Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Essentials

Getting Started with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Essentials
Hello, and welcome to TrainSignal. You're watching Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Essentials. In this Getting Started lesson, I'll cover what you'll learn in this Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Essentials course. Let's start the lesson off by meeting your instructor. That's me, David Davis. I've been in the IT industry over 18 years. In that time, I've worked as a network admin, UNIX admin, Windows admin, VMware admin, and, finally, an IT manager. We've had a lot of success using both Microsoft and VMware virtualization products. I've spoken at VMworld North America and Europe, as well as numerous user groups and conferences. In my time in the it industry, I've written hundreds of different articles for magazines and online publications such as Virtualization Review. I've authored numerous TrainSignal video training courses including ESX Server, vSphere 4, 5, VMware vSphere troubleshooting, performance, vCloud directory essentials, Microsoft Virtual Server video training courses, and obtained a number of certifications and awards.

Using Virtual Storage, Virtual Disks, and Snapshots
Hello, and welcome to TrainSignal. You're watching Using Virtual Storage, Virtual Disks, and Snapshots. We'll start this lesson off by quickly reviewing some traditional storage options. With traditional physical servers in the datacenter, just about every center has local storage. That local storage or the disks inside the server are called DASD, or directly attached storage devices. In some cases, those disks are also attached in a storage drawer and are called JBOD or just a bunch of disks. Optionally, those disks can be provisioned out using ray groups and SCSI LUNs. But most enterprises have moved to SAN or NAS storage. Those are the two share storage options traditionally used in the datacenter today. SAN storage, or storage area networks, use either iSCSI or Fibre Channel technology. And the SAN storage while shared amongst many servers appears as a local drive. With the NAS storage, your storage appears as shared network drives. Protocols in use for NAS are NFS, the network file system, or SMB, which stands for server message block. SMB is what's used by Windows file servers for file sharing today. Now when you start using virtual storage with Hyper-V, you still need physical storage of some kind. These forms of storage don't just totally disappear. However, all servers that are virtualized will, instead, use virtual storage, and that virtual storage for each virtual machine will be stored on one of these forms of traditional storage--local, SAN, or NAS.

Using Hyper-V Storage Migration
Hello, and welcome to TrainSignal. You're watching Using Hyper-V Storage Migration. Let's start this lesson off by laying out why it is that you need storage migration at all. To define it, storage migration is the moving of virtual storage of a virtual machine from one location to another. In many cases, the virtual machine is running while the storage is being moved. Now this feature is so beneficial and so helpful for a variety of reasons. But they all have to do with flexibility. In the past, you'd have to shut down a physical host to move its storage. Today, you could move all or just pieces of a virtual machine's storage with the virtual machine up and running at all times. That means that end users can be accessing a critical company application in a virtual machine while the storage of that virtual machine is being moved from one location to another. Actually, it's really amazing that this is even possible. So why would you want or need to move a virtual machine storage? Well, let's say that you need to perform SAN or NAS maintenance on a storage array, you need to take it offline, maybe replace a disk or a power supply. Or perhaps you just have a SAN LUN that's out of space. That happens quite frequently. Or maybe your SAN is being pushed to its performance limits, and it's just out of IO, also known as IOs per second or IOPS, requiring you to move virtual machine disk files to balance the performance allocation. No matter the reason, the ability to move virtual machine storage with the virtual machine powered on is a huge benefit to system administrators, companies, and end users alike because it's going to prevent down time and give them greater flexibility.

Virtual Machine Conversion with Hyper-V
Hello, and welcome to TrainSignal. You're watching Virtual Machine Conversion with Hyper-V. We'll start the lesson off by talking about why you need conversion tools in the first place. Obviously, you can create brand-new virtual machines. But why do you need to convert other virtual machines? Well, there're really a couple of different scenarios here. The first one would be a P2V server conversion, or physical to virtual. So let's say you have an existing physical server in your datacenter. You want to virtualize that. You would use a P2V conversion tool to do it. These tools make it much easier than, let's say, performing a backup of the physical host and then trying to restore that into a virtual machine. These conversion tools can make the process automated and easy. So there's one option of physical to virtual. Another option would be a virtual to virtual server conversion. So in this case, let's say that you have another hypervisor in the datacenter, perhaps a VMware vSphere host is running a virtual machine, and you want to convert that to Hyper-V. You would use a V2V server conversion tool to convert that VMware vSphere virtual machine into Hyper-V. Or another case, let's say that you download a virtual machine from the internet that is created with another hypervisor. You might need to convert that to Hyper-V using a V2V server conversion tool. And in most cases, these types of tools are combined into one. So you get a conversion tool for Hyper-V, and it will do both physical to virtual, as well as virtual to virtual server conversions.

