Χαρακτηριστικό

Περιγραφή

Active/Active File Share
Clusters

Using CSV and a witness as
features, you can create an active/active file share failover cluster. This
is supported for services that use large file with little metadata access,
e.g. Hyper-V. In other words, you can use a file share cluster instead of a SAN
for your Hyper-V cluster.

Asymmetric Hyper-V Cluster

A single cluster with
Hyper-V and Active/Active File Server roles

BitLocker & HA

The ability to encrypt
parent partition disks and cluster shared volumes using BitLocker for
physical security of virtual machines and data. Uses a Cluster Name Object
(CNO) for locking and unlocking CSVs.

Boot From SAN

VMs can boot from iSCSI or
Fibre Channel disks, rather than just the traditional VHD(X)

Cluster Aware Updating

Automate the Windows Update
process for clustered hosts. It automatically drains hosts of VMs and patches
them in order.

Cluster Scalability

Up to 63 hosts and up to
4,000 VMs

Concurrent Live Migration

Perform many live migrations
at once between two hosts, with the only limit being your bandwidth.

Converged Fabrics

Simplified host networking
by merging all of the various LAN, SAN, and cluster networks to a reduced
number of teamed high bandwidth NICs.

CSVFS

CSVs are easier to backup.
Although they are still NTFS, they appear as CSVFS for easier identification
as CSVs in disk administration tools.

Data Center Bridging

DCB enables very different
networking protocols to run on the same network infrastructure, and therefore
helps enable the convergence of LANs and SANs onto a single unified fabric.

Dedup & Thin Provisioning

Windows 8 can use just the
storage space that is required by not needlessly storing “empty” space (thin
provisioning) or redundant data (de-duplication)

DHCP Guard

Ban DHCP traffic from rogue
DHCP services running in VMs.

Direct I/O Backup

VMs on Cluster Shared
Volumes (CSVs) can be backed up without Redirected I/O (Mode/Access).

Drain VMs

Easy host maintenance by
draining VMs from the host

Dynamic Memory Minimum Memory

Once a VM has booted it can
balloon down to the Minimum setting if it is underutilising the memory
allocated by the Startup setting.

Dynamic Virtual Machine Queue

DMVQ will dynamically span
processing VMQ n/w traffic across more than one CPU. It will automatically
scale up and scale down the CPU utilisation based on demand

Extensibale Hyper-V Switch

Replacing the virtual
network, this intelligent virtual switch offers extensibility for partners,
with products already announced by the likes of Cisco and Brocade.

Failover Prioritisation

Order the failover of VMs
based on application dependencies.

Guest Application Monitoring

Configure Failover
Clustering to restart or failover VMs based on monitored events that occur
inside of the VM.

Guest NUMA

Virtual machines are aware
of Non-Uniform Memory Architecture and can schedule processes in accordance
with memory placement at the physical layer. Guest NUMA can be customised on
a per-VM basis.

High Availability

A feature of Failover
Clustering, allowing a service or VM to failover from one host to another,
enabling machine fault tolerance and maintenance windows with minimised
service downtime.

Host Scalability

160 physical logical
processors, up to 2 TB RAM, removal of the 8:1 logical to virtual processor
limit.

Hyper-V Replica

Asynchronous replication of
virtual machines from one location to another, supporting VSS snapshots,
failover, and IP address injection.

IPsec Task Offload

IPsecTO moves this workload
from the main host’s CPU to a dedicated processor on the network adapter

Live Migration

Move a virtual machine from
one host to another. This does not require Failover Clustering in Windows
Server 8.

Live Storage Migration

Physically relocate a VM by
first copying it and synchronising I/O until the source and destination are
identical. Can leverage Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX) in a SAN to make the
process up to 90% faster.

Multi-Tenancy

With features such as Network
Virtualisation, PVLANs, and PORT ACLs, you can use Windows 8 Hyper-V in
multi-tenant environments such as IaaS public cloud hosting.

Native 4k disk support

This will allow disk
alignment for VHDs created on 4k sector physical disks, thus improving
performance.

Network Virtualisation

The abstraction of virtual
IP address from physical IP address, allowing easier mobility of VMs across
fabrics. This is a key feature of multi-tenancy.

NIC Teaming

Team NICs in Windows Server
8 (and Hyper-V) for bandwidth aggregation and network path fault tolerance.
The NICs do not need to be from the same manufacturer.

Online Disk Repair

Windows 8 will detect
storage faults and incrementally fix them with brief delays to I/O traffic
that don’t interrupt it. Should replace the need for
offline chkdsk.

Port ACLs

Define allowed communication
paths between virtual machines based on IP range or MAC address.

PowerShell

Hyper-V has around 150
built-in PowerShell cmdlets. 100% of features are revealed via PowerShell.

PVLAN

VLANs are slow to configure
in the physical network and there is a limit on how many can be configured.
Private VLANs allow Hyper-V to replace this physical networking feature.

QoS

Specify maximum limits and
minimum guarantees for network communications.

Receive Side Coalescing

RSC aggregates packets from
the same TCP/IP flow into one larger packet, reducing per-packet processing
costs for faster TCP/IP processing

Receive Side Scaling

RSS allows the receive side
network load from a network adapter to be shared across multiple processors

Remote Direct Memory Access

RDMA enables more efficient
access of data on file shares.

Resource Metering

Measure CPU, network and
memory on a per-VM basis. This data is stored with the VM and moves with the
VM.

Single Root I/O
Virtualisation

SR-IOV allows a physical NIC
to appear to be a number of physical NICs, and allows virtual machine
networking to bypass the virtual switch.

SMB 2.2

SMB 2.2 supports RDMA and is
in Windows Server 8. Storage of VMs is supported on SMB 2.2. file shares. With
NIC teaming, you get multi-channel SMB.

Snapshot Live Merge

You do not have to shut down
a VM to merge a snapshot in Windows 8, resolving a major support issue.

Storage Pools

An aggregation of disks
without any RAID. They can be as loosely coupled as a bunch of USB drives.
The disks can be different sizes. A pool does not appear in Explorer. You can
create Storage Spaces from Storage Pools. This is one of the storage types
you could use to create a scalable and continuously available active/active
file share cluster.

Storage Spaces

A thinly provisioned slice
of storage from a storage pool. Can be a 2-copy-mirror (Like RAID 1 in
concept and performance), 3-copy-mirror, or parity (like RAID 5 in concept
and performance) storage space. Can be lots of spaces in a single pool. A
space is divided up into slabs across disks in the pool depending on the
fault tolerance chosen. Advanced configuration allows you to choose which
pool disks to use.

Unified Tracing

Enables network diagnostics
in the Hyper-V Extensible Switch

VHDX

The default virtual disk
type, expanding up to 16 TB, and supporting dynamic and fixed types.

Virtual Fibre-Channel Adapter

A host’s fibre channel
adapter can be virtualised, thus enabling VMs to have their own WWN and
direct access to the SAN.

Virtual Machine Scalability

32 virtual processors, 512 GB RAM

Virtualisation Aware Domain Controllers

Windows Server 8 domain
controllers are aware if they are Windows 8 Hyper-V VMs. This
prevents USN rollback (VM restore or snapshot application).

Windows 8 Client

Hyper-V is included in the
client operating system for free. It’s the same Hyper-V as in the server,
offering VM mobility and an easy introduction to Microsoft’s enterprise
virtualisation.  The client version of Hyper-V requires Second Level
Address Translation (SLAT)  in the CPU (Intel EPT, AMD RVI/NPT). 
This is not a requirement in the server version, but it is recommended.