Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V Enhancements

Windows Server 2016 includes improvements to the Hyper-V role that runs virtual machines (VMs). Improvements should enable organizations to deploy and maintain VMs faster and more easily than with Windows Server 2012 R2, and they should provide more comprehensive high availability and security to guest OSs. The updated Hyper-V requires upgrading to Windows Server 2016 (and Datacenter edition for most of the new features in the OS), which may have licensing repercussions.

Improvements to High Availability and Disaster Recovery

Several new features included in Windows Server 2016 are intended to help deliver high availability and disaster recovery solutions based on the Hyper-V role. These include Storage Replica, storage resiliency and compute resiliency, and Storage Quality of Service (QoS), all of which are expected to require Windows Server 2016 Datacenter edition. (For more on storage capabilities, see the chapter “Windows Server 2016 Storage Enhancements“.)

Storage Replica is a new feature in Windows Server 2016 that allows for disaster recovery between servers or clusters with potentially no data loss. Storage Replica delivers synchronous or asynchronous replication from one active source volume to another single passive replica volume. The replica can be in the same physical server, another independent server, a peer server in a cluster, or a remote server in a stretch cluster. (In a stretch cluster, failover occurs from a cluster server at one site to a cluster server at a remote site. Stretch clusters must use synchronous replication to enforce integrity.) Storage Replica is not suitable for all scenarios, and it is not a replacement for application-specific replication technologies.