Hi, this is Bryon Surace again. I’m a senior program manager on the Windows virtualization team at Microsoft.
I wanted to draw your attention to the new Hyper-V Component Architecture Poster.
The poster is a great visual tool to help in the understanding of the key features and components of the Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2. It highlights key Hyper-V components including:
§ Architecture
§ Virtual Networking
§ Virtual Machine Snapshots
§ Live Migration
§ Storage Interfaces
§ Storage Types
§ Storage Location and Paths
§ Import and Export
This large-format poster provides practical visual depictions of the Windows Hypervisor, live migration process, cluster shared volumes architecture, VMQ data paths, disk storage I/O path, and much more.
Download, Print, and Enjoy!
Bryon Surace
Hi, I’m Friea Berg from NetApp’s Virtualization Solutions team. Today, I’d like to share how Microsoft and NetApp have been helping customers get the most out of their virtualized infrastructure. Microsoft is a leader in applications, Windows, and management while NetApp leads in highly efficient and flexible storage. By integrating our solutions and joining forces, we provide the virtualized infrastructure building blocks that enable customer success.
There are significant challenges and capabilities required at each layer of an end-to-end virtualization solution. Our engineers have worked with Microsoft engineers for more than four years as Microsoft developed first Hyper-V and then R2, and we’ve built on our expertise with Microsoft technologies to deliver products tightly integrated with Hyper-V, System Center Operations Manager, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, Microsoft dynamic datacenter toolkits and Microsoft enterprise applications.
As a result, NetApp and Microsoft have developed a unique virtualization solution that spans the datacenter from the desktop to the cloud. By combining Microsoft’s built in hypervisor and integrated System Center management platform with unique NetApp efficiency technologies such as primary storage deduplication and incremental only backup copies, our customers can maximize the utilization of both servers and storage to dramatically reduce power, cooling and datacenter space. Using Microsoft management tools you can monitor and manage an entire complex datacenter – including NetApp storage.
The strength of our joint solution led Microsoft to name NetApp it’s Storage Solutions Partner of the Year and to establish a 3-year strategic alliance with virtualization as a major area of focus. Microsoft VDI partners Citrix and Quest have integrated directly into NetApp to leverage our native storage array-based cloning features to enable mass provisioning of desktop VMs, and Cisco recently published an Exchange 2010 on Hyper-V with NetApp validated design. Just this week, Microsoft and NetApp were named one of the top 10 cloud computing collaborations to watch.
We believe so strongly in the benefits of our joint virtualization solution that in early 2009 NetApp was the first partner to guarantee that joint Microsoft and NetApp virtualization customers will use 50% less storage. Today, our customers and partners are the biggest advocates of our joint virtualization solution and have realized substantial cost-savings, improved SLAs, accelerated deployments and more. Below are a few examples:
Visit NetApp at booth 801 at TechEd June 7-10 or stop by the Microsoft virtualization kiosk on Tuesday, June 8th, to learn more about how NetApp and Microsoft are delivering on our promise to help customers transform their data centers to achieve greater efficiencies, reduce costs, and respond faster to changing business needs.
Friea Berg
This post is for all the Microsoft channel partners who read this blog. You'll want to check out our new virtualization partner profitability toolkit (here). David Greschler's blog here sums it up better than I could. Here's an excerpt:
Every partner knows about the great opportunity to sell virtualization technology and services. For a while, that meant one thing: working exclusively with VMware.
Times have changed.
Microsoft’s virtualization technology is more affordable and seen by many as technically comparable, and the company is gaining market share. Indeed, Microsoft Hyper-V continued its ascent in Q409, growing 215 percent year over year, according to the market research firm, IDC.
Nearly every VMware partner we talk to recognizes that Microsoft is a major player in virtualization and tells us they would like an opportunity to build a virtualization practice that includes both VMware and Microsoft. They recognize that having a dual practice allows them to become more trusted advisors to their customers. But they want a way to better understand the economic model.
To that end, Microsoft today is announcing a new virtualization partner profitability toolkit. The kit, available here on the Microsoft Partner Network, contains a profitability modeling tool that partners can use to see exactly how much adding a Microsoft practice can mean to their business. It’s basically an interactive spreadsheet, built with midsize business customers in mind, to help partners visualize the economic differences of doing project work around technology from one vendor versus being technology agnostic and building a virtualization practice that makes use of technology from multiple vendors.
I just caught this article on the topic of channel partners choices for virtualization, and the toolkit. Here are some quotes:
"Very generally, if the customer has a really good view of what they want to see at the end of a project and can clearly articulate that, Microsoft has the best opportunity because its management wraps around its virtualization where VMware has separate [management] stacks," Russell said.
