Microsoft's Hyper-V team last week at VMworld strongly recommended to run Hyper-V using the Server Core variant of Windows Server 2008. Using the smaller Server Core as the Hyper-V parent partition, instead of a full blown instance of Windows Server 2008, strips out Windows features and services not needed to run Hyper-V. With Server Core, Microsoft is attempting to minimize the attack surface and patching requirements for Windows to make it a safer platform for virtual machines.

So, following Microsoft's recommendations, folks over at VMware blog deployed Hyper-V with Server Core to test Microsoft’s claims that with Hyper-V there is no added learning required, comparing to VMware ESXi requires you to take the time to learn a whole new system. They did side-by-side installations of Microsoft Server Core/Hyper-V and VMware ESXi 3.5 on identical servers.  To let you see the details of each setup process, we recorded the entire sequence in a pair of videos.

Windows Server Core = MS-DOS 2008: If you haven't seen Server Core yet, here's the UI in its entirety.  It doesn't look like the Windows I know, in fact it looks like DOS!  Are we stepping back in time?  Who knows DOS anymore?  Actually, it makes you wonder why Microsoft didn't just call it MS-DOS 2008, especially since anyone using Server Core will need to resurrect some long lost command line skills to get any work done.

Resources:

1. This first video shows every step required to install Hyper-V and ESXi on a fresh machine
2. Second video starts where the first left off and takes Hyper-V and ESXi through the steps needed to configure two iSCSI datastores for VM use.

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