Customer Reviews

Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Unleashed

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

As a MCT - skip this book, it's got some tid bits, but they are so buried in fluff as to make the whole thing useless for example 3 pages devoted to entering a product key? A total waste of my money and time.

First of all, I'm a skimmer when it comes to technical books, almost never a cover-to-cover reader. I make heavy use of the index and TOC to try to find what I need or am interested in.

This book was great when it first came out because the release date beat all the other books to market, significantly. It gave a clear, comprehensive introduction to the aspects of Hyper-V. It is a very good first book for trying to get a handle on Hyper-V before you've ever installed it. Once installed however, donate this book to someone with an interest in, but no access to, the technology.

The TOC is good, and the index, too. Just don't be trying to use this book to help figure out what or why something went wrong nor how to fix it. This is not the right resource for that. The book's user level rating says Intermediate-Advanced; it is referring to your level of general IT comfort level, and definitely not your familiarity with Hyper-V technology.

As the cost of data centres continues to rise, companies are searching for ways to more efficiently use their machines. Here Microsoft offers its take, with the book describing how under its MS Windows Server 2008, you can use the Hyper-V virtualisation. The product is not really targeted at the individual home user. You can see this in the second chapter, which is devoted to a high level discussion of the business rationale for a corporate installation of Hyper-V. Indeed, you should read this closely, for it explains in a top down manner why migration could make sense for your company.

The rest of the book describes the actual installation and management of Hyper-V. Dealing with gritty and inevitable issues like keeping up with installing service packs and updates. Yes, there will be improvements and bug fixes to this product. Here, Microsoft has built in extensive capabilities for easy maintenance.

Now what choices are available for the guest operating systems? Naturally, Microsoft offers its own OSs here. The text goes into some detail about how to install these. No surprise to you, I hope. But commendably, the book also explains how to install a linux based OS under Hyper-V. Reassuring to some sysadmins.

A discerning reader might be a little queasy about the prospect of bugs in Hyper-V. Given that it functions as a "root" operating system (so to speak), a bug in it could be worse than a bug in a child guest operating system that you install inside Hyper-V. But with any virtualisation product, this is the reality that you have to deal with. In this wise, Hyper-V is not at any particular disadvantage vis-a-vis competing products.

I seldom write comments for books I purchased. Except this one. Having both Virtual Server 2005 Resource Kit and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Unleashed, this book is a far cry to the standards set by the Virtual Server Resource Kit.

It does not give you the architecture of Hyper-V, which is a big change from Virtual Server (I should say this is another model). It does not show you how the Hyper-V adapter in the parent partition is related to the physical adapter and the child's adapter, which is useful in troubleshooting network issues.

When talking on performance tuning and monitoring, only a slight tough is mentioned - something like a fixed VHD is faster than a dynamic VHD, and all the Hyper-V performance counters is not mentioned. I am talking about Hyper-V performance tuning, not Windows 2008 performance tuning!!

The chapter in high availability is a slight touch as well - it does not tell you the architecture of the fail over and how a VM is failed over (in terms of memory pages and disk access) to another host. There is no mention of WMI administration in Hyper-V.

I would not recommend this to administrators looking to further their administration skills in vitalization. Consider the in depth, authority materials given by the Virtual Server 2005 Resource Kit, I would wait for the Hyper-V Resource Kit (happened to be from the same MS authors) for authoritative materials, such as advanced features, performance tuning, security and possibly WMI administration.

This book gives you the basic things in Server 2008 and Hyper-V, but it does not enable you to become a seasoned Hyper-V administrator.

I used this book during our rollout to Exchange 2010 and Active Directory 2008 R2 and while the book needs to be updated for the new 2008 R2 Hyper-V, the half of the book covering the System Center Virtual Machine Manager is actually pretty decent. I bought Rand Morimoto's latest book on Windows 2008 R2 Unleashed and he updated the whole HyperV section in that book to include Live Migrations and the new R2 features of Hyper-V. Overall, I'm happy with the book!

If you are looking for a good book about Hyper-V, this is not the one. Most of the coverage is too light. About the only section that was worth much was the one on clustering, and even that wasn't really in depth. You are better off with the Hyper-V Resource Kit, which actually includes coverage of Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2.

I agree with the "Soup and Potatoes" review. This book was an early, attractive reference. I'll be looking for a bit more content in an R2 book for my second helping on this topic. I mean, the network coverage was kind of thin, I really need this part to more fleshed out so I don't have to rely on others to help me network the guest OS level stuff. Also, he Linux coverage could have used more details.
Better luck next time...

Keep you money! Very little useful information. The authors just repeats the information on Microsoft's site however he charges for it.

If you already have a good understanding of vitualization and have a successful deplaoyment of VM-Ware or Vitual Server this book will leave you asking a lot of questions like how to I migrate vitual machines to Hyper-V if I don't have Virtual Machine Manager 2008. The book does cover Virtual Machine Manager 2008. It doesn't address security as well as I would have liked and doesn't give suggestions for 3rd party applications. If your brand new to vitualization this book is a good start. For those who are looking to migrate from VM-Ware or Vitual Server don't waste your money or time reading this book.

The overall content was disappointing. There were one or two chapters on Clustering that were useful but the rest is pretty much basic info.

If you are looking for some advanced techniques, this is not the book for you.

If you are a newb, then this is a good starting point.