Windows 2008 R2 ship dates and Hyper-V Improvements in R2
So this is probably old news by now, but if you haven’t heard, we’re 
shipping Windows 7 (client) and Windows Server 2008 R2 at the end of July. The will both be available for retail sale on October 22nd. I’m already running the Windows 7 RC client on my machines, and I’m running Server 2008 R2 as my hyper-V hosts. I’ve really enjoyed the RC of both products, but I am looking forward to the RTM code.
Here’s more detail on the full feature set of Server 2008 R2
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/R2.aspx
I’ve spent the last few weeks talking about the Hyper-V improvements in R2 and it’s been great to get my hands on some server class hardware to demonstrate Live Migration… It rocks! I’m using Live Migration on my Hyper-V hosts in my lab, but my servers don’t compare to some of the Dell 1950’s, 2950’s, and R900’s I’ve been able to get my hands on. Check out some of my Hyper-V screen casts and you’ll hear me gush over some of the servers I’ve been able to use. As you already know, Live Migration requires Windows Clustering and shared disks. I’ve used both Fiber Channel and iSCSI SANs to support Windows Clustering and they are both very good solutions.
While I have not had a chance to tune the storage solutions for my demonstrations, Fiber Channel and iSCSI SANs have both performed very well. If you are looking for an iSCSI storage solution, we have a number of Windows Storage Server solutions available, Storage Server can act as an iSCSI target, that’s (of course) 
what I use in my lab. Honestly though, I’d love to get my hands on one of the Equalogic SANs for my lab. To me, these really rock since they are self tuning. Tuning the SAN will be important, especially with the Clustered Shared Volumes (CSV’s) coming in R2. CSV’s have great potential because all of the Hyper-V hosts in the cluster can access the same LUN at the same time; but keep in mind that we still need to size our storage solutions. Taking just one drive to host multiple virtual machines will create an incredible bottleneck if we’re not careful. As a rule of thumb, you should plan one VM per spindle in your storage solution. You need to be sure to size your loads, the rule of thumb is just a good starting point. As I said, I’d love to have an Equilogic SAN like the PS5000 series. These SANs are self tuning, so the SAN will figure out how many spindles should be leveraged to optimize your disk I/O. The old SANs require that we define the spindles needed for each LUN. While yes we can size these ourselves, the Equilogic SAN will adjust to the changes in your workload automatically. This SAN also supports Multi-Path I/O (MPIO). MPIO is cool because we can leverage multiple network connections to the SAN to increase I/O performance. You can define MPIO to use a second NIC as a redundant connection, or to double, or even triple (with three NICs) the bandwidth to and from the SAN.
As I said, I’ll talk more about Hyper-V in R2 as soon as I have time, but I’ve been on the road for the last few weeks talking about Hyper-V. I just need to take some time to sit down and talk to you as well.
Until next time,
Rob