I have been working with Hyper-V since the beta release of it for Windows Server 2008. There was a lot to learn with the brand new product. It quickly became evident that Hyper-V was just a tiny piece of the entire puzzle. A Hyper-V project is much more than just a virtualization project. It is a project that will change how your server and application infrastructure works and is managed. Microsoft’s promise of dynamic IT and optimized infrastructure was finally possible thanks to Hyper-V and System Center. Many first-time Hyper-V users will be encountering Microsoft’s System Center family of products for the first time. They will see how tightly the products work together to provide an agile and highly managed environment.

I started blogging (www.aidanfinn.com) about Hyper-V not long after I started to work with it. I also talked about it at conferences in Ireland, Europe, and the United States. It became clear that although there were many fine publications on the individual products, there was little to help those engineers, consultants, or administrators who wanted to install a complete Hyper-V infrastructure. The same questions, requests for help, and Internet searches kept recurring. It seemed to me that a lot of valuable information was distributed across many sources. Some essential pieces were falling through the cracks and were receiving no coverage at all. We were missing a consolidated guide for deploying the complete enterprise Hyper-V solution, from start to finish.

That is what led me to the idea of writing this book. I wanted to combine everything I knew into one reference that would guide a person through a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V project. I wanted to give you help to get from the start of the project when you need to ask the right questions to the end of the project when you are implementing those last pieces of the infrastructure that are the difference between a good solution and an excellent solution.

The timing of this book worked out rather nicely. Hyper-V is more than just a feature in Windows Server 2008 R2. It’s a collection of products and accelerators that encompasses many product groups in Microsoft, each with their own release schedules. We would have been unable to produce this book last year because many of the components that we have included have become available only in the last few months. Some of the products included were released as we developed the book, and some were still just beta releases! You will never be bored as a Hyper-V expert.

I hope you find value in this book. Many months of work, investigation, troubleshooting, late nights, and long weekends have gone into this project. It is my wish that you find the guidance and knowledge that will help you master your Hyper-V deployment.