With the recent leak of Windows 8 build 7989, those who were able to get their hands on this build were hard at work trying to discover any new hidden features that would give us a glimpse at what to expect with the new operating system. Two new features were discovered in this build, Hyper-V 3.0 and .VHDX virtual drive format.
In a blog post by Robert McLaws, Windows 8 build 7989 includes the following Hyper-V 3.0 features:
- Storage
- Virtual Fibre Channel Adapter
- Storage Resource Pools
- New .VHDX virtual hard drive format (Up to 16TB + power failure resiliency)
- Memory/Processor Enhancements
- Support for more than 4 cores! (My machine has 12 cores)
- NUMA – Memory per Node, Cores per Node, Nodes per Processor Socket
- Networking Enhancements
- Hardware Acceleration (Virtual Machine Queue & IPsec Offload)
- Bandwidth Management
- DHCP Guard
- Router Guard
- Monitor Port
- Virtual Switch Extensions
- Network Resource Pools
Looks like Hyper-V 3.0, a hypervisor-based virtualization system for x86-64 systems, will allow us to see self contained AppV applications. If this is correct, and if Microsoft does include Hyper-V 3.0 in Windows 8, this could potentially make Windows 8 a huge game-changer when it comes to virtualization.
Other enhancements, such as the support for more than four cores, will allow for a new virtual hard drive format that will support up to 16GB in space.
Anyone get a chance to play around with this build yet?
