Generation 2 Virtual Machines In Windows 8.1 Hyper-V Part 2 (10/81)

In the last post I covered some of the basic differences between Gen1 and Gen2 VMs, today it’s time to dig a bit deeper. Let’s start with a quick recap of some of the things that were discussed last time.

First of all, the BIOS has been replaced with UEFI, which introduces a legacy free environment. Many of the devices that Gen1 VMs have emulated are now removed, and SCSI disk support has completely replaced IDE, including boot support. Also, the big one for me was the support for PXE in the synthetic network adapter, which offers big benefits in installation speed.

There are other enhancements in Hyper-V which I haven’t covered yet, and these include Hyper-V Manager connecting to VMs via Remote Desktop, which gives the benefit of a shared clipboard and audio redirection, and can allow the integration of devices such as smart card readers. This really helps to start overcoming some of the changes that occurred on the client side with XP Mode going away, and makes Hyper-V a bit more end user friendly.

You’ll notice a new option in the Integration Services which is Guest Services, which isn’t enable by default. Enabling this is what provides the ability to use RDP over VMBus, and it’s available in both Gen1 and Gen2 VMs.

Here’s a list of the hardware differences between the VM types and some of the benefits the new platform delivers.

There is much more to the new capabilities in the associated Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V, but I need to keep my test environment at Hyper-V 2012 for a little bit longer due to some demo requirements, but then I’ll be able to post a bit more.