Hyper v

Microsoft introduced Hyper-V as a virtualization platform in 2008, and it continued to release new Hyper-V versions with new Windows server versions. So far, there are a total of four versions,including Windows Server 2012 R2 Basically, Microsoft Hyper-V Server is a standalone and shortened version of Windows Server where Microsoft cut out everything irrelevant to virtualization, services and Graphical User Interface (GUI) to make the server as small as possible.

Hyper-V architecture

Insight into Hyper-V architecture

Parent partition The Parent partition is the partition that has all the access to hardware devices, and control over the local virtualization stack The parent partition has the rights to create child partitions and manage all the components related to them

Child partition the child partition gets created by the parent partition, and all the guest virtual machine related components run under the child partition.

Understanding Hyper-V parent partition the parent partition is the brain of Hyper-V virtual stack management, and all the components get installed in child partitions. The parent partition also makes sure that the hypervisor has adequate access to all the hardware resources; and while accessing these hardware resources, the trusted computing base concept will be used when you start your Hyper-V server, the parent partition is the first partition to get created; and while running the virtual machines on the Hyper-V server, it is the parent partition that provisions the child partitions on the hypervisor

Hyper-V Virtual Machine Management Service Virtual Machine Management Service (VMM Service or VMMS) is responsible for the management of the virtual machine state for the child partitions This includes making the right decision to change the virtual machine state, handling the creation of snapshots, and managing the addition or removal of devices. When a virtual machine in a child partition is started, the VMMS spawns a new VM worker process, which is used to perform the management tasks for that virtual machine

Virtual devices Virtual devices (vDevices) are the application interfaces that provide control over devices to the VMs. There are two types of vDevices, as follows: 1Core devices 1.1Emulated devices 1.2Synthetic devices Plugin devices

Core devices (emulated devices) These virtual devices emulate a specific hardware device, such as a VESA video card. Most core vDevices are emulated devices like this, and examples include BIOS, DMA, APIC, ISA bus, PCI bus, PIC device, PIT device, Power Management device, RTC device, Serial controller, Speaker device, 8042 PS/2 keyboard/mouse controller, Emulated Ethernet (DEC/Intel 21140), Floppy controller, IDE controller, and VGA/ VESA video.

Core devices (synthetic devices) These virtual devices do not model specific hardware devices. Examples of synthetic devices include a synthetic video controller, synthetic human interface device (HID) controller, synthetic network interface card (NIC), synthetic storage device, synthetic interrupt controller, and memory service routines. These synthetic devices are available only to guest operating systems that support Integration Services.

Plugin devices These devices allow direct communications between the parent and the child partition These devices can safely be removed and added whenever it is necessary. Examples of these types of devices are human interfaces and mass storage devices.