Yesterday and today a lots and lots of blogs paid attention to one of the new features which will be build-in to the next version of Windows Server edition, codename “Windows Server 8”. The new feature was shown at the WPC11 and it was mentioned here officially for the first time. Basically this feature, Hyper-V Replica, makes it possible to replicate a business critical VM offsite for e.g. DR without anything else than Hyper-V. No expensive hardware needed! Looks really promising and I can’t wait to play around with it!

But while looking at this footage, click here and fast forward to about 37min., something else caught my attention.

Apparently in codename “Windows Server 8”, within the Hyper-V Manager, the “Virtual Network Manager” has been replaced by a “Virtual Switch Manager” and a new action option has been introduced called “Virtual Storage Manager”.

Windows_8_Server_Actions_01  Windows_2008R2_Server_Actions_01

Hyper-V Mannager Windows 8 Server on the left, on the right a screendump of Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1.

What will be the new features of the “Virtual Switch Manager” be? What we already “know” from screen dumps of Windows 8 Client is that Virtual Switch Extensions and Network Resource Pools are part of the “Virtual Switch Manager”. What else?! And what about the new features for the “Virtual Storage Manager”? Anyone?

All in all we will be looking at our crystal ball for the time being and after the BUILD conference in Anaheim later this year we will probably know more!