Hyper-V is Microsoft’s native, or bare-metal, hypervisor for creating and managing virtual machine (VM) environments. It has multiple operating systems running on a single physical server. Hyper V Server isolates each VM within the same physical machine, which allows multiple users to access different systems independently on the same hardware. This type of isolation ensures that even if one virtual machine crashes, it does not impact other workloads running on the same physical machine.

Learn about Hyper-V virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), how it works and additional useful tools to manage Hyper-V VDI infrastructures in your organization.

What Are the Features of Hyper-V?
Hyper-V offers many features, each with its own set of benefits for Hyper-V administrators and users. Here are the top Hyper-V features and what they can do for your organization:

Hardware and software virtualization: Hyper-V virtual machines have all the components of a physical computer, including processors, memory, storage and networking. However, they provide greater flexibility for provisioning computing resources. Each component can be configured in several ways, according to unique end-user requirements.

Hyper-V Replica: This feature can be used to replicate VMs to a different physical site to ensure higher availability and quick restoration for disaster recovery. Hyper-V provides application-consistent backups by synchronizing Hyper-V standalone servers and clusters residing at different physical sites.

Integration services: These are a customized set of services and drivers that make it easy to use supported guest operating systems on a Hyper-V virtual machine.

Migration features: Hyper-V provides a Live Migration feature supporting different types of migrations for moving a virtual machine from one Hyper-V host to another without suspending running applications. Storage migration allows administrators to migrate or distribute a VM’s filesystem (including virtual disk files, configuration files, paging files, etc.) across separate storage locations without downtime. There are other features, like import/export, for facilitating portability.

Virtual machine connection: This is Hyper-V’s remote connectivity tool that allows administrators to access a virtual machine hosted on a Hyper-V host remotely without booting the guest operating system. This feature is available for both Windows and Linux.

Shielded virtual machines: Hyper-V’s shielded VM feature utilizes BitLocker technology to keep virtual machines secure from malware attacks and data tampering attempts. Secure Boot is another security feature that protects virtual machines against unauthorized access, even from system administrators.

How Does Hyper-V Work?
Hyper-V supports various versions of Windows Server, Windows and Linux distributions to run on virtual machines as guest operating systems. It requires a processor that includes Second Level Address Translation (SLAT), present in the current Intel and AMD processors. The host machine must have at least 4 GB of RAM for running three to four basic virtual machines. You can leverage a more powerful physical server to host more VMs on a single server or provision VMs with higher processing power.

Hyper-V hypervisor provides an isolated space to multiple virtual machines sharing the same hardware platform by means of a partition. For running Hyper-V, at least one parent or root partition must be running a Windows OS. Hyper-V runs in the parent partition and can access hardware components such as the physical processor. The parent partition then creates child partitions using the hypercall application programming interface (API). Guest OSes or virtual machines run on these child partitions. As such, child partitions do not have direct access to the hardware components of the physical server. The hypervisor handles the interrupts to the physical processor and utilizes Input-Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU) to map physical memory addresses to the virtual addresses of the child partitions for forwarding interrupts to the respective child partition.

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