"There will always be cases where if a customer already has investment in VMware, deploying [more VMware] might be less expensive [than Hyper-V]," said Jim Vanden Boom, a virtualization solutions manager at CDW LLC. But, again, said Vanden Boom, "since Hyper-V is included in the base Microsoft Server OS, if you're going to have to buy a new server OS anyway, Hyper-V could make more sense."
Kathi Grumke, VandenBoom's colleague and another solution specialist at CDW, concurred. "Customers are looking for agnostic analysis so they can make a decision of what makes sense so whatever tools we can deploy help us have that conversation with the customer," she said. "They may have invested in VMware already. Maybe it's coming up for renewal. Should they go for that or look at Hyper-V? The toolset gives us the opportunity to have that trusted adviser conversation."
While you check out the toolkit, don't forget that dynamic memory and RemoteFX are coming with SP1 of WS08 R2 (a no cost addition if you have R2).
Patrick
Hi readers,
Due to the planned MSDN/TechNet blog upgrade, we have to re-post blogs posted during the week of May 17. We wanted you to know you'll be seeing 2-3 posts again. Thanks for your patience with us.
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Preamble: The point of this series, and the spirit in which it is written, is to take a holistic approach at the issues facing our customers, discuss the complexities with regard to memory management and explain why we’re taking the approach we are with Hyper-V Dynamic Memory. This isn’t meant to criticize anyone or technology, rather to have an open and transparent discussion about the problem space.
In my last blog, we covered some follow-up questions about Page Sharing. Today, we’ll discuss Second Level paging. To discuss the implications of using Second Level Paging, let’s put virtualization aside, take a step back and level set and start by discussing Virtual Memory and Paging.
Virtual Memory At A High Level
Modern operating systems employ virtual memory. Virtual memory is a way of extending the effective size of a computer’s memory by using a disk file (as swap space) to simulate additional memory space. The operating system keeps track of which memory addresses actually reside in memory and which ones must be brought in from disk when needed. Here are a few of the common memory management functions performed by modern operating systems:
Virtual Memory In Depth
Let’s dive in deeper. For that, I’m going to reference a TechNet article that discusses the Windows Virtual Memory Manager. If you’d like to read the full article it is here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc767886.aspx. A second article I highly recommend on virtual memory is this one from Mark Russinovich: http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/11/17/3155406.aspx
From the TechNet article:
Sharing A Computer's Physical Memory
Operating systems that support multitasking allow code and data from multiple applications to exist in the computer's physical memory (random access memory) at the same time. It is the operating system's responsibility to ensure that physical memory is shared as efficiently as possible, and that no memory is wasted. As a result, an operating system's memory manager must contend with a problem called memory fragmentation. Memory fragmentation refers to the situation where free (available) memory becomes broken into small, scattered pieces that are not large enough to be used by applications. In the example shown here, free memory is separated into three separate blocks. Once free physical memory becomes fragmented, an operating system can consolidate free memory into a single, contiguous block by moving code and data to new physical addresses. In this case, the three blocks of free memory were consolidated into one larger block by moving system memory upward and application 1 downward in physical memory. If an application accesses its code or data using physical memory addresses, the application may encounter problems when the operating system moves its code and data. A mechanism must be provided for applications to access their code and data no matter where the operating system moves them in physical memory. Virtualizing Access to Memory A common solution is to provide applications with a logical representation of memory (often called virtual memory) that completely hides the operating system's management of physical memory. Virtual memory is an illusion that the operating system provides to simplify the application's view of memory. Applications treat virtual memory as though it were physical memory. Meanwhile, the operating system can move code and data in physical memory whenever necessary. In a virtual memory system, the addresses applications use to access memory are virtual addresses , not physical memory addresses. Every time an application attempts to accesses memory using a virtual address, the operating system secretly translates the virtual address into the physical address where the associated code or data actually resides in physical memory. Because the translation of virtual addresses to physical addresses is performed by the operating system, applications have no knowledge of (or need to be concerned with) where their code and data actually reside. Extending Virtual Memory Through Swapping When applications access memory using virtual addresses, the operating system is responsible for translation of virtual addresses to physical addresses. As a result, the operating system has total control over where data and code are physically stored. This not only means that the operating system can move code and data in physical memory as it likes, but it also means that code and data don't need to be stored in physical memory at all! A computer's processor can only access code and data that resides in physical memory (RAM). However, physical memory is relatively expensive so most computers have relatively little of it. Most multitasking operating systems extend their virtual memory management schemes to compensate for this scarcity of physical memory. They rely on a simple, but very important fact: Code and data only need to be in physical memory when the processor needs to access them! When not needed by the processor, code and data can be saved temporarily on a hard disk (or other device with abundant storage). This frees physical memory for use by other code and data that the processor needs to access. The process of temporarily transferring code and data to and from the hard disk to make room in physical memory is called swapping. Swapping is performed to increase the amount of virtual memory available on the computer. The memory manager performs swapping "behind the scenes" to make it appear as though the computer has more physical memory than it actually does. Effectively, the virtual memory available on a computer is equal to its physical memory plus whatever hard disk space the virtual memory manager uses to temporarily store swapped code and data. Loading Swapped Code And Data On Demand If an application attempts to access code or data that is not in physical memory (it was swapped to disk) the virtual memory manager gets control. The virtual memory manager locates (or creates) an available block of physical memory, and copies the required code or data into the block so it can be accessed. Applications are not aware that their code and data were ever swapped to disk. The code and data are automatically loaded into physical memory by the virtual memory manager whenever the application needs to use them.
