. Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 R2
• Focused on delivering Private Cloud solutions
• Complete virtual machine compatibility between on premise
Hyper-V and Azure IaaS
• Incredibly well received – key highlights:
– Hyper-V Replica
– Shared Nothing Live Migration
– Support for virtual machines on SMB 3.0
– Full PowerShell Support
– And more…
5. Generation 2 Virtual Machines
Ease of Management & Operations
• PXE boot from Optimized vNIC
• Hot-Add CD/DVD Drive
Dynamic Storage
• VMs have UEFI firmware with support
for GPT partitioned OS boot disks >2TB
• Faster Boot from Virtual SCSI with Online
Resize & increased performance
Security
• Removal of emulated devices reduces attack
surface
• VM UEFI firmware supports Secure Boot
VMs built on Optimized,
Software-Based Devices
Generation 2
Virtual Machine
Synthetic NIC
PXE Boot
Hot-Add
CD/DVD
Drive
UEFI Firmware
with Secure Boot
Boot From
Virtual SCSI
6. Generation 2 Virtual Machine Hardware
Legacy Devices Removed Replacement Devices Enhancements
IDE Controller Virtual SCSI Controller Boot from VHDx (64TB max size, online resize)
IDE CD-ROM Virtual SCSI CD-ROM Hot add/remove
Legacy BIOS UEFI firmware Secure Boot
Legacy NIC Synthetic NIC Network boot with IPv4 & IPv6
Floppy & DMA Controller No floppy support
UART (COM Ports) Optional UART for debugging Faster and more reliable
i8042 keyboard controller Software based input No emulation – reduced resources
PS/2 keyboard Software based keyboard No emulation – reduced resources
PS/2 mouse Software based mouse No emulation – reduced resources
S3 video Software based video No emulation – reduced resources
PCI Bus VMBus
Programmable Interrupt Controller (PIC) No longer required
Programmable Interrupt Timer (PIT) No longer required
Super I/O device No longer required
22. Automatic Activation
• Zero touch activation of virtual machines
• Virtual machines automatically activated
according to the hosting environment
• Reduces configuration for hosters / enterprises
23. Live Migration
Gen 2 VM
Deduplication
LiveMigration
Storage Tier
Replication
Failover
VM Mgmt
AD DS
VM Storage
Powershell
Compression are enabled by default, at the cost of
computing resources
Giving two times the performance on <10GbE Network
Faster network can utilize SMB Direct & SMB
Multichannel
“A crazy fact: Memory speed will be the bottleneck on a
host with PCI3 support and three RDMA NICs for Live
Migration!” (Finn, 2013)
24. Much Faster Live Migration
Without Compression
With Compression – 50%
With RDMA NICs – 70%
27. Replication
Gen 2 VM
Deduplication
LiveMigration
Storage Tier
Replication
Failover
VM Mgmt
AD DS
VM Storage
Powershell
Hyper-V Replica Extended Replication
Replication to 3rd site, Site A to DR, DR to Site C
New Replication interval to better suit for different
network capabilities
30sec, 5mins, 15mins interval
Replication to cloud is easy
28. Once Hyper-V Replica is enabled, VMs begin replication
• Affordable in-box business continuity and
disaster recovery
• Configurable replication frequencies of 30
seconds, 5 minutes and 15 minutes
• Secure replication across network
• Agnostic of hardware on either site
• No need for other virtual machine replication
technologies
• Automatic handling of live migration
• Simple configuration and management
Replicate Hyper-V VMs from a
Primary to a Replica site
Hyper-V Replica in Hyper-V 2012 R2
Once replicated, changes replicated on chosen frequencyUpon site failure, VMs can be started on secondary site
CSV on
Block
Storage
SMBShare
FileBased
Storage
29. Replication configured from primary to secondary
Hyper-V Replica | Extended
Replication
• Once a VM has been successfully replicated to
the replica site, replica
can be replicated to a 3rd location
• Chained Replication
• Extended Replica contents match the original
replication contents
• Extended Replica replication frequencies can
differ from original replica
• Useful for scenarios such as SMB -> Service
Provider -> Service Provider DR Site
Replicate to 3rd Location for
Extra Level of Resiliency
DAS
Storage
Replication can be enabled on the 1st replica to a 3rd site
31. Online VHDX Resize
Expand Virtual SCSI Disks
1. Grow VHD & VHDX files whilst attached
to a running virtual machine
2. Then expand volume within the guest
Shrink Virtual SCSI Disks
1. Reduce volume size inside the guest
2. Shrink the size of the VHD
or VHDX file whilst the VM is running
Online VHDX Resize provides
VM storage flexibility
10 GBUnallocated
32.
33. Virtual Machine Live Cloning
Export a clone of a running VM
• Point-time image of running VM
exported to an alternate location
• Useful for troubleshooting VM
without downtime for primary VM
Export from an existing checkpoint
• Export a full cloned virtual machine
from a point-in-time, existing checkpoint of a
virtual machine
• Checkpoints automatically merged into single
virtual disk
Duplication of a Virtual
Machine whilst Running
VM1 VM2
User Initiates an export of a running VM
Hyper-V performs a live, point-in-time export of the
VM, which remains running, creating the new files in
the target location
Admin imports new, powered-off VM on the target
host, finalizes configuration and starts VM
With Virtual Machine Manager, Admin can select host
as part of the clone wizard
When you optimize your business for the cloud with Windows Server 2012 R2, you take advantage of the skills and investment you’ve already made in building a familiar and consistent platform. Windows Server 2012 R2 builds on that familiarity. With Windows Server 2012 R2, you gain all the Microsoft experience behind building and operating private and public clouds, delivered as an enterprise-class, simple and cost-effective server and cloud platform.
Windows Server 2012 R2 delivers significant value around the following seven key capabilities:
Server virtualization. Windows Server 2012 R2 is a virtualization platform that has helped organizations of all sizes realize considerable cost savings and operational efficiencies. With industry leading size and scale, Hyper-V is the platform of choice for you to run your mission critical workloads. Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 R2 greatly expands support for host processors and memory. Using Windows Server 2012 R2, you can take advantage of new hardware technology, while still utilizing the servers you already have. This way you can virtualize today, and be ready for the future.
Storage. Windows Server 2012 R2 was designed with a strong focus on storage, from the foundation of the storage stack up, with improvements ranging from provisioning storage to how data is clustered, transferred across the network, and ultimately accessed and managed. Windows Server 2012 R2 offers a wide variety of high-performance, highly available storage features and capabilities, while taking advantage of industry-standard hardware for dramatically lower cost.
Networking. Windows Server 2012 R2 makes it as straightforward to manage an entire network as a single server, giving you the reliability and scalability of multiple servers at a lower cost. Automatic rerouting around storage, server, and network failures enables file services to remain online with minimal noticeable downtime. What’s more, Windows Server 2012 R2 – together with System Center 2012 R2 – provides an end-to-end Software Defined Networking solution across public, private, and hybrid cloud implementations.
Server management and automation. Windows Server 2012 R2 enables IT professionals to meet the need for fast, continuous and reliable service within their datacenters by offering an integrated platform to automate and manage the increasing datacenter ecosystem. Windows Server 2012 R2 delivers capabilities to manage and automate many servers and the devices connecting them, whether they are physical or virtual, on-premises or off, and using standards-based technologies.
Web and application platform. Windows Server 2012 R2 builds on the tradition of the Windows Server family as a proven application platform, with thousands of applications already built and deployed and a community of millions of knowledgeable and skilled developers already in place. Windows Server 2012 R2 can offer your organization even greater application flexibility. You can build and deploy applications either on-premises or in the cloud—or both at once, with hybrid solutions that work in both environments.
Access and information protection. With the new capabilities in Windows Server 2012 R2, you will be able to better manage and protect data access, simplify deployment and management of your identity infrastructure on-premises and across clouds, and provide your users with more secure remote access to applications data from virtually anywhere and any device.
Virtual desktop infrastructure. With Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft is making it even easier to deploy and deliver virtual resources across workers’ devices. VDI technologies in Windows Server 2012 R2 offer easy access to a rich, full-fidelity Windows environment running in the datacenter, from virtually any device. Through Hyper-V and Remote Desktop Services, Microsoft offers three flexible VDI deployment options in a single solution: Pooled Desktops, Personal Desktops, and Remote Desktop Sessions (formerly Terminal Services).
Show the creation of Gen 2 virtual machines and the differences between Gen 1 and Gen 2
Show the creation of Gen 2 virtual machines and the differences between Gen 1 and Gen 2
Real world scenario
Production to DR, DR to further backup to the cloud
Or Production to Cloud, and cloud service provider further replicate to regional DR
Current situation
Business continuity is the ability to quickly recover business functions from a downtime event with minimal or no data loss. There are number of reasons why businesses experience outage including power failure, IT hardware failure, network outage, human errors, IT software failures, and natural disasters. Depending on the type of outage, customers need a high availability solution that simply restores the service. However, some outages that impact the entire data center such as natural disaster or an extended power outage require a disaster recovery solution that restores data at a remote site in addition to bringing up the services and connectivity. Organizations need an affordable and reliable business continuity solution that helps them recover from a failure.
Before Windows Server 2012
Beginning with Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper‑V and Failover Clustering can be used together to make a virtual machine highly available and minimize disruptions. Administrators can seamlessly migrate their virtual machines to a different host in the cluster in the event of outage or to load balance their virtual machines without impacting virtualized applications. While this can protect virtualized workloads from a local host failure or scheduled maintenance of a host in a cluster, this does not protect businesses from outage of an entire data center. While Failover Clustering can be used with hardware-based SAN replication across data centers, these are typically expensive. Hyper‑V Replica fills an important gap in the Windows Server Hyper‑V offering by providing an affordable in-box disaster recovery solution.
Windows Server 2012 Hyper‑V Replica
Windows Server 2012 introduces Hyper‑V Replica, a built-in feature that provides asynchronous replication of virtual machines for the purposes of business continuity and disaster recovery. In the event of failures (such as power failure, fire, or natural disaster) at the primary site, the administrator can manually fail over the production virtual machines to the Hyper‑V server at the recovery site. During failover, the virtual machines are brought back to a consistent point in time, and within minutes they can be accessed by the rest of the network with minimal impact to the business. Once the primary site comes back, the administrators can manually revert the virtual machines to the Hyper‑V server at the primary site.
Hyper‑V Replica is a new feature in Windows Server 2012. It lets you replicate your Hyper‑V virtual machines over a network link from one Hyper‑V host at a primary site to another Hyper‑V host at a Replica site without reliance on storage arrays or other software replication technologies. The figure shows secure replication of virtual machines from different systems and clusters to a remote site over a WAN.
Benefits of Hyper‑V Replica
Hyper‑V Replica fills an important gap in the Windows Server Hyper‑V offering by providing an affordable in-box business continuity and disaster recovery solution.
Failure recovery in minutes. In the event of an unplanned shutdown, Hyper‑V Replica can restore your system in just minutes.
More secure replication across the network. Hyper‑V Replica tracks the write operations on the primary virtual machine and replicates these changes to the Replica server efficiently over a WAN. The network connection between the two servers uses the HTTP or HTTPS protocol and supports both integrated and certificate-based authentication. Connections configured to use integrated authentication are not encrypted; for an encrypted connection, you should choose certificate-based authentication. Hyper‑V Replica is closely integrated with Windows failover clustering and provides easier replication across different migration scenarios in the primary and Replica servers.
Hyper‑V Replica doesn’t rely on storage arrays.
Hyper‑V Replica doesn’t rely on other software replication technologies.
Hyper‑V Replica automatically handles live migration.
Configuration and management are simpler with Hyper‑V Replica:
Integrated user interface (UI) with Hyper‑V Manager.
Failover Cluster Manager snap-in for Microsoft Management Console (MMC).
Extensible WMI interface.
Windows PowerShell command-line interface scripting capability.
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Show the creation of Gen 2 virtual machines and the differences between Gen 1 and Gen 2
Show the creation of Gen 2 virtual machines and the differences between Gen 1 and Gen 2
Show the creation of Gen 2 virtual machines and the differences between Gen 1 and Gen 2