Hello, my name is Vipul Shah and I’m a Senior Product Manager with the Virtualization Team.
Due to its ability to drive down costs and drive up resource usage, Microsoft SQL Server consolidation is top of mind for our customers these days. Microsoft virtualization, which includes Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and System Center, is one of the well known mechanisms to enable this. Today, Ted Kummert, Senior Vice President, Microsoft Business Platform Division, released a video (click here) that outlines how virtualization enables consolidation.
So the natural question is – can we achieve higher amounts of throughput as we consolidate? Can we improve the throughput with recent advances in hardware and the recent release of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V?
To address this, we recently performed tests that are discussed in the Best Practices for SQL Server Virtualization webcast (click here) and in the SQL Server Consolidation Guidance (click here).
In our tests, we ran a complex stock trading application workload on servers with Second Level Address Translation (SLAT). In physical environments, the operating system translates virtual memory addresses to physical addresses. However with virtualization, we have an additional translation (the second level address translation) because you are running operating systems within virtual machines. This means additional CPU cycles are spent doing this translation. The SLAT enabled processors complete this translation within the silicon, leading to performance advantage compared with non-SLAT enabled CPUs. You get these processors from both Intel and AMD.
We chose a 16-core HP DL585 server with SLAT-enabled AMD processors with HP EVA 8000 storage running Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. We created virtual machines (VM) each with 4 virtual processors and 7 GB RAM using a fixed-sized VHD format. We started to run our workload with one VM and gradually increased the load, adding more VMs as we went along. We found that we were able to increase the throughput with consolidation. The workload scaled near-linearly up to 4 VMs consuming all of the physical cores on the server (16 cores total). Then we added even more VMs, consolidating up to 8 VMs. We over-committed virtual-processors to physical-cores ratio by 2:1. We were able to run heavy load (3000 batch requests per second), consuming about 70% CPU on the server. The tests also found that Windows Server 2008 R2 offered improved performance than the prior release as shown by the dotted red-line in the graph.
Microsoft virtualization (Hyper-V and System Center) combined with advances in hardware technology (such as SLAT-enabled technology) can provide a solid consolidation platform for production workloads using SQL Server.
Microsoft continues to work with partners to offer solutions that help our customers realize the benefits of virtualization (click here). Further guidance from our partners will be forthcoming. For more resources on virtualizing Microsoft server applications, click here.
Vipul Shah
Microsoft Virtualization Team, Senior Product Manager
If you haven’t heard by now, today, Microsoft and HP announced a three-year, $250 Million agreement to build a strategic partnership to simplify technology for our customers. This agreement between Microsoft and HP will result in collaborations in engineering roadmaps, prepackaged application solutions, and comprehensive virtualization offerings and integrated management tools.
To get more information on the actual announcement itself, the press releases, videos, and other details, click here.
One the key areas for the agreement is Virtualization. By working on integrating the technologies from both companies, Microsoft and HP can provide customers with a management solution that goes from Infrastructure to Application, from Cloud to Desktop. I think it’s clear that the future of IT it’s not just a discussion of physical and virtual management but how to manage IT holistically, which includes both physical and virtual infrastructure.
In the near term, the technical result of this partnership is that we’ll see data center management solutions based on both the System Center family of tools and HP’s Insight Software. This allows for heterogeneous management of data centers, integrating not just monitoring but also provisioning and maintenance of both physical and virtual systems.
Second, there are new “Smart Bundles” that bring Virtualization solutions to Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs), using HP Servers, Storage, and Networking along with Windows Server and Insight software, all managed with System Center Essentials (SCE) and HP Operations Center. SMBs can really benefit from virtualization and these new Smart Bundles provide a single, cost effective package for virtualization.
Over the next three years, customers can expect to see deeper integration of Insight Software and System Center, interoperability between Business Technology Optimization software with the System Center, increased collaboration on run book automation, HP and Microsoft services integrating their expertise on virtualization and cloud based implementations, and much more.
How this impacts virtualization is that the focus of this partnership is in the area I have repeatedly highlighted as the key to virtualization, management. I’m sure many have heard the phrase that virtualization without good management is worse no virtualization in the first place. This statement becomes more and more true as everyone deploys more virtualization.
