Hyper-V Processor Compatibility options

Hyper-V R2 has been out and about for a while now. Did you know that this version includes some new processor compatibility settings intended to ease the process of Live Migrating a virtual machine from one host to another?
It does!

When you open the properties of a virtual machine in the Hyper-V Manager and choose the Processor, one of the boxes on the Properties page is entitled Processor Compatibility and it has two checkboxes:

  • Migrate to a physical machine with a different processor version.
  • Run an older operating system, such as Windows NT.

These options should not be construed as enabling the ability to seamlessly migrate virtual machines between different processor platforms, such as from AMD to Intel and vice versa. Rather, it means that you can migrate a virtual machine from an older processor to a newer one as long as the processors are from the same vendor. When migrating between hosts with supported processors, no restart of the virtual machine is necessary.

The second checkbox, Run an older operating system, such as Windows NT, hides unsupported processor features from older operating systems so that they can run under Hyper-V. Bear in mind that this option simply gets these operating systems to function. It does not mean that Microsoft will support them.

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