Microsoft published a document named “Getting to Know Hyper-V: A Walkthrough from Initial Setup to Common Scenarios” last week.  According to Microsoft, “this guide provides detailed step-by-step walkthroughs for testing Hyper-V on a pre-production environment. You can use this guide to become familiar with Hyper-V and the process of creating and managing virtual machines. Also included in this guide are useful scenarios that you can test to better understand how Hyper-V can address the business goals of your organization.”  The document serves as a sort of evaluators guide for Hyper-V, stepping the reader through everything from enabling VT in BIOS through virtual networking.  It also includes some sections on using snapshots, base virtual machine templates, and managing Hyper-V based virtual machines remotely with Hyper-V Manager.  If you want more in-depth documentation on Hyper-V you can go through http://technet.microsoft.com.

As a side note, Microsoft has published the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications to help standardize technical documentation.  I have long been a fan of Microsoft’s technical documentation for its easy to read style, although it sometimes lacks the depth that I desire.

While we’re on the topic of virtualization documentation, I have also been quite pleased with VMware’s technical documentation over the years, and have found it to be continually increasing in quality, providing very specific technical guidance and references to additional resources.  I have also been pleased to see that VMware has improved delivery options for documentation.  VMware offers several formats for documentation delivery, including web-based and PDF’s.  Start with the Documentation Roadmap for a quick introduction to the available documentation, and where to find what you need.

You can find web-based vSphere documentation here: http://pubs.vmware.com/vsp40/.   The web-based documentation is great for running searches on.  All vSphere documentation can be accessed through this page: http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vs_pages/vsp_pubs_esx40_vc40.html.  If you want to do a full grab of all of VMware’s documentation for an in-house repository (e.g. SharePoint), check out xtravirt’s VMware Documentation Downloader script.

If you are looking for quick and easy evaluator guide-type documentation from VMware, check out these resources: ESXi Installable and vCenter Server Setup Guide and the Virtualization Kit (registration required) at http://www.vmware.com/resources/wp/virtualization101_register.html.

There is a ton of less formal VMware documentation in several places:

• Technical resources and case studies here: http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/
• Proven practices around Strategy, Applications, Security, Management, and Availability at VIOPS.
• Official VMware Blogs at http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/planet/vmware/.
• Community blogs aggregated by VMware at Planet v12n: http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/planet/v12n/
• VMworld Recorded Sessions & Labs (VMworld 2009 Sessions available as of today, September 14th) at http://vmworld.com.
• The VMware Community Forums: http://communities.vmware.com/
• And, 3rd party books like Scott Lowe’s Mastering VMware vSphere 4.

Do you have other sources of virtualization documentation or easy methods of searching documentation to find exactly what you need when you need it?  If so, leave a comment!