Like I’ve posted many times, management of virtualization and the integration of virtualization management into the rest of IT is what should be the focus of customers. Too much focus is spent on technologies & features and too little is focused on implementation and management. In the lifecycle of your systems, you will spend more time, energy, and money on management of the systems than on the initial implementation. Great management capabilities reap benefits on a daily basis. That’s why I’m so excited about this announcement and why I think the people who benefit the most from it are customers who are implementing and will continue to implement virtualization.
Edwin Yuen Senior Technical Product Manager – Virtualization
Happy New Year to all my readers. In keeper with the positive tone I’ve been on recently, I wanted to again highlight more case studies about Microsoft Virtualization. We recently published two case studies that exemplify the cost savings, scalability, and flexibility benefits that customers consistently realize with Microsoft virtualization. Both highlight the capabilities of Windows Server Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager.
OTRUM is a Norwegian company that provides interactive television solutions to the hospitality industry. Although it had been using VMware, it needed a virtualization solution that was more affordable, easy to set up and scale, and simple to manage. After learning that Hyper-V was included in OTRUM’s licenses for Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter, it implemented the technology, along with System Center products. By switching from VMware, OTRUM immediately saved more than NOK 50,000 (U.S.$8,775) in license fees, and will save another U.S.$20,000 over three years on VMware support costs. And, by managing its data centers from a central console, the company simplified administration of its physical and virtual server environments, saving about 20 hours per month in management time.
“Hyper-V works better than VMware. It’s easier to set up and, with System Center Virtual Machine Manager, I have a single console for managing the whole virtual environment, including one remaining VMware host… Running several servers on the same physical machine is more cost-effective. But having Hyper-V virtualization software included with our Windows Server licenses meant even greater savings.”
Mercuri Urval, a Switzerland-based international personnel and management consultancy, realized similar benefits. While the company was using virtualization technologies from VMware and Citrix, it needed to develop a new server infrastructure that would provide better performance, flexibility, and ease of use, while being cost-effective. With Windows Server 2008 Datacenter and Hyper-V, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager, it can now add new virtual servers or migrate existing ones in just minutes, and activate test environments easily to test updates or new software installations.
Because Windows Server 2008 Datacenter can accommodate an unlimited number of virtual servers on each physical server, Mercuri Urval saved U.S.$48,000 on Citrix licenses, and saw an additional 35 percent cost reduction by eliminating VMware licenses and its external terminal solution.
“With Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, we developed a simple, clear, cost-effective, and scalable solution that provides our employees access to information regardless of place and time. And with the flexibility provided by Hyper-V, we can develop our IT gradually, without disrupting daily business.”
Hello Virtualization Planet followers! I’m back for a quick update on a couple of items from the past month a couple new ones.
First, I made what I considered a really important post right before the holidays. The post, Cutting through the FUD: Facts you should know about Hyper-V and System Center, really is a response to some of the negative attacks that I saw late last year. Now, I want to stress again that this isn’t all the articles out there (it’s really in the minority), but I felt compelled to respond. Still, I think that 2010 is going to be a good year for everyone.
Second, I think that I forgot to highlight the release of the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool 2.1. The Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool provides tested guidance and automated tools to help keep virtualized machines updated, without introducing vulnerabilities into the existing IT infrastructure. The tool combines the Windows Workflow programming model with the Windows PowerShell™ interface to automatically bring groups of virtual machines online, service them with the latest security updates, and return them to an offline state. This latest version supports all our latest R2 releases and is available for download at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc501231.aspx.
Finally, I wanted to highlight two new whitepapers that have been released. They are
How Customers Are Cutting Costs and Building Value with Microsoft Virtualization: http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/0/2/6025DD0C-CC79-4D06-B4F6-EDAF5993CE86/HyperV-VMware-Cost-Comparison-Jan2010.pdf
In-Guest Monitoring with Microsoft System Center: http://download.microsoft.com/download/A/7/7/A77AB5C5-8ABA-4C3F-B0DB-12F51D789775/In-Guest-Monitoring-with-SC-Jan2010.pdf
You can find these two whitepapers and more like them at the Microsoft Virtualization Compare site.