Microsoft recently released the latest public preview of Windows Server 2016 and Hyper-V Server 2016 (the free version). There are lots of new Hyper-V features to evaluate, learn, and use.
If I had to give you a theme to this release, it would be cloud. Much of what is in the 2016 release is geared toward building private, hosted, or public cloud, with a lot of the management being offered either by Azure or Microsoft Azure Stack. When evaluating WS2016, you’ll need to consider:
- Nano Server, with administration via Remote Server Management Tools
- Hyper-V
- Failover Clustering
- Storage
- Networking, particularly the Network Controller
- Microsoft Azure Stack
- Containers
In this post, I’m going to focus on the improvements to Hyper-V.
Connected Standby
This is a feature for Windows 10 users and the few presenters that run Windows Server Hyper-V on their laptop or hybrid device. You might even say that this new feature was dedicated to Paul Thurrott when the feature was announced at TechEd Europe 2014, mainly because Paul was one of the more vocal sufferers of the lack of compatibility between Hyper-V and the heralded Windows 8/hardware feature. Hyper-V had issues with Connected Standby, and these issues have been solved in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016.
Discrete Device Assignment (DDA)
Discrete Device Assignment is a relatively new feature in the list of improvements. DDA allows you to give a virtual machine direct and exclusive access to some PCI devices in the host. The concept is that a virtual machine can talk directly to a graphics card. My suspicion is that the primary customer for this feature are those who are using Microsoft Azure with an N-Series virtual machine. But anyone looking for something better than RemoteFX or compute intensive workloads should be interested in this feature, too.
Host Resource Protection
This is a security feature to protect a host and other virtual machines from resource abuse by another virtual machine. Imagine that a virtual machine goes awry or is compromised; in the latter case, the attacker will want to attack the hypervisor, either looking for a vulnerability or to launch a DOS attack. Hyper-V can be configured to starve the virtual machine of resources when unusual behaviour starts, thus limiting the damage and giving you a chance to intervene.
Add-Add/Remove of Virtual Memory and Network Adapters
Is that applause and cheering that I hear? This heavily demanded feature is coming to Hyper-V; you can add and remove memory and virtual NICs to and from running virtual machines running Windows 10 or WS2016.
Hyper-V Manager
The old tool is looking long in the tooth, but improvements are coming. You can launch Hyper-V manager with alternate credentials, supporting the secure dual-identity approach that some companies enforce. You can also manage older versions of Hyper-V from WS2016 (WS2012, WS2012 R2, Windows 8.1, and Windows 8). The management protocol has been updated to use WS-MAN (TCP 80) with remote hosts. A benefit is that you can connect to a remote host with CredSSP and perform a live migration without enabled messy Active Directory constrained delegation.