Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V

Excellent session on the new Hypervisor architecture & features. Here are my notes from the session:

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Hyper-V is written for 64-bit throughout its entirety, and will NOT work and will never work on x86 machines.

Hyper-V can actually take advantage of up to a Terabyte of physical memory.

It is nothing like Virtual Server or Virtual PC, which are hosted solutions on top of Windows. Think of Hyper-V as sitting on top of the bare metal (sounds like VMWare ESX).

Architecture

• At initial installation, Windows 2008 is just like Win2k, & Win2k3. If you want Hyper-V, then you simply check a check-box to enable it and reboot. Windows 2008 then reboots into Hyper-V. (See page 11 of attached presentation, and run it in slide-show mode to see the transitions)
• You will need *at least* 2 network adapters on every Hyper-V machine, b/c it will saturate network bandwidth when you get 10-20 virtual machines on there.
• Automatic failover clustering is built-in. If you have 15 vm’s running and the server comes down, you can have all of those vm’s migrate to another server seamlessly. (See page 14 of attached presentation)
  
• What should you NOT run on Hyper-V?
  • Only apps that need more than quad-processors
  • Only solution that has something like a dongle that needs direct, physical machine access
  • Other than those, nothing! (SQL Server is fine!)

Virtualization Comparisons (with VMWare and Virtual Server 2005, R2)

• See pages 42 & 43 of the attached presentation

Testing Out Hyper-V

So, how can you easily create a dev/test environment for playing with Hyper-V and checking out its capabilities? Here are specs for a cheap machine to use for this purpose:

• Single Proc Quad Core
  • 2.4 GHz
  • 300 GB Drive
  • DVD-RW Burner
  • 1 Gb NIC
  • $700
• 8 GB DDR2 800 MHz
  • $150
• Two 500 GB SATA disks
  • $200 ($99 x 2)
• Total: $1,050

hyper-v