LABS GALLERY: Windows Server 2008 R2 Stands Out Most for Hyper-V, Win 7 Features

by Jason Brooks

In contrast with virtualization-only products such as VMware’s ESX Server, Hyper-V is baked into Windows Server, which means visiting various separate Windows configuration tools to perform Hyper-V operations such as shared storage management.

R2’s Failover Cluster Validation wizard proved invaluable for rooting out the handful of configuration wrinkles I encountered during my tests of this feature.

Once I’d configured my Failover Cluster, I could create new virtual machines from the Failover Cluster management console, as well as from the Hyper-V management consoles for each of my nodes.

Microsoft has released compatibility drivers for Linux machines running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, but I had to start out with a “legacy” network device to complete a network installation of my Linux VM.

Moving running VMs from one node to another was fast and easy using the Failover Clustering console.

Installing the so-called “enlightened” drivers for Linux machines required a bit of dependency hunting. I’d love to see Microsoft smooth this process with a package repository for the drivers.

I used R2’s Remote Desktop Services to make Word 2010 available as a RemoteApp, complete with a Windows installer for integrating the hosted application with client machines.

After installing my Word RemoteApp on a client system, I could launch it from the machine’s Start menu.

An entry for “virtual machine” appears in the list of applications and services that may be enabled for high availability.

I set out to cluster one of the VMs I’d created on a single node, but I ended up having to copy and paste my virtual hard drive and recreate a VM using that disk to complete the node-to-cluster migration.