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I’ve posted quite a bit of information about Hyper-V on this blog – including the Hyper-V presentation I gave at Microsoft UK in April 2008 but TechNet Edge has some videos from the Windows Server Virtualization product team that go into a lot of the detail – and where better to learn about this than from the guys who created the product?

Interview with Mike Neil (Microsoft General Manager, Virtualization) about Hyper-V RTM, including:

• Why Microsoft decided to get into the server virtualization environment.
• Changes between the various release candidates and RTM.
• Challenges encountered along the way.
• Where Hyper-V is heading.
• IT Pro challenges for deploying Hyper-V.

Architectural overview:

• Virtual service provider (VSP) virtual service client (VSC) and VMBus.
• Disk operations within the Hyper-V architecture.
• Comparison of fixed, dynamic, and differencing VHD disks.

Snapshots:

• How virtual machine snapshots work.
• How to properly export a specific VHD/snapshot.
• Limitations with multiple branches of snapshots.

Backing up Hyper-V virtual machines:

• Virtual machine snapshots and Volume Shadow copy Service snapshots (VSS).
• How VSS snapshots function.
• What happens with a backup for VSS and a non-VS aware operating system (e.g. Linux or Windows 2000 Server).

Disks and iSCSI:

• Determine when to use a pass-through disk.
• How iSCSI works and how to use it with Hyper-V.
• Learn some best practices for using iSCSI.

High availability:

• Guest operating system clustering.
• Virtualization platform clustering.

How Microsoft uses server virtualisation for it’s own IT.