Preface

Today we virtualize datacenters to gain flexibility, scalability, high-end performance, and ease of management. Moreover, virtualization has brought a high level of consolidation. This enables us to reduce the footprint of the datacenter and save power. For some years, we have wanted to manage our datacenter using the Cloud model. We wanted to create server quickly, improve the performance of this machine on the fly, and delete it when we don't need it anymore.

All of this can be done, thanks to hypervisor. There are several hypervisors such as VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer, or Microsoft Hyper-V. Because this book is called Hyper-V Best Practices, we will focus on Hyper-V.

Microsoft has released a major Windows Server version toward the end of 2016. This book focusses on Hyper-V on Windows Server 2016. A lot of new features have been provided in this new version but several rules can be applied to Hyper-V in a previous release.

This book is not intended to explain you all feature mechanisms included in Hyper-V. To follow this book, some knowledge of Hyper-V is required. However, because Hyper-V doesn't work alone, you also need to know about Failover Cluster, Active Directory, storage, and network.

Fasten your seat belts and welcome to this Hyper-V journey.