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Deep Dive Into Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V
Deep Dive in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V This session provides an overview of new and improved features in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V including scalability, mobility, and high availability. Key highlights include support for larger virtual machines with up to 64 virtual processors and 1TB of memory per VM, new 64TB VHDX format, live migration enhancements, Hyper-V Replica for disaster recovery, and networking improvements like NIC teaming. The presentation includes demonstrations of features like concurrent live migration and storage migration.
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Deep Dive Into Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V
- 1. Deep Dive inWindows Server 2012 Hyper-V Lai Yoong Seng (MVP Virtual Machine) Senior Consultant Redynamics Asia Systems Management laiys@Redynamics.com | www.ms4u.info 1
- 2. Session Objective andTakeaways Get excited! Learn what’s hot and new in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Scenario • Scalability • Mobility Video & Demo • High Availability 2
- 3. Scalability Bigger, faster virtual Run more Take advantage machines demanding of newer hardware, while applications still using with better existing hardware performance to maximum Dynamic advantage Memory VHDX Improvement 3
- 4. Hyper-V Host Scaleand Scale-up Workload Support Maximum number Improvement System Resource Windows 2008 R2 Windows Server 2012 factor Logical processors on hardware 64 320 5 Host Physical memory 1 TB 4 TB 4 Virtual processors per host 512 2048 2 Virtual processors per virtual machine 4 64 16 Virtual Memory per virtual machine 64 GB 1 TB 16 machine Active virtual machines 384 1,024 2.7 Nodes 16 64 4 Cluster Virtual machines 1,000 8,000 8 4
- 5. Scalability Video
- 6. New virtual harddisk format VHDX Features Large allocations Data region (large allocations and 1 MB aligned) and 1 MB aligned • Storage capacity up to 64 TBs Block Allocation User data blocks Intent log Table (BAT) • Corruption protection during power failures Sector bitmap blocks • Optimal structure alignment for large-sector disks Header region Metadata region (small allocations and unaligned) User metadata Header Metadata table Benefits File metadata • Increases storage capacity • Protects data • Helps to ensure quality performance on large-sector disks 6
- 7. Dynamic Memory Improvement • New configuration Item: Minimum Memory • Functionality:- • Configure dynamic memory while the VM is up and running • Increase the maximum memory • Decrease the minimum memory • Hyper-V Smart Paging 7
- 8. Live Dynamic Memory DEMO
- 9. Virtual machine Mobility Managevirtual machines independently from underlying Live migration Live migration infrastructure Improvement of storage SMB Share Shared- Handle changing needs on Based Live nothing live demand Migration migration 9
- 10. Improve Live Migration •Concurrent Live Migrations • Live Migration Queuing Concurrent Live Migrations: Multiple simultaneous LMs for a given source or target Live Migration Queuing: In-box tools queue & manage large numbers of VMs
- 11. Migrate Virtual MachineWithout Downtime Live migration based on Modifiedmigration setup Memory pages transferred Storage handle moved Live server message block (SMB) share Improvements VM Modified memory pages Configuration data Memory content VM MEMORY • Faster and simultaneous migration • Live migration outside a clustered environment IP connection • Store virtual machines on a File Share SMB network storage 11
- 12. Move Virtual MachineStorage Without Downtime Live migration of storage Disk Reads are mirrored; outstanding Disk contents writes go to to new writes and are copied new Reads and writes go to the source VHD Move virtual hard disks attached changes are replicated destination VHD to a running virtual machine Computer Benefits running • Manage storage in a cloud environment Virtual machine Hyper-V with greater flexibility and control • Move storage with no downtime • Update physical storage available to a virtual machine (such as SMB-based Source device Target device storage) • Windows PowerShell cmdlets 1
- 13. WOULDN’T IT BEGREAT IF YOU COULD LIVE MIGRATE A VM WITH NOTHING BUT AN ETHERNET CABLE?
- 14. Migrate Virtual MachinesWithout Downtime Readswrites are mirrored; Disk and writes go to the Disk contents writes go toto new Reads and are copied the Shared-nothing live source VHD. Live Migration Live Migration Completes Live Migration Continues outstanding changes are destination VHD source VHD migration replicated Begins Source Live Migration Destination Hyper-V Configuration data Hyper-V Modified memory pages MEMORY Memory content Benefits Virtual machine Virtual machine • Increase flexibility of virtual machine IP connection placement • Increase administrator efficiency • Reduce downtime for migrations across cluster boundaries Source device Target device 1
- 15. Concurrent Live Migration &Live Storage Migration DEMO
- 16. High Availability Hyper-V Ensure highest uptime – Clustering Network 99.999%, 99.99%, 99.9% ….. Enhancement Enhancement Ensure Business Continuity and Hyper-V Setup Disaster Environment Replica 16
- 17. Hyper-V Clustering Enhancements External Storage iSCSI SAN Flexible VM Guest Arrays Storage clustering •iSCSI Remote File Servers •Fiber Channel FC SAN •SMB 3 Clustering File Server SMB Support 3
- 18. Hyper-V VM Monitoring •The host monitors the guest VM • Any application with a service • Uses Service Control Manager • Configurable recovery actions • Restart Service • Reboot VM • Move VM
- 19. Virtual Machine FailoverPriority • Start Order • Live Migration • Node Maintenance • Running Priority • Pre-emption shuts down lower priority VMs High Medium Low
- 20. Failover Priority Video
- 21.
- 22. Network Quality ofService Network Quality of Service (QoS) Ability to control the throughput of the network and network bandwidth control. 22
- 23. Network QOS DEMO
- 24. NIC Teaming Technology •Provides network fault tolerance and continuous availability when network adapters fail by teaming multiple network interfaces • Vendor agnostic and shipped inbox Virtual adapters • Provides local or remote management Team network adapter Team network adapter through Windows PowerShell or UI • Enables teams of up to 32 network adapters • Aggregates bandwidth from multiple network adapters • Includes multiple nodes: switch dependent and independent 24
- 25. Disaster Happen Anywhere… Tsunami…Earthquake … 911 incident… How to protect your datacenter?
- 26. Hyper-V Replica New feature Primary site Replica site Replicate Hyper-V virtual machines from a Exchange virtual machine primary site to a replica site CRM virtual machine SQL virtual machine IIS virtual machine Exchange replica virtual SharePoint virtual machine machine Benefits CRM replica virtual • Affordable in-box business continuity and machine disaster recovery R2 • Failure recovery in minutes P1 P2 Replicate over R1 R3 WAN link • More secure replication across network • No need for storage arrays • No need for other software replication SMB file share SAN technologies Hyper-V role and tools Hyper-V role and tools Hyper-V Hyper-V PS Hyper-V Hyper-V PS • Automatic handling of live migration cmdlets integrated UI cmdlets integrated UI • Simpler configuration and management Send/receive replica traffic Hyper-V Management Module Hyper-V Management Module tracks and replicates changes for receives and applies the changes to each virtual machine the replica virtual machine 26
- 27. Hyper-V Replica DEMO
- 28. Let’s Recap 64 virtual processors per VM 1TB virtual machine memory New 64TB VHDX format Native 4k disk support Hyper-V Replica Hyper-V virtual fiber channel Live storage migration Windows NIC teaming Concurrent live migration Support for AES/NI Support for up to 64 nodes per cluster Support for 4000 VMs per cluster Hyper-V support for up 28
- 29. Virtual Lai’s Blog Q&A Thank you www.ms4u.info DOWNLOAD Windows Server 2012 http://www.microsoftvirt http://technet.microsoft.com/en- ualacademy.com us/evalcenter/hh670538.aspx 29
Editor's Notes
- #3 NOTE: This slide is animated and has 3 clicks[Click]The first scenario we are going to talk about is how you can achieve greater densities and run more demanding workloads through the Scale and Performance improvements of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. Within your organization, as you virtualize more of your infrastructure you need to have a platform, a hypervisor, that can support your most demanding workloads.[Click]Also, as you adopt newer hardware, you will need to be able to utilize the advancements within the hardware to the fullest, without losing the capability of the existing investments in infrastructure you already have.[Click]We do this through new features and updates delivered with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V like:Bigger, faster virtual machinesHardware offloadingNon-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) support
- #7 With the evolution of storage systems, and the ever-increasing reliance on virtualized enterprise workloads, the VHD format of Windows Server needed to also evolve. The new format is better suited to address the current and future requirements for running enterprise-class workloads, specifically:Where the size of the VHD is larger then 2,040 GB. To reliably protect against issues for dynamic and differencing disks during power failures. To prevent performance degradation issues on the new, large-sector physical disks.Hyper‑V in Windows Server 2012 contains an update to the VHD format, called VHDX, that has much larger capacity and additional resiliency. VHDX supports up to 64 terabytes of storage. It also provides additional protection from corruption from power failures by logging updates to the VHDX metadata structures and prevents performance degradation on large-sector physical disks by optimizing structure alignment.Technical descriptionThe VHDX format’s principal new features are:Support for virtual hard disk storage capacity of up to 64 terabytes.Protection against corruption during power failures by logging updates to the VHDX metadata structures. The format contains an internal log that is used to capture updates to the metadata of the virtual hard disk file before being written to its final location. In case of a power failure, if the write to the final destination is corrupted, then it is played back from the log to promote consistency of the virtual hard disk file.Optimal structure alignment of the virtual hard disk format to suit large sector disks. If unaligned I/Os are issued to these disks, an associated performance penalty is caused by the Read-Modify-Write cycles that are required to satisfy these I/Os. The structures in the format are aligned to help ensure that are no unaligned I/Os exist.The VHDX format also provides the following features:Larger block sizes for dynamic and differential disks, which lets these disks attune to the needs of the workload.A 4-KB logical sector virtual disk that results in increased performance when applications and workloads that are designed for 4-KB sectors use it.The ability to store custom metadata about the file that you might want to record, such as operating system version or patches applied.Efficiency (called trim) in representing data, which results in smaller files and lets the underlying physical storage device reclaim unused space. (Trim requires pass-through or SCSI disks and trim-compatible hardware.)The figure illustrates the VHDX hard disk format.As you can see in the preceding figure, most of the structures are large allocations and are MB aligned. This alleviates the alignment issue that is associated with virtual hard disks. The different regions of the VHDX format are as follows:Header region. The header region is the first region of the file and identifies the location of the other structures, including the log, block allocation table (BAT), and metadata region. The header region contains two headers, only one of which is active at a time, to increase resiliency to corruptions.Intent log. The intent log is a circular ring buffer. Changes to the VHDX metastructures are written to the log before they are written to the final location. If corruption occurs during a power failure while an update is being written to the actual location, on the subsequent open, the change is applied again from the log, and the VHDX file is brought back to a consistent state. The log does not track changes to the payload blocks, so it does not protect data contained within them.Data region. The BAT contains entries that point to both the user data blocks and sector bitmap block locations within the VHDX file. This is an important difference from the VHD format because sector bitmaps are aggregated into their own blocks instead of being appended in front of each payload block.Metadata region. The metadata region contains a table that points to both user-defined metadata and virtual hard disk file metadata such as block size, physical sector size, and logical sector size.Hyper‑V in Windows Server 2012 also introduces support that lets VHDX files be more efficient when they represent that data within it. Because the VHDX files can be large, based on the workload they are supporting, the space they consume can grow quickly. Currently, when applications delete content within a virtual hard disk, the Windows storage stack in both the guest operating system and the Hyper‑V host have limitations that prevent this information from being communicated to the virtual hard disk and the physical storage device. This contains the Hyper‑V storage stack from optimizing the space used and prevents the underlying storage device from reclaiming the space previously occupied by the deleted data.In Windows Server 2012, Hyper‑V now supports unmap notifications, which lets VHDX files be more efficient in representing that data within it. This results in smaller files size, which lets the underlying physical storage device reclaim unused space.BenefitsVHDX, which is designed to handle current and future workloads, has a much larger storage capacity than the earlier formats and addresses the technological demands of evolving enterprises. The VDHX performance-enhancing features make it easier to handle large workloads, protect data better during power outages, and optimize structure alignments of dynamic and differential disks to prevent performance degradation on new, large-sector physical disks.RequirementsTo take advantage of the new version of the new VHDX format, you need the following:Windows Server 2012 or Windows 8The Hyper‑V server roleTo take advantage of the trim feature, you need the following:VHDX-based virtual disks connected as virtual SCSI devices or as directly attached physical disks (sometimes referred to as pass-through disks). This optimization also is supported for natively attached VHDX-based virtual disks.Trim-capable hardware.
- #10 NOTE: This slide is animated and has 3 clicksIn this scenario we will discuss how you can achieve Increased business flexibility with virtual machine mobility.[Click]What we are going to talk about here are the different ways of moving a virtual machine around between different servers, the things that we have done with Windows Server 2012 Hyper‑V that allow us to gain a benefit for our customers of being able to manage the virtual machines independently of thier underlying and physical infrastructure.[Click]Also, you need to be able to handle the changes in demand as they occur. You have a need to rebalance where the virtual machines are located either via through the servers the VMs reside on, or the storage resources used by the virtual machine.[Click]Within Windows Server 2012 we provide these values through:Live Migration within a clusterLive Migration of storageShared nothing live migrationHyper-V Replica
- #12 NOTE: This slide is animated and has 5 clicksTo maintain optimal use of physical resources and to add new virtual machines easily, you must be able to move virtual machines whenever necessary – without disrupting your business. Windows Server 2008 R2 introduced live migration, which made it possible to move a running virtual machine from one physical computer to another with no downtime and no service interruption. However, this assumed that the virtual hard disk for the virtual machine remained consistent on a shared storage device such as a Fibre Channel or iSCSI SAN. In Windows Server 2012, live migrations are no longer limited to a cluster and virtual machines can be migrated across cluster boundaries, including to any Hyper-V host server in your environment. Hyper-V builds on this feature, adding support for simultaneous live migrations, enabling you to move several virtual machines at the same time. When combined with features such as Network Virtualization, this feature even allows virtual machines to be moved between local and cloud hosts with ease.In this example, we are going to show how live migration works when connected to an SMB File Share. With Windows Server 2012 and SMB3, you can store your virtual machine hard disk files and configuration files on an SMB share and live migrate the VM to another host whether that host is part of a cluster or not.[Click]Live migration setup: During the live migration setup stage, the source host creates a TCP connection with the destination host. This connection transfers the virtual machine configuration data to the destination host. A skeleton virtual machine is set up on the destination host, and memory is allocated to the destination virtual machine.[Click]Memory page transfer: In the second stage of a SMB-based live migration, the memory that is assigned to the migrating virtual machine is copied over the network from the source host to the destination host. This memory is referred to as the “working set” of the migrating virtual machine. A page of memory is 4 KB.During this phase of the migration, the migrating virtual machine continues to run. Hyper-V iterates the memory copy process several times, with each iteration requiring a smaller number of modified pages to be copied. After the working set is copied to the destination host, the next stage of the live migration begins.[Click]Memory page copy process: This stage is a memory copy process that duplicates the remaining modified memory pages for “Test VM” to the destination host. The source host transfers the CPU and device state of the virtual machine to the destination host.During this stage, the available network bandwidth between the source and destination hosts is critical to the speed of the live migration. Use of a 1‑gigabit Ethernet (GbE) or faster connection is important. The faster the source host transfers the modified pages from the migrating virtual machine’s working set, the more quickly live migration is completed.The number of pages transferred in this stage is determined by how actively the virtual machine accesses and modifies the memory pages. The more modified pages, the longer it takes to transfer all pages to the destination host.[Click]Moving the storage handle from source to destination: During this stage of a live migration, control of the storage that is associated with “Test VM”, such as any virtual hard disk files or physical storage attached through a virtual Fibre Channel adapter, is transferred to the destination host. (Virtual Fibre Channel is also a new feature of Hyper-V. For more information, see “Virtual Fibre Channel in Hyper-V”). The following figure shows this stage.[Click]Bringing the virtual machine online on the destination server: In this stage of a live migration, the destination server has the up-to-date working set for the virtual machine and access to any storage that the VM uses. At this time, the VM resumes operation.Network cleanup: In the final stage of a live migration, the migrated virtual machine runs on the destination server. At this time, a message is sent to the network switch, which causes the switch to obtain the new MAC addresses of the migrated virtual machine so that network traffic to and from the VM can use the correct switch port.The live migration process completes in less time than the TCP time-out interval for the virtual machine that is being migrated. TCP time-out intervals vary based on network topology and other factors.
- #13 NOTE: This slide is animated and has 3 clicksNot only can we live migrate a virtual machine between two physical hosts, Hyper‑V in Windows Server 2012 introduces live storage migration, which lets you move virtual hard disks that are attached to a running virtual machine without downtime. Through this feature, you can transfer virtual hard disks, with no downtime, to a new location for upgrading or migrating storage, performing backend storage maintenance, or redistributing your storage load. You can perform this operation by using a new wizard in Hyper‑V Manager or the new Hyper‑V cmdlets for Windows PowerShell. Live storage migration is available for both storage area network (SAN)-based and file-based storage.When you move a running virtual machine’s virtual hard disks, Hyper‑V performs the following steps to move storage:Throughout most of the move operation, disk reads and writes go to the source virtual hard disk.[Click]After live storage migration is initiated, a new virtual hard disk is created on the target storage device. While reads and writes occur on the source virtual hard disk, the disk contents are copied to the new destination virtual hard disk.[Click]After the initial disk copy is complete, disk writes are mirrored to both the source and destination virtual hard disks while outstanding disk changes are replicated.[Click]After the source and destination virtual hard disks are synchronized, the virtual machine switches over to using the destination virtual hard disk.The source virtual hard disk is deleted.Just as virtual machines might need to be dynamically moved in a cloud data center, allocated storage for running virtual hard disks might sometimes need to be moved for storage load distribution, storage device servicing, or other reasons.[Additional information]Updating the physical storage that is available to Hyper‑V is the most common reason for moving a virtual machine’s storage. You also may want to move virtual machine storage between physical storage devices, at runtime, to take advantage of new, lower-cost storage that is supported in this version of Hyper‑V, such as SMB-based storage, or to respond to reduced performance that can result from bottlenecks in the storage throughput. Windows Server 2012 provides the flexibility to move virtual hard disks both on shared storage subsystems and on non-shared storage as long as a Windows Server 2012 SMB3 network shared folder is visible to both Hyper‑V hosts.You can add physical storage to either a stand-alone system or to a Hyper‑V cluster and then move the virtual machine’s virtual hard disks to the new physical storage while the virtual machines continue to run.Storage migration, combined with live migration, also lets you move a virtual machine between hosts on different servers that are not using the same storage. For example, if two Hyper‑V servers are each configured to use different storage devices and a virtual machine must be migrated between these two servers, you can use storage migration to a shared folder on a file server that is accessible to both servers and then migrate the virtual machine between the servers (because they both have access to that share). Following the live migration, you can use another storage migration to move the virtual hard disk to the storage that is allocated for the target server.You can easily perform the live storage migration using a wizard in Hyper‑V Manager or Hyper‑V cmdlets for Windows PowerShell.BenefitsHyper‑V in Windows Server 2012 lets you manage the storage of your cloud environment with greater flexibility and control while you avoid disruption of user productivity. Storage migration with Hyper‑V in Windows Server 2012 gives you the flexibility to perform maintenance on storage subsystems, upgrade storage appliance firmware and software, and balance loads as capacity is used without shutting down virtual machines.Requirements for live storage migrationWindows Server 2012.The Hyper‑V role.Virtual machines configured to use virtual hard disks for storage.
- #14 NOTE: This slide is animated and has 4 clicksWith Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, you can also perform a “Shared Nothing” Live Migration where you can move a virtual machine, live, from one physical system to another even if they don’t have connectivity to the same shared storage. This is useful, for example, in a branch office where you may be storing the virtual machines on local disk, and you want to move a VM from one node to another. This is also especially useful when you have two independent clusters and you want to move a virtual machine, live, between them, without having to expose their shared storage to one another. You can also use “Shared Nothing” Live Migration to migrate a virtual machine from one datacenter to another provided your bandwidth is large enough to transfer all of the data between the datacenters.As you can see in the animation, when you perform a live migration of a virtual machine between two computers that do not share an infrastructure, Hyper-V first performs a partial migration of the virtual machine’s storage by creating a virtual machine on the remote system and creating the virtual hard disk on the target storage device.[Click]While reads and writes occur on the source virtual hard disk, the disk contents are copied over the network to the new destination virtual hard disk.This copy is performed by transferring the contents of the VHD between the two servers over the IP connection between the Hyper-V hosts.[Click]After the initial disk copy is complete, disk writes are mirrored to both the source and destination virtual hard disks while outstanding disk changes are replicated.This copy is performed by transferring the contents of the VHD between the two servers over the IP connection between the Hyper-V hosts.[Click]After the source and destination virtual hard disks are synchronized, the virtual machine live migration process is initiated, following the same process that was used for live migration with shared storage.After the virtual machine’s storage is migrated, the virtual machine migrates while it continues to run and provide network services. [Click]After the live migration is complete and the virtual machine is successfully running on the destination server, the files on the source server are deleted.
- #25 Note to presenter: 3 clicks to complete build.Windows Server 2012 helps you provide fault tolerance on your network adapters without having to buy additional hardware and software. Windows Server 2012 includes NIC Teaming as a new feature, which allows multiple network interfaces to work together as a team, preventing connectivity loss if one network adapter fails. It allows a server to tolerate network adapter and port failure up to the first switch segment. NIC Teaming also allows you to aggregate bandwidth from multiple network adapters, for example, so four 1‑gigabyte (GB) network adapters can provide an aggregate of 4 GB/second of throughput.The advantages of a Windows teaming solution are that it works with all network adapter vendors, spares you from most potential problems that proprietary solutions cause, provides a common set of management tools for all adapter types, and is fully supported by Microsoft.Teaming network adapters involves the following:NIC Teaming configurations. Two or more physical network adapters connect to the NIC Teaming solution’s multiplexing unit and present one or more “virtual adapters” (team network adapters) to the operating system. Algorithms for traffic distribution. Several different algorithms distribute inbound and outbound traffic between the network adapters. Team network adapters exist in third-party NIC Teaming solutions to divide traffic by virtual local area network (VLAN) so that applications can connect to different VLANs simultaneously. Like other commercial implementations of NIC Teaming, Windows Server 2012 has this capability.
- #26 Current situationBusiness continuity is the ability to quickly recover business functions from a downtime event with minimal or no data loss. There are number of reasons why businesses experience outage including power failure, IT hardware failure, network outage, human errors, IT software failures, and natural disasters. Depending on the type of outage, customers need a high availability solution that simply restores the service. However, some outages that impact the entire data center such as natural disaster or an extended power outage require a disaster recovery solution that restores data at a remote site in addition to bringing up the services and connectivity. Organizations need an affordable and reliable business continuity solution that helps them recover from a failure.Before Windows Server 2012Beginning with Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper‑V and Failover Clustering can be used together to make a virtual machine highly available and minimize disruptions. Administrators can seamlessly migrate their virtual machines to a different host in the cluster in the event of outage or to load balance their virtual machines without impacting virtualized applications. While this can protect virtualized workloads from a local host failure or scheduled maintenance of a host in a cluster, this does not protect businesses from outage of an entire data center. While Failover Clustering can be used with hardware-based SAN replication across data centers, these are typically expensive. Hyper‑V Replica fills an important gap in the Windows Server Hyper‑V offering by providing an affordable in-box disaster recovery solution. Windows Server 2012 Hyper‑V ReplicaWindows Server 2012 introduces Hyper‑V Replica, a built-in feature that provides asynchronous replication of virtual machines for the purposes of business continuity and disaster recovery. In the event of failures (such as power failure, fire, or natural disaster) at the primary site, the administrator can manually fail over the production virtual machines to the Hyper‑V server at the recovery site. During failover, the virtual machines are brought back to a consistent point in time, and within minutes they can be accessed by the rest of the network with minimal impact to the business. Once the primary site comes back, the administrators can manually revert the virtual machines to the Hyper‑V server at the primary site.Hyper‑V Replica is a new feature in Windows Server 2012. It lets you replicate your Hyper‑V virtual machines over a network link from one Hyper‑V host at a primary site to another Hyper‑V host at a Replica site without reliance on storage arrays or other software replication technologies. Benefits of Hyper‑V ReplicaHyper‑V Replica fills an important gap in the Windows Server Hyper‑V offering by providing an affordable in-box business continuity and disaster recovery solution. Failure recovery in minutes. In the event of an unplanned shutdown, Hyper‑V Replica can restore your system in just minutes.More secure replication across the network. Hyper‑V Replica tracks the write operations on the primary virtual machine and replicates these changes to the Replica server efficiently over a WAN. The network connection between the two servers uses the HTTP or HTTPS protocol and supports both integrated and certificate-based authentication. Connections configured to use integrated authentication are not encrypted; for an encrypted connection, you should choose certificate-based authentication. Hyper‑V Replica is closely integrated with Windows failover clustering and provides easier replication across different migration scenarios in the primary and Replica servers.Hyper‑V Replica doesn’t rely on storage arrays.Hyper‑V Replica doesn’t rely on other software replication technologies.Hyper‑V Replica automatically handles live migration.Configuration and management are simpler with Hyper‑V Replica:Integrated user interface (UI) with Hyper‑V Manager. Failover Cluster Manager snap-in for Microsoft Management Console (MMC).Extensible WMI interface.Windows PowerShell command-line interface scripting capability.RequirementsTo use Hyper‑V Replica, you need two physical computers configured with:Windows Server 2012.Hyper‑V server role.Hardware that supports the Hyper‑V role.Sufficient storage to host the files that virtualized workloads use. Additional storage on the Replica server based on the replication configuration settings may be necessary.Sufficient network bandwidth among the locations that host the primary and Replica servers and sites.Firewall rules to permit replication between the primary and Replica servers and sites.Failover Clustering feature, if you want to use Hyper‑V Replica on a clustered virtual machine.