Operating systems that support multitasking allow code and data from multiple applications to exist in the computer's physical memory (random access memory) at the same time. It is the operating system's responsibility to ensure that physical memory is shared as efficiently as possible, and that no memory is wasted. As a result, an operating system's memory manager must contend with a problem called memory fragmentation. Memory fragmentation refers to the situation where free (available) memory becomes broken into small, scattered pieces that are not large enough to be used by applications. In the example shown here, free memory is separated into three separate blocks.
Once free physical memory becomes fragmented, an operating system can consolidate free memory into a single, contiguous block by moving code and data to new physical addresses. In this case, the three blocks of free memory were consolidated into one larger block by moving system memory upward and application 1 downward in physical memory.
If an application accesses its code or data using physical memory addresses, the application may encounter problems when the operating system moves its code and data. A mechanism must be provided for applications to access their code and data no matter where the operating system moves them in physical memory.
Virtualizing Access to Memory
A common solution is to provide applications with a logical representation of memory (often called virtual memory) that completely hides the operating system's management of physical memory. Virtual memory is an illusion that the operating system provides to simplify the application's view of memory. Applications treat virtual memory as though it were physical memory. Meanwhile, the operating system can move code and data in physical memory whenever necessary.
In a virtual memory system, the addresses applications use to access memory are virtual addresses , not physical memory addresses. Every time an application attempts to accesses memory using a virtual address, the operating system secretly translates the virtual address into the physical address where the associated code or data actually resides in physical memory. Because the translation of virtual addresses to physical addresses is performed by the operating system, applications have no knowledge of (or need to be concerned with) where their code and data actually reside.
Extending Virtual Memory Through Swapping
When applications access memory using virtual addresses, the operating system is responsible for translation of virtual addresses to physical addresses. As a result, the operating system has total control over where data and code are physically stored. This not only means that the operating system can move code and data in physical memory as it likes, but it also means that code and data don't need to be stored in physical memory at all!
A computer's processor can only access code and data that resides in physical memory (RAM). However, physical memory is relatively expensive so most computers have relatively little of it. Most multitasking operating systems extend their virtual memory management schemes to compensate for this scarcity of physical memory. They rely on a simple, but very important fact: Code and data only need to be in physical memory when the processor needs to access them! When not needed by the processor, code and data can be saved temporarily on a hard disk (or other device with abundant storage). This frees physical memory for use by other code and data that the processor needs to access. The process of temporarily transferring code and data to and from the hard disk to make room in physical memory is called swapping.
Swapping is performed to increase the amount of virtual memory available on the computer. The memory manager performs swapping "behind the scenes" to make it appear as though the computer has more physical memory than it actually does. Effectively, the virtual memory available on a computer is equal to its physical memory plus whatever hard disk space the virtual memory manager uses to temporarily store swapped code and data.
Loading Swapped Code And Data On Demand
If an application attempts to access code or data that is not in physical memory (it was swapped to disk) the virtual memory manager gets control. The virtual memory manager locates (or creates) an available block of physical memory, and copies the required code or data into the block so it can be accessed. Applications are not aware that their code and data were ever swapped to disk. The code and data are automatically loaded into physical memory by the virtual memory manager whenever the application needs to use them.
Key Points:
Ok, now that we’ve discussed how virtual memory and paging works, let’s relate this to virtualization.
Static Memory & Guest Only Paging
Today with Hyper-V (V1 & R2), memory is statically assigned to a virtual machine. Meaning you assign memory to a virtual machine and when that virtual machine is turned on, Hyper-V allocates and provides that memory to the virtual machine. That memory is held while the virtual machine is running or paused. When the virtual machine is saved or shut down, that memory is released. Below is a screenshot for assigning memory to a virtual machine today:
This memory is 100% backed by physical memory and is never paged. Remember that the guest is actively determining which pages should and shouldn’t be paged as it manages all the memory it’s been allocated by the virtual machine and it knows best how to do so. Here’s a basic picture to illustrate what this looks like in a virtualization environment. There are four virtual machines running and each of the guest kernels are managing their own memory.
Ok, now let’s dive into Second Level Paging…
Second Level Paging: What Is It?
Second Level Paging is a technique where the virtualization platform creates a second level of memory abstraction and swap files are created by the virtualization layer to page memory to disk when the system is oversubscribed. With SLