We're setting up three machines to host a total of 12 VMs running 2012 r2. We purchased 6 licenses of 2012 R2, but we're not sure that allows us to install 2012 r2 as a base OS on each box and still have our 12 VMs. Because of this, we installed Hyper-V 2012, which MS provides for free.
The problem we have now is that we need to remotely administer both Hyper-V 2012, which is core, and our 2012 r2 VMs. It appears that we'll need to run both Windows 8 and 8.1 because there seems to be a problem with running the remote management tools for Hyper-V 2012 R2 on Windows 8.
It seems very odd that if you want to manage Hyper-V 2012 and Server 2012 R2 that you would need both a Windows 8 and a Windows 8.1 machine handy. Am I missing something?