One of the easiest ways to adopt Windows Server 2016 in an existing environment is via an in-place upgrade mechanism. You might have a scenario with a relatively fresh installation of Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V, where you want to update to Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V on the same hardware. In cases where you have Hyper-V running with all the applications, drivers, and hardware on the host computer being supported on a Windows Server 2016 platform, you can use the in-place upgrade option for upgrading. This will guarantee that your host computer will be easily upgraded to Windows Server 2016 with all the configuration and files preserved.

However, in cases where applications, drivers, or even hardware might not work on Windows Server 2016, or the old installation of Windows Server 2012 R2 has had lots of modifications caused by uninstalled applications, the best way would be via migration to a new operating...

If you don't want to perform an in-place upgrade from Windows Server 2012 R2 to Windows Server 2016, the migration from an old Hyper-V version to Windows Server 2016 is not so complicated either. One option to consider, especially for VMs that run in an isolated environment, is to use export and import to migrate these VMs.

You need to install a new server with Windows Server 2016, enable the Hyper-V role, export the virtual machine from the old server, and import them back to your new server. That's it! This is the same process that we have been using since the first version of Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 but with a fairly recent twist.

Earlier versions of Hyper-V had some limitations, for example, you could import only a virtual machine that had been exported before and there were lots of other issues regarding different configurations in the source and destination host that could trip you up.

The next few steps will guide you through...

Most people think that the process to migrate a virtual machine from one host that is running a previous version of Hyper-V, to another one with a newer version, is simply done by the export and import process, as shown in the previous task. In the past this would have been wrong, but this is the experience that Microsoft wants to provide for Windows Server 2016. During previous migrations, you may have noticed some strange behavior in the VMs you migrated, such as mouse integration, slow performance, and some other issues.

With Windows Server 2016, Microsoft has changed its strategy when it comes to Integration Services, no longer are the Integration Service versions so heavily matched to the host version. The focus is now on applying updates to the VM if there is a requirement to update the VM. This has the added benefit that the person responsible for managing the Hyper-V host isn't necessarily responsible for updating...

Cross Version Shared Nothing Live Migration provides you with the capability to migrate your VMs to a Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V host, via nothing more than a shared network, without the VMs experiencing any downtime. The nice thing about Cross Version Shared Nothing Live Migration, is that it provides a mechanism to non-disruptively upgrade your Hyper-V host.

Given the increased cadence around the Windows operating system, Microsoft introduced features like Cross...

In a hybrid cloud environment, with thousands of physical and virtual servers, it is normal to face some problems or limitations that require reallocating a virtual machine to another location.

Let's list some examples of the issues you might encounter:

Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V includes a feature to help you in these scenarios called storage migration, providing the ability to reallocate the virtual machine storage while it's running.

This recipe will walk through all the details and steps to show you how to move the virtual machine storage using the storage migration.