Planning and installing Hyper-V
- Hypervisor architecture, deployment scenarios and differences between Hyper-V in Windows Server and in Windows 11
- Hardware requirements, comparing the Standard and Datacenter editions for virtualisation scenarios
- Installing the Hyper-V role on Server Core or Server with Desktop Experience and setting host configuration
- Windows Server 2025 scaling limits: up to 4 PB of memory and 2048 logical processors per host
- Management tools: Hyper-V Manager, the Hyper-V PowerShell module, PowerShell Direct and Windows Admin Center
Creating and configuring virtual machines
- Generation 2 as the default: UEFI, Secure Boot and virtual TPM for Windows and Linux guest operating systems
- Processors, dynamic memory and NUMA; integration services
- Using production and standard checkpoints purposefully
- Exporting and importing VMs, and deploying them in a standardised way with PowerShell
- Nested virtualisation for test and lab environments
Storage for virtual machines
- Virtual hard disks: VHDX with fixed or dynamic size, differencing disks, extending and compacting disks
- Storage locations: local NVMe disks, SMB 3 shares, iSCSI and Fibre Channel with Multipath I/O
- Shared virtual hard disks (VHD Set) for guest clusters
- Live storage migration of virtual machines
Networking and devices
- Virtual switches (external, internal, private), VLANs and advanced adapter settings such as DHCP and router guard
- Switch Embedded Teaming (SET), SR-IOV and RDMA for high-performance host networking
- Network ATC: configuring cluster host networking through intents for management, compute and storage
- Using graphics processors: Discrete Device Assignment (DDA) or GPU partitioning (GPU-P), processor, GPU and driver requirements
Mobility and high availability
- Live migration with and without a failover cluster, authentication and performance options
- Dynamic processor compatibility for migrations between hosts with different processor generations
- Building a Hyper-V failover cluster with Cluster Shared Volumes; workgroup clusters without Active Directory with live migration
- Live-migrating VMs with GPU partitions and running them highly available in a cluster
Disaster recovery and operations
- Setting up Hyper-V Replica, performing test failover as well as planned and unplanned failover
- Backing up and restoring virtual machines, overview of Azure Site Recovery
- Securing and updating hosts, monitoring performance and resource usage, resolving typical faults
