A virtual machine workload can be created in two possible ways. You can either create a new VM and set up, or convert a previously active physical server to a virtual machine. Apart from this, in the following section we will also see how to convert a VMware guest machine to a Hyper-V VM.

However, before we get into the thick of the things, let's first look at the new generation virtual machine offering in Windows Server 2012 R2. Until the previous release of the Windows Server Hyper-V platform, virtual machines used to depend on emulation of old chipsets and devices. These virtual machines are now referred to as Generation 1. With the release of Windows Server Hyper-V 2012 R2, Microsoft released Generation 2 virtual machines, which promised to remove the limitations of the older version. The new version introduces kernel enlightenments and removes the dependency on BIOS. The Generation 2 VMs boot off UEFI instead of standard BIOS, which...