ronaldg's ramblings

Hyper-V redux - some more facts about HV

Since I've gotten "into" the virtualization technology more as a result of TS2's current content, I'm passing some more info around Hyper-V on to you.   Most of this is just a bit more tech info fleshing in some of the things discussed in the previous post as well as adding some new facts that I think will be of interest.  And I'm including some links to more tech info on HV at the end.  read on...

2. Hyper-V is a role of Windows Server 2008 and requires Windows Server 2008 x64 Editions (either Full installation or Server Core on Standard, Enterprise, or Datacenter x64 editions) for the parent partition. Specifically, Windows virtualization will not run on Windows Server 2008 32-bit Editions, nor will it run on Vista.
3. Hyper-V requires hardware assisted virtualization support in the form of Intel VT or AMD AMD-V technology. Windows virtualization will not run on hardware without VT or AMD AMD-V which includes any x86 or Itanium-based platform. Note: In the case of AMD, you either need a rev. F3 processor (latest Opterons and all new quad-core Barcelonas should work) or a rev. F2 processor with a “half and half” BIOS implementation.
4. Hyper-V requires that hardware data protection (DEP) be enabled. Hardware DEP is a feature of x64 processors and is typically enabled in the BIOS. The primary benefit of DEP is to prevent code execution from data pages, a frequent exploit in times past (see my DEP primer in another post if you want a little more tech detail).
5. Since my readership is likely not Enterprise-focused, I'll not go into quick migration info here, but you can easily find info about that in the docs and resources available in TechNet if you need it.
6. All Hyper-V implementations have a parent partition. This partition manages the Hyper-V installation and the Virtualization console runs from the parent partition. In addition, the parent partition can be used to run legacy VMs that run under a hosted virtualization product such as Virtual Server.
7. The Guest VMs run on Hyper-V child partitions. Hyper-V’s child partitions support two types of VMs: high performance VMBus-based VMs or hosted emulation-based VMs (mentioned above). VMBus is a totally new VM architecture and is essentially a high performance in-memory pipeline that connects Virtualization Service Clients (VSCs) in the guests with the host’s Virtual Service Provider (VSP) which I also alluded to in the earlier post.  Hosted emulation-based VMs, obviously, support guest OSs that don’t support the new VMBus architecture.
8. Hyper-V supports host systems with up to 1TB of RAM, and Hyper-V doesn’t limit the number of active VMs; the only limitation comes from the capabilities of the host server hardware. In addition, the Hyper-V VMs are more scalable supporting up to 4 virtual processors per VM and up to 32GB of RAM per VM (note: to take full advantage of this support, the host system must have at least 4 cores and more than 32GB of physical RAM).
9. Hyper-V provides new storage features including booting VMs from SAN.  And it provides for guest-to-guest failover clustering, as well as virtual server host failover clustering.  Hyper-V also introduces the pass-through VM access storage feature which lets you access virtual hard disk (VHD) images without mounting the VHD image in a VM. Hyper-V can also take advantage of Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for live VM backup and  allows multiple snapshots of running VMs with the ability to revert back to any of the saved snapshots.
10. On the networking side, Hyper-V includes a new virtual switch with support for Windows Network Load Balancing (NLB) across VMs on separate servers.
11. Hyper-V beta now supports remote management and also provides a Hyper-V MMC only installation option for a separate management node.

So what do you think, is this some cool stuff or what.  Before I close this thread I'd like to share some additional observations around why there won't be a 32-bit Hyper-V:

Perhaps you're wondering why we didn't develop Windows Virtualization (incl HV) for 32-bit, since we know that many of you have significant investments in that hardware genre.  Basically there's just too many limitations in scalability and performance on the 32-bit platform to make it a worthwhile product development investment going forward.  For example, when running Virtual Server R2 (32-bit) on Windows Server 2003 (32-bit) on a large server we’ve found that the limit is approximately 30 virtual machines. However, when running Virtual Server R2 SP1 x64 on Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition on a large server, we’re been able to successfully run over two hundred of virtual machines concurrently.  How many of you just said, "but I don't need it do >30 servers on a box"?  Well, if Microsoft's platform development strategy was entirely focused on you, that would be a great comeback.  BUT, we have a whole world of customers to support out there, many of whom are very large.  One of virtualization's main pillars is (and has been) server consolidation.  And besides, I doubt that many of you would argue, at this point, that the main hardware platform going forward is the 64-bit architecture.

Here's the Hyper-V home page on Microsoft (again): Hyper-V: A Key Feature of Windows Server 2008

Here's one to a good, recent article in IT Pro Magazine: Windows IT Pro took a first look at Hyper-V

Here's another one to a TechNet article on how to get up and running with Hyper-V: Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Started with Hyper-V

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