Installation of the Microsoft Hyper-V Role

With the basic concepts of Windows virtualization covered so far in this chapter, and the background on sizing and planning for server capacity and storage, this section now focuses on the installation of the Microsoft Hyper-V Server role on a Windows Server 2008 R2 system.

Installing Windows Server 2008 R2 as the Host Operating System

The first step is to install Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V as the host operating system. The step-by-step guidance for the installation of the Windows operating system is covered in Chapter 3, “Installing Windows Server 2008 R2 and Server Core.” Typically, the installation of a Windows Server 2008 R2 to run the Hyper-V role is a new clean server installation, so the section in Chapter 3, “Installing a Clean Version of Windows Server 2008 R2 Operating System,” is the section to follow for getting Windows Server 2008 R2 set up for virtualization.