I recently came across a blog post by a Microsoft engineer which showed his 5th grade son creating a virtual machine with Hyper-V 2012. Now, I am sure this child is hereditarily blessed when it comes to intelligence, but the ease in which he navigates through the Windows 2012 and …

The Unitrends administrative user interface allows users to configure and manage their Hyper-V 2012 servers, and get a view at a glance of their data protection status.  Users can build flexible schedules to back up their VMs periodically.  They can use a combination of Full and Incremental backups, or only …

In this blog, I had discussed the advancements in Hyper-V 2012’s networking capabilities, specifically the network virtualization capabilities.  With network virtualization, physical and virtual networking becomes seamless, especially when considering workloads may be bursting into a private cloud setup. One other feature that layers on top of the network virtualization …

Microsoft introduced “shared nothing” for Live Migrations in Server 2012. This is simply the ability to move a running virtual machine/guest from one hypervisor host system to another with no requirement for shared storage between the two hosts. This means you no longer have to have a fancy, expensive storage …

Resource Metering is a powerful new feature in Hyper-V 2012.  It allows Hyper-V host administrators to track the compute resources a given VM or set of VMs uses over time.  The information collected includes the average CPU and memory usage, the minimum and maximum memory usage, the maximum amount of …

I have been working with Hyper-V for a while now and while I think overall it has just the right feature set to create a dent in the virtualization space, I was particularly impressed with the Hyper-V replica feature.  Replication is a complex concept and Hyper-V 2012 replica achieved what …

I had a chance this week to read an interesting interview with Microsoft MVP Aidan Finn on how Hyper-V is shaking up the virtualization world. The interview was done by TechTarget writer Nick Martin and reported online in an article titled “How Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V is changing the virtualization …

Last August I wrote a blog post giving a general comparison of Hyper-V 2012 and vSphere 5.0. I’m speaking this week at the Virtualization Deep Dive 2013 conference in Cambridge, MA, so I thought I would like to dig in a bit to study the nitty-gritty feature enhancements and comparisons …

I was recently starting on a new project and needed to have a Hyper-V VM I could use for development, debug, and test.  At the same time, our development team was putting the finishing touches on a couple of new features, so I thought I would use them to help …

Server Message Block (SMB), also known as Common Internet File System (CIFS, /ˈsɪfs/) operates  as an application-layer network protocol[1] mainly used for providing shared access to files, printers, serial ports, and miscellaneous communications between nodes on a network.  [Wikipedia]
The CIFS protocol is widely used in the context of a file server, where a central repository hosts the files that can be …