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It is next week : August 15th that Windows 2012 will be available for download for MSDN subscribers. Are you ready to deploy it?

Enhancements in Hyper-V and Windows Server 2012 , on network (Teaming, Hyper-V Extensible Switch), multi-tenancy security, higher performance and flexibility.

The performance improvements in Windows Server 2012 over the Server 2008 R2, are huge :

• Increases in the number of logical processors on server hardware, to 160 from 64;
• Increases in the amount of physical memory, to 2TB from 1TB;
• Increases in the number of virtual processors per host server, to 1,024 from 512;
• Increases in the number of virtual processors per virtual machine, to 32 from four;
• Increases in the amount of memory per virtual machine, to 1TB from 64GB;
• Increases in the number of active virtual machines, to 1,024 from 384;
• Increases in the maximum number of virtual nodes in a single server cluster, to 64 from 16;
• Increases in and in the total number of virtual machines, to 4,000 from 1,000
• New virtual disk version : VHDX ( with a built-in feature for preventing data corruption)
• Virtual fiber channel ( making possible to offer the HBA in the host as a virtual HBA to the Virtual Machines)
• SMB file shares to store Virtual Machines
• Hyper-V Replica ( makes possible to create a replica of VMs on other Hyper-V hosts, even in – remote locations ) – ESSENTIAL in DR solutions.

Plus, true live storage migration, shared-nothing live migration, improvements in Dynamic memory… and counting.

Windows Server 2012 will also be available in the desktop version : Windows 8. You can install the Hyper-V on Windows 8 by navigating to the Control Panel and selecting Turn Windows features on or off and select the Hyper-V Platform option.

Note: One of the requirements of running Hyper-V on the Windows 8 edition is that the processor needs to support SLAT (Second Level Address Translation), otherwise Hyper-V will  not available.

Resuming, Windows Server 2012 has a lot of improvements and quite a lot of new functionality as well! So, enjoy the upgrade!