Difference between Windows Client Hyper-V and Server Hyper-V

Windows 8 supports virtualization on the client OS to allow IT professionals and developers to use Hyper-V as a desktop operating system. If you are an IT Professional or developer that uses Windows Server as development operating environments, you should be excited about new client Hyper-V feature in Windows 8 and wonder what are some of the key differences and similarities between Windows 8 Hyper-V and Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V?

Here are the some of the key differences in Windows 8 Client Hyper-V from Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V:

• No Hyper-V Replica
• No Hyper-V Network Virtualization
• No Virtual Machine Live Migration (Requires Failover Clustering only in Windows Server)
• No Shared Nothing Live Migration
• No SR-IOV (You need server class hardware; appropriate firmware, etc; you won’t find this on desktops)
• No Failover Clustering (Client doesn’t include Failover Clustering)
• No Virtual Fiber Channel
• No RemoteFX GPU Hardware Acceleration ( which requires RDV only in Windows Server)
• Second Level Address Translation (SLAT) HW required

And the commonalities between Windows 8 Hyper-V & Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V

• Virtual Machines created with Client Hyper-V are 100% compatible with Server Hyper-V
• Client Hyper-V offers the same VM scale as Server
  • Up to 64 virtual processes per VM
  • Up to 64TB per virtual disk ( vhdx format )
  • Up to 1 TB of memory per VM.
• Live Storage Migration is included
• Support VHD Storage on SMB3 file shares
• 100% PowerShell/WMI compatibility in management from Client to Server.
• Client Hyper-V offers the full rich, open and extensible Hyper-V virtual switch.
• QoS, bandwidth management and other advanced virtual switch capabilities are in there