Category: Hyper-V

The official Hyper-V Server 2008 page is up and the product should be available for download today.  You should read the licensing terms of this free product before deploying it.  There is also a configuration guide.

The download link doesn’t appear to work yet, but I would expect they will after RTM.  You can see how the various versions of Hyper-V compare here.

Credit: Hypervoria

Possibly the biggest budget black hole in the IT world, SAP, have announced that they now support Hyper-V as a platform.  You can now save money by virtualising on Hyper-V so that you can give that money to the plethora of SAP consultants on your site 😉

I wonder if Oracle will respond to this by supporting their products on Hyper-V – or any other non-Oracle virtual platform?

Credit: VolkerW.

This NIC doesn’t have the same complication as the HP NC373i but there’s still a gotchya to watch out for.  Do not use the HP Network Configuration utility to assign a VLAN tag to the NC326M, even for a temporary test.  Even if you remove the VLAN tag from the NIC, there’s still something left behind by HP’s utility.

I found that if  configure a virtual switch on a clean machine with the NC373M then there were no problems at all – as long as the HP Ethernet virtual connect is wired and configured correctly.

We’ve heard little bits of information about Hyper-V Server, the dedicated version of Windows Server 2008 that can only run the Hyper-V role.  You can read about it now.

Microsoft says: "Customers who require richer and more robust virtualization features, such as Quick Migration, multi-site clustering, large memory support (greater than 32 GB of RAM), and more than four processers on the host server, should use Windows Server 2008". 

Hyper-V server is aimed at branch office server consolidation, VDI (where there is a broker to manage hardware fault tolerance) and test labs.

This update offers greater scalability to accommodate the new 6 core CPU’s from Intel.  You now can have 24 logical processors (cores) per host and 192 VM’s per host.

Tim Litton has published the results of testing where the performance of fixed and dynamic disks were compared.  Fixed disks generally performed 10-15% better.

When considering fixed versus dynamic disks:

• Fixed disks (and pass-through disks) are the only disks that PSS support in production.
• Dynamic (and differencing) disks are great in labs where you have smaller physical storage capacities.

On a related note, some details from QLogic on their performance testing with 8GB fibre channel HBA’s (a few months ago prior to RTM) are available.

Virtual Server 2005 R1 SP1 and Virtual PC 2007 SP1 both use VMC files to describe a VM.  This tool, aka VMC2HV, will convert those files into the XML format used by Hyper-V.  Removing VM additions (pre convert) is still a manual task.

TechNet Magazine (online and free) features virtualisation this month and spends plenty of time talking about Hyper-V.  There’s a good article explaining the basics of getting a cluster of Hyper-V servers up and running so your VM’s can become host-fault tolerant.

There are two variables on the time required for quick migration:

1. Your storage throughput
2. How much RAM is assigned to the VM

Using a 4GB Fibre Channel SAN on 15K disks, a quick migration of a VM with 1GB RAM is taking me 9 seconds.

EDIT:

I just moved a VM with 28GB of RAM.  It took exactly 70 seconds from start to finish.  A machine with 4GB RAM took 12 seconds.  Note that disk fail over always takes the same amount of time.