On Teched 2013 there has been a massive announcement about the future of Windows 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 and there was an session with Jeffrey Snover and Kenneth Hansen about Desired State Configuration DSC and how that works,

Now the Hands-On Lab has been released for DSC and accessible for everyone, this also means that you can access the other parts of PowerShell v4.

Here is a link to the HOL-310 http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-H310#fbid=9Ij04Tjn-bt

I have done the lab and it is quite impressive how simple and powerfull it is and being able to keep a desired state of installed/configurered servers with a service on them.

As I was in the lab environment I could not resist to check if there was any new powershell cmdlets for the Hyper-V module in R2

And with this command you can see that there is 14 new cmdlets in the R2 version of the hyper-v module compared to the 2012 version.

Here is a list of all the HOL that is available online and probably there will be more added later on.