Managing a VM day-to-day can look like an easy task, but when something goes wrong, it is time to use all the expertise to find the cause of the problem and solve it. Understanding how to perform these tasks is the key to troubleshooting your environment.

With all that you have read so far, you probably have a general idea of what a VM is composed of, and so the process of creating a VM is nothing more than putting all the components together. However, in Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft introduced a new type of VM, the Generation 2 VM (Gen 2 VM). If you are familiar with the VMware technology, you probably have seen multiple VM hardware types that allow you to have more features depending on the hardware type. Gen 2 VMs in Hyper-V works in, essentially, the same way. However, the goal for Gen 2 VMs is to prepare the underlying VM hardware for the future.