This is part 1 of a multi-part series sharing my experience upgrading my Hyper-V servers from Windows Server 2008 R1 to R2.

While there are several new features available in R2 already outlined in some other posts on this blog, there are a few specific Hyper-V features that drove me to want to upgrade.

Hyper-V 2.0

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This article describes the Hyper-V upgrade process in a clustered environment.

In my previous post I described why we decided to upgrade our highly available Hyper-V environment from version 1 to version 2. We wanted to take advantage of the Cluster Shared Volumes, Dynamic Memory, and Live Migration. Next I’ll describe the process I went through to test the scenario in my test lab for the new features.

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In this last part of three Aaron Denton shares his experiences after ther upgrade from Hyper-V 1.0 to Hyper-V 2.0.

In the previous posts for this series, I discussed why we decided to upgrade our virtual machine host servers from Windows Server 2008 to revision 2. I also outlined the implementation plan.

Now that I’ve gone through the actual upgrade, I want to share how it went.

Cluster Shared Volumes

While there may not be any performance or high availability gains from this feature, I consider it a great one from an administrative standpoint.

To illustrate my point, consider the number of disks needed to have clustered Exchange 2007 servers running as VMs in revision 1. For each server one disk for Windows, a disk for each database, and a disk for each set of transaction logs is needed. With just one mailbox store, six iSCSI disks are needed. When you add in the disks you need to run Hub Transport and Client Access servers you easily need 8-10 disks just for email.

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