Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 supported configuring virtual machines with a maximum of four virtual processors and up to 64 GB of memory. However, many IT organizations increasingly want to use virtualization when they deploy mission-critical, tier-1 business applications into their private cloud datacenter fabric. Large, demanding workloads such as online transaction processing (OLTP) databases and online transaction analysis (OLTA) solutions typically run on systems with 16 or more processors and can demand large amounts of memory. For this class of workloads, more virtual processors and larger amounts of virtual machine memory can be a core requirement.

In response to these increased demands, Microsoft has greatly expanded support for Hyper-V host processors and memory in Windows Server 2012 RC . New features include support for up to 32 virtual processors and 1TB of memory for Hyper-V guests, a new VHDX virtual hard disk format with larger disk capacity of up to 64 TB and support for 512e/4kb sector disks, and additional virtual disk resiliency provided through a new logged design. These features help ensure that the virtualization infrastructure can support the configuration of large, high-performance virtual machines to support workloads that might need to scale up significantly or in environments where a smaller number of high capacity hypervisor hosts is desirable to reduce operational costs.

These however, aren’t the only improvements in Windows Server 2012 RC Hyper-V, as you can see from the table below:

Significant improvements have been made across the board, with Hyper-V now supporting increased cluster sizes, a significantly higher number of active virtual machines per host, and additionally, more advanced performance features such as in-guest Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA). This ensures customers can achieve the highest levels of scalability, performance and density for their mission-critical workloads.

To download Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate and learn about the technical details on the virtualization improvements in this latest release of the Windows Server operating system, please see: http://aka.ms/NewsWS2012RC

• Microsoft Announces Availability of Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate
• Is Windows Server 2012 cloud ready?
• Getting Productive with Windows Server 2012 (Part 1)
• Implementing Hyper-V Network Virtualization in Windows Server 2012