Hyper-V™ is a next-generation, 64-bit virtualization technology that facilitates agility and integrated management of both physical and virtual components. It provides a platform to reduce costs, increase hardware utilization, optimize network and business infrastructure, and improve server availability.
While there are many compelling reasons to move to Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V technology, the top five reasons include:
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Reduce Infrastructure Costs Through Consolidation
Consolidating multiple workloads onto a single hardware platform enables you to reduce physical server sprawl and to support your business with less hardware, resulting in lower equipment costs, lesser electrical consumption for server power and cooling, and reduced physical space requirements.
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Virtualize the Most Demanding Workloads
Hyper-V supports 64-bit guest operating systems, offering you the flexibility to consolidate 32-bit and 64-bit workloads in the same environment. Organizations can virtualize infrastructure workloads on Server Core to run these workloads in their most reliable configurations.
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Virtualize for High Availability
Leveraging the clustering capabilities of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise and Datacenter editions, Hyper-V provides support for highly available virtual machines. Clustering and Network Load Balancing features support increased availability for planned and unplanned downtime, helping to improve business continuity.
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Protect Important Data Using Live Backup
The Hyper-V virtual machine Snapshot feature quickly captures the state of a running VM, including data, configuration, and running processes, allowing you to easily restore a VM to a previous state. It is especially useful for implementing complex or high-risk configuration changes, giving you the option to simply roll back the changes if something goes wrong. Hyper-V also uses the Windows Server 2008 Volume Shadow Copy Service to enable fast and reliable disaster recovery, and to minimize interruption, even after natural disasters or hardware failures.
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Minimize Downtime with Quick Migration
Hyper-V enables you to rapidly migrate a running virtual machine from one physical host system to another with minimal downtime. It leverages the familiar high-availability capabilities of Windows Server and System Center management tools, better enabling you to meet stringent Service Level Agreements and response metrics.