LIVE NOW: Never mind Windows 8, speak your brains on Server 2012 Windows Server 2012 was part of a Microsoft launch wave that included Windows 8 and Office 2013. While the benefits of the latter two are debatable, on server Microsoft has delivered a solid performer that’s completely surpassed Windows Server 2008 and deserves attention. Among the biggest changes are advances in Hyper-V, …
Never used Hyper-V myself but as I understand Microsoft's marketing material there are two options, run Hyper-V as a part of Windows Server or get a minimal standalone version of it without all the bells and whistles.
To cite said marketing material: "Either as a stand-alone product or an integrated part of Windows Server, Hyper-V is the leading virtualization platform for today and the transformational opportunity with cloud computing. "
I would tend to disagree, a bit... A hypervisor is a subset of operating systems. In fact the original name came from when the OS was actually called the supervisor, hence the thing which is above supervisors and controls them being the hypervisor.
Now, the hypervisor by its very nature has to be a minimal operating system, so you can legitimately have a super-chopped down version of an existing OS, such as Windows or Linux, with appropriate hypervising software added as the hypervisor. This then leads you on to the murky world of having a hypervisor with full OS capabilities installed as well running the VMs. Where is the line drawn, is vmware server running on a hypervisor or an OS?
If I don't give a shit about Hyper-V - and really, it has zero relevance for me.
Just what is a "blogger" with provably limited understanding of the technologies going to be able to say that will improve our understanding of the changes to the underlying OS? I don't think she evn knows what an OS is!
"Virtualisation is THE biggest topic for server OS right now"
Is it really or is that just keen propaganda? Just because many people have found good ways to utilize virtualization doesn't exactly make this "the thing" which is used throughout the entire market.
I think there are more servers out there which are used in-house to perform regular tasks than there are servers which require virtualization capabilities. The main difference is that when talking virtualization you're often talking about bigger thus also more expensive environments. And companies like Microsoft tend to go where the money is...
But that doesn't automatically make it THE overall topic.
@ShellLuser: I'm actually a fan of 1:1 virtualisation - if you have a single machine that you want to run, it's good to run it under its own hypervisor, if only because it makes it more easily migrateable, you can take the image and run it on any bare metal that the hypervisor can run on. This makes restoring after hardware failure or implementation of DR much easier. You can also use backup agents which talk to the hypervisor instead of backing up the VM, which can be useful if there isn't an agent for your VM.
There are only a few cases where you need the full power of the underlying hardware and those can be dealt with on a case by case tactical basis.
MJF appears on Windows Weekly and This week in tech pod casts.
She has never come across as knowing her onions technically. She just regurgitates press releases. I remember a recent one where she said she had never installed/reinstalled Windows!. And you expect us to value her opinion on Server 2012?
TBH I don't think its safe to put too much value at all in any stuff like this since you're always getting one sided stories. I mean; lets not forget that sessions like these also used to tell us how great Windows 8 was (and was going to be) and how the "experts" saw "many companies getting ready to migrate" or "many customers picking up on Win8".
Well, we all know how that turned out in the real world.
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