Chapter 4. Managing Networking

Networking, along with storage, is one of the most critical subsystems for virtualization. Planning your hardware accordingly is extremely important and failure in the planning phase can result in a virtualization environment with poor performance. Furthermore, changing your hardware during production, either network or storage, is not that simple.

From the networking point of view, there are two important aspects to be considered. These are the hardware networking, the physical network installed on the host machine, and the VM networking, the virtual network on which the VM accesses the network resources.

Another important aspect of Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 are the new features available on Hyper-V Switch. These new features allow you to have a new hardware configuration, which was not supported by Microsoft in the previous versions of Windows Server. It also allows you to have not only a better VM density, but a variety of new workloads...