1. Yes, hardware improvements will make a difference in AC performance. However, as Bert, myself, and others have mentioned you will reach diminishing returns at some point because of AC itself.
2. Absolutely NOT. Hyper-V is one of the two PREMIER virtualization platforms (VMWare being the other) and no such penalty exists. The penalty for running VHD or VHDX files as your virtual disks is nearly indistinguishable from using regular drives.
JamesNT
.png "ACUF Donor I")
