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

Keynote

Well, the IT Pro Tech*Ed didn’t have the pizzazz of the Developer Tech*Ed from last week … we had “Bob Muglia” and they had “Bill Gates”.  That’s probably enough said.

Anyway, the keynote started off with some funky, music performed by a group dressed up in African attire.  Kinda good/neat, but a bit odd for Tech*Ed.  The keynote then focused on stuff like Identity Lifecycle Management & Virtualization.  Cool stuff on the upcoming 2008 & Hyper-V virtualization technology.  Muglia stated that they had low expectations for performance (against VMWare) with this initial product, but that tests show that it performs as good as, and in some cases better than VMWare ESX.  That sure sounds impressive, but I’m not sure exactly what the tests were and how ‘unbiased’ Muglia is.