Last year before Windows 8 was finalized for release, there were some Building Windows 8 involving Hyper-V client edition that the Windows 8 users are finally able to try out Windows Virtual PC's successor. It has more features than ever and from this event, additional settings were mentioned such as NIC Teaming, Router and DHCP Guards, Pass-Through Disk, Virtual Switches, Virtual Graphics Card via RemoteFX and the list goes on. Even the System Center thing was mentioned as you can use System Center VMM To manage the VMWare and Hyper-V virtual machines. In addition, live migration was also mentioned as well as the data replication of the virtual machines between the data centers, storages, servers and other stuffs around the sites. Also, there's even the Data Replica thing which can be used for data replication of the virtual machine so you're going to need it in case the downtime is bound to happen due to some hardware failure, maintenance or whatever that's going to happen to the organization in the future.
Unfortunately, during the event, there was some technical problem targeting the Q&A session that all the questions were pushed over to the Help tab. For me, I had nothing left to ask questions as this event was already beyond my knowledge about Hyper-V and besides, I have never even used Hyper-V before personally. Who knows when will I be using Hyper-V but then, about 1GB to 2GB is somewhat required by then? However, the better thing is that one of the Windows Server related OS called, Hyper-V Server, is free so that you can download it and try it out for virtualization purposes although the downside is that it is going to be Server Core based so you've better be familiar with the advanced server related command line stuffs for doing whichever technical actions needed. Like the previous event I attended, the Linux OSes already have their own integrations when running them as Guest OSes on Hyper-V. I don't know if you can use the System Center technology to deploy the Macs in addition to PCs WITHOUT the use of scripting and why was I curious like that? Well, that may be because, you can use this tool for deployment through Orchestrator which is somewhat less difficult by the way.
For migration, the settings of the virtual machines can be involved as well. However, the live migration process can be interrupted abruptly if one of the systems involved in it goes down and I don't know if that can be troublesome should that kind of downtime happen during the migration process.
Anyway, that event will be how you will use Hyper-V in your business. If you're a Windows 8 user and are into virtualization thingy, go get Hyper-V now and try it out.
