Hello, Cloud Gurus, and welcome back,
and congratulations on making it to the end of this section.
I hope the knowledge you've gained
in this section will serve you well now and into the future.
Let's recap some of the key takeaways
from the lessons in this section.
When I first started working with Microsoft hypervisors,
I was using Virtual PC 2009.
And then when Hyper-V came along,
it fundamentally changed the way hypervisors worked.
Virtual PC was a type 2 hypervisor.
This means that it runs on the host operating system
just like all the other software applications.
And your virtual machines run
on top of the software hypervisor.
And this means that the resources are restricted
in the same way they are restricted
to applications that run on your server.
And this led to a wide variety of performance issues.
Hyper-V is different.
It's a type 1 hypervisor.
So it runs below the operating system on the bare metal.
And when you install the Hyper-V role,
the parent operating system that's used to manage Hyper-V
shares its resources with the VMs deployed to Hyper-V.
And the resources are divided up into partitions.
And the host operating system is the root partition.
And the VMs have their own partitions.
And the VMs that you deploy on Hyper-V can be
one of two generations
and you should choose Generation 2 VMs wherever possible
because only Generation 2 VMs support secure boot.
But you might want to use Generation 1
if you need to use a 32-bit operating system.
All right, let's take a high-level look at Hyper-V
to review all of the key concepts
we covered in this section.
We first started by defining what Hyper-V is.
And that is that it is a hypervisor
that can run either a top bare metal on a physical server
or in a virtual machine.
To deploy a hypervisor,
your processor has to have specific requirements
including support for processor features
like second level address translation,
more commonly known SLAT,
and virtualization support from either AMD or Intel.
And you also need to make sure you have enough memory
in your Hyper-V host.
And we explored that dynamic memory can be used
to help deal with memory capacity issues.
You'll also need storage that meet your capacity,
performance, and redundancy requirements.
And to get the required capacity,
performance, and redundancy,
you can use a storage area network, or SAN,
or group disks together using something like storage spaces.
Now, I know that we didn't cover storage spaces
in this section,
but we will take a look at it later on
and I'll remind you then
that it can be used for Hyper-V storage.
You'll also need enough network performance and redundancy
to help achieve the required levels of redundancy
and performance for your network.
And to help you achieve this,
we took a look at network teaming
and a range of advanced network capabilities.
And the hypervisor virtualizes the hardware in the server.
And the way in which that is done is different
for each type of hardware.
The processor is virtualized as a virtual processor.
So that one's fairly easy to remember.
You can assign one or more virtual processes to each VM
and configure how many processor cores
each virtual processor has.
And the memory is virtualized as virtual RAM.
That's also pretty obvious.
And as mentioned, you can either statically assign
an amount of RAM or use dynamic memory
and set a minimum, maximum, and startup amounts
and configure a buffer.
And disks are virtualized as either virtual hard disks
in either the older VHD format or the newer VHDX format.
And you can assign multiple hard disks to a VM.
And if you are using a Generation 2 VM,
you can even add and edit the disks while the VM is running.
You can also assign the same hard disk
to multiple virtual machines using VHD sets,
which is the replacement for the older shared VHDX.
And VHD sets allow you to use things like guest clustering.
And the physical network is connected to the VM
using a virtual switch.
We spoke about the types of virtual switches
including private, which is VM-only,
internal, which is VM and host-only,
and external in which the virtual switch can be connected
to a single physical network interface
or connected to a network team.
Now you can't connect a virtual switch to multiple NICs
that aren't part of a team.
And on top of your hypervisor,
you create and run your virtual machines.
Let's take a look at some of the key gotchas
that we've looked at in relation to VMs.
VMs are allocated processor cores
based on the scheduler you're using.
To ensure your VMs don't share physical cores,
which could expose them to potential vulnerabilities,
you can make sure you're using the core scheduler.
And because dynamic memory can lead
to your Hyper-V host exhausting all of your physical memory,
which means a VM might not be able to restart
when it needs to,
Smart Paging with reliable restart allows you
to use disk space to ensure you can restart a VM
by allocating disk space as available memory.
We also talked about application consistent snapshots
for your VMs.
And these are called production checkpoints in Hyper-V.
This allows the VM operating system
to prepare applications for a checkpoint
so you can make sure the checkpoint won't lead
to application issues like data corruption.
And when it comes to the virtual network,
we spoke about how you can use NAT
with an internal virtual switch
to provide network connectivity for nested virtual machines.
And we know that we can use Hyper-V Manager
to manage our VMs.
We can also use Windows Admin Center.
And we can use PowerShell and PowerShell Direct.
What's important to remember here is
that you should use enhanced session mode
to connect to the console of your VMs
to ensure you don't end up
with an administrative session being hijacked.
All right, now I know that's a lot
and there is even more covered in this section,
but let's leave it there for now.
Thanks for being with me in this section.
I hope you found it useful.
And I look forward to seeing you in the next section.