One of the essential characteristics of a cloud computing infrastructure is resource pooling. A hypervisor is installed on individual systems to provide abstraction of the underlying hardware in order to provide resource pooling for compute resources. In the Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 operating system, the hypervisor is Hyper-V. Hyper-V is maturing at remarkable speeds, due in no small part to the fact that Microsoft leverages Hyper-V as the hypervisor for its public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering, Windows Azure.
