Microsoft has published an excellent overview of the upgrade process used to move from Hyper-V RTM to Hyper-V R2 (Hyper-V RTM is the final release of the original Hyper-V as opposed to the beta). You can find the Microsoft support document here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/957256

The key factors I noticed where that snapshots are not fully compatible between Hyper-V and Hyper-V R2 and saved states are completely incompatible. If you have saved states for virtual machines, you will need to power off those virtual machines before an in-place upgrade. Of course, the knowledge base article also covers that export/import method of upgrading and the backup/restore method.

Running Hyper-V on a laptop computer provides several advantages. You can use it for testing, training and development. But how do you know if Hyper-V will run on your laptop?

Hyper-V has several requirements. Key among them are:

• Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise or Datacenter
• Only 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2008 support it
• Hardware assisted virtualization (Intel-VT or AMD-V)
• Hardware DEP

The difficulty is in determining if your system meets these last two requirements. The Intel-VT and AMD-V hardware virtualization features are enabled or disabled in a computer’s BIOS. Vendors use different names to refer to the hardware virtualization support as well as hardware DEP. Here’s a great tool that will take the guesswork out of the process for you:

http://www.grc.com/securable.htm

Securable is a simple and free utility that reports on whether your system supports the key requirements of Hyper-V (64-bit, hardware DEP and hardware virtualization support). When you run it, you will see a screen similar to the following:

If your screen shows 32 bits as the maximum length and no hardware DEP or virtualization, you cannot run Hyper-V. In fact, if just one of these three shows negative, you cannot run Hyper-V. Depending on the operating system, BIOS settings and the hardware, you may see messages that indicate that something is supported but not enabled. That’s not usually a problem – just turn it on in the BIOS.

When running Hyper-V on a laptop, I encourage you to have a laptop with at least 4 GB of RAM. With 4 GB of RAM you can potentially run to virtual machines at the same time. I am typing this blog on a laptop with 6 GB of RAM and it works great for Hyper-V testing and development – as well as training.

Hopefully, this will help get you started with Hyper-V on a laptop computer. Now days, a laptop isn’t so much different from a desktop – and that can be a really good thing for us IT geeks.

Hyper-V can be deployed in two basic ways: as an add-on to Windows Server 2008 or as a stand-alone product. Hyper-V Server 2008 is a stand-alone product that only provides virtualization. There is not support for extra services such as DHCP, DNS or Internet Information Servers. Now, don’t misunderstand me; you can install virtual machines that provide all of these services, but the services do not run "on the Windows Server" in the same way that you may be used to. Of course, and most don’t realize this, even with Hyper-V running on Windows Server 2008, your extra services are running in a virtual machine, Microsoft just likes to call it the "parent partition".

Hyper-V Server 2008 is completely, totally and without exception free; however, you still have to pay for the licenses to run the needed OS within each virtual machine. If you want to play with Hyper-V as a Linux server virtual host, you can built everything without a single license fee. Hyper-V "running on" Windows Server 2008 requires that you first purchase Windows Server 2008 licenses. Here’s a great tool that Microsoft has released to help you calculate the cost of implementing Windows Server 2008 running Hyper-V (NOTE: This tool does not provide support for cost calculations related to Hyper-V Server 2008): http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/howtobuy/licensing/calculator.mspx

In summary, just one more time, two basic products exist: Hyper-V Server 2008 (free) and Windows Server 2008 "running Hyper-V" (not free no matter how you slice it because you have to buy Windows Server). And there you have it.