Chapter 7: Implementing Virtualization with Hyper-V

differencing disk

A dynamically expanding virtual disk that uses a parent/child relationship in which the parent disk is a dynamically expanding or fixed size disk with an OS installed and possibly some applications and data. The differencing disk is a child of the parent. Changes are made only to the differencing disk; the parent disk remains unaltered.

Load balancing

A feature of NIC teaming that distributes traffic between two or more interfaces, providing an increase in overall network throughput that server is able to maintain.

Virtual machine queue (VMQ)

A feature of virtual network interfaces (vNICs) that accelerates vNIC performance by delivering packets from the external network directly to the vNIC.

Storage Quality of Service (QoS)

A feature on virtual machines that enables administrators to specify minimum and maximum performance values for virtual hard disks.

Synthetic network adapters

A network adapter that uses synthetic drivers in Hyper-V and offers much better performance than legacy network adapters. See also synthetic driver.

load balancing and failover (LBFO)

A network interface configuration that allows multiple network interfaces to work in tandem to provide increased bandwidth, load balancing, and fault tolerance. Also called NIC teaming.

NIC teaming

A network interface configuration that allows multiple network interfaces to work in tandem to provide increased bandwidth, load balancing, and fault tolerance. Also called load balancing and failover (LBFO).

VHD set

A new VHD option in Windows Server 2016 designed specifically for shared virtual hard disks that enables backup of virtual machine groups and online disk resizing, and supports Hyper-V Replica.

pass-through disk

A physical disk attached to the host system that's placed offline so that it can be used by a VM instead of or in addition to a virtual disk.

Aggregated policy

A storage QoS policy that applies the minimum and maximum I/O operations per second (IOPS) values to a set of virtual disks working as a whole.

Dedicated policy

A storage QoS policy that applies the minimum and maximum values to each virtual disk to which the policy is applied.

Dynamically expanding disks

A virtual hard disk in which the .vhd file is very small when created but can expand as additional space is needed.

Fixed-size disks

A virtual hard disk in which the disk's full size is allocated on the host system when it's created.

external virtual switch

A virtual switch in which one of the host's physical network adapters is bound to the virtual network switch, allowing virtual machines to access a LAN connected to the host.

internal virtual switch

A virtual switch that isn't bound to any of the host's physical NICs. However, a host virtual NIC is bound to the internal virtual switch, which allows virtual machines and the host computer to communicate with one another, but VMs can't access the physical network.

private virtual switch

A virtual switch with no host connection to the virtual network, thereby allowing VMs to communicate with one another. However, there's no communication between the private virtual network and the host.

Single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV)

An advanced feature in Hyper-V that enhances the virtual network adapter's performance by bypassing the virtual switch software on the parent partition.

Failover

The ability of a server to recover from network hardware failure by having redundant hardware that can immediately take over for a device failure.