The only thing which is not constant is change; change provides new ideologies and methodologies for getting things done in more efficient and cost-effective ways. We all have been seeing a drastic shift of industry where every single product and IT system being supported is migrated to a virtualized server platform also known as a virtual machine. This new virtualized platform or virtual machine provides a handy way of maximizing the usage of underlying infrastructure and getting the most out of your investment.

Hyper-V is a hypervisor and a Microsoft implementation of a server virtualization and consolidation product, where Hyper-V is a native server role available in the Windows Server operating system. At the time of writing this book, the current version is Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, which is the most robust and extremely well-equipped hypervisor product for server virtualization platforms.

This book is built upon the building-blocks strategy, where we start with introducing Hyper-V, and then we move along with adding necessary blocks of knowledge that provide the base platform for upcoming chapters and feature sets. This book covers all features and functionalities of Hyper-V as a hypervisor and discusses them in detail to ensure that readers get the information they need to set up the same technology in the real world. In addition to all this, each chapter of this book contains specific best practices, tips, and recommendations from a real-world standpoint and experience.

We hope after reading this book, you will become experienced in deploying and managing Hyper-V for enterprise-wide server virtualization and consolidation.