Installing Free Hyper-V Server 2012
Hello, and welcome to TrainSignal. You're watching Installing Free Hyper-V Server 2012. We'll start this lesson off by talking about what free Hyper-V 2012 has to offer you. Anytime someone offers something for free, of course you're going to have some questions about whether or not it's a very useful product. I assure you free Hyper-V Server 2012 is actually a very powerful free product from Microsoft, and I applaud them for offering such a full-featured product available at no cost. Free Hyper-V Server 2012 actually provides all the same advanced features of Windows Server 2012 with the Hyper-V role enabled. There's no virtualization rights for any virtual machines that you run underneath it. Of course you would have to purchase any Windows licenses for Windows virtual machines that you would want to run. But, for example, you could run the Linux operating system, that is supported now, at no cost. So you could run free Hyper-V Server 2012 and a version of free Linux underneath at no cost and have a very powerful type 1 hypervisor with many advanced features. There's no local graphical interface. That's really the only drawback with free Hyper-V 2012. So it's very similar to Windows server core. In other words, you just get a command prompt on the local server. You can use the S config tool on the local console to configure, let's say, an IP address and some other basic information like the server name. But other than that, if you want to actually administer the virtual machines, most likely you're going to do it with Hyper-V Manager running remotely on another workstation. However, you could, of course, use PowerShell locally on the Hyper-V Server 2012 console as well.

Building a Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Lab
Hello, and welcome to TrainSignal. You're watching How to Build a Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Lab. The first question I want to answer is, Why should I build a Hyper-V lab at all? Why not just buy a production server and install Hyper-V? Well, there're a number of great reasons to build a lab, and they vary from person to person and from company to company. Those reasons always include learning. With Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V being all new, just about every Windows admin out there wants to learn it, and you don't want to do it in production. You don't want to risk your job or use expensive production infrastructure servers just to learn Microsoft Hyper-V. The second reason is certification. New certifications covering Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Microsoft private cloud are now out and available, and you need to get started learning and preparing to achieve those certifications. Those certifications are going to be great ways to differentiate yourself from other Windows Server administrators out there so that you can prove your expert knowledge in virtualization and cloud computing. The third reason is testing. Whether it's creating a proof of concept for your company to show how Hyper-V can run your company's applications or testing your management applications with Hyper-V, utilizing Microsoft Hyper-V for testing is a great use case for a Hyper-V lab. The fourth reason is development. Many companies want to develop applications around Hyper-V or even create development environments inside Hyper-V. This is because of how easy it is to snapshot virtual machines, clone virtual machines, and create entire new development environments in just seconds utilizing Microsoft Hyper-V. Now personally I run my own home lab environment that I use to learn about Hyper-V and other hypervisors. It helps me to test advanced features, to demonstrate the power of virtualization, and even to prepare for certifications related to virtualization and cloud computing.

Enabling Client Hyper-V with Windows 8
Hello, and welcome to TrainSignal. You're watching Enabling Client Hyper-V With Windows 8. We'll start this lesson off by answering the question, How can Client Hyper-V help you? Client Hyper-V is a type 1 virtualization hypervisor running inside the Windows 8 operating system on your desktop or laptop computer. Just like Hyper-V on a Windows Server system, Client Hyper-V will allow you to run other operating systems inside Windows 8. So you could, for example, run Windows Server 2012 or even install applications like Microsoft Exchange or SharePoint. With Client Hyper-V, not only can you learn about these new operating systems and other applications, you could also move those virtual machines very easily to a production Hyper-V Server. Finally, Client Hyper-V is an excellent tool for developers who need to run multiple operating systems or multiple instances of applications on their existing desktop or laptop system.