Key Changes for Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V

 

Simplified editions:

• Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacentre: for highly virtualised datacentre and cloud environments.
• Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard: for physical or minimally virtualised environments.
• Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials: small businesses with up to 25 users and 50 devices.

Specifications:

Class	Resource	Windows Server 2012-r2
Host	CPUs on hardware	320
Host	Physical memory	4TB
VM	vCPU per VM	64
VM	vRAM per VM	1TB
VM	vDisk per VM	64TB
VM	Running VMs per host	1024
Cluster	Nodes	64
Cluster	VMs in Cluster	8000

 

General performance changes:

• Storage Tiering (Pool HDD & SSD and automatically move hot data to SSD)
• Data De-duplication (for live VDI virtual hard disks)
• VMs on SMB 3.0
• Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) network cards
• Offload Data Exchange (ODX) if you SAN supports it
• Simultaneous Live Concurrent Migration now to the level of hardware you support (10gb use 8 concurrent)

Generation 2 VMs:

Generation 2 VMs are based on the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) BIOS. They use less emulated hardware. Gone are serial ports, PS/2 ports and other devices.

• ONLY Windows Server 2012 / 2012 R2, Windows 8 / 8.1, are supported.
• Secure Boot is an turned on by default
• The synthetic network interface controller (NIC) supports Pre-Boot eXecution Environment (PXE) booting.
• Gone are IDE-connected virtual hard drives (VHDs) you can now boot from virtual SCSI.
• Generation 2 VM boots about 20% faster and the OS installs about 50% faster
• However there is no performance benefit to a running VM.