Overview of Hyper-V

Applies To: Windows Server 2008 R2

Hyper-V provides software infrastructure and basic management tools that you can use to create and manage a virtualized server computing environment. This virtualized environment can be used to address a variety of business goals aimed at improving efficiency and reducing costs. For example, a virtualized server environment can help you:

  • Reduce the costs of operating and maintaining physical servers by increasing your hardware utilization. You can reduce the amount of hardware needed to run your server workloads.

  • Increase development and test efficiency by reducing the amount of time it takes to set up hardware and software and reproduce test environments.

  • Improve server availability without using as many physical computers as you would need in a failover configuration that uses only physical computers.

For more information about Hyper-V, see the Windows Server 2008 Technical Library (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=93752). For information about the new features in the Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V technology, see https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=142885.

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