Technology has a way with change and change is necessary. We have witnessed many advances in the world of computing, with improvements and innovations being released at the drop of a hat, be it the room-sized hard drives squeezed down to thumbnail-sized memory cards, or mainframes giving way to distributed traditional servers and then to virtualized workloads. With virtualization at its fore, cloud computing has now taken the IT world by storm. Microsoft has become a major stakeholder in it with its earlier releases of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 and Azure. Later on, it grabbed the attention of medium and enterprise businesses with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. Now it has put its best foot forward with the Release 2.0 of Windows Server 2012.

In the forthcoming pages, we will look into the Hyper-V architecture, which will help you understand what runs under the hood and realize what to fix if the setup does not deliver as expected. We will also look at the technical prerequisites, scalable options, and features introduced with Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V.

Some features are new to this hypervisor platform, while others are improvements to earlier offerings with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, with more support for Linux VMs now.

There is also a basic overview of the licensing aspects and the Automatic Virtual Machine Activation (AVMA) feature released with Windows Server 2012 R2. It's imperative to understand the licensing requirements when designing a solution and ensure that you pay for what you use.

A discussion on Hyper-V always invites a comparison with the market leaders—VMware's ESXi servers. After almost a decade of catching up, Microsoft has delivered a product that matches up to its worthy competitor. We will close this chapter with a comparison chart of VMware's latest offering, ESXi 5.5, and Citrix XenServer 6.2 in order to show the features' differences and similarities.

In this chapter, we will broadly discuss the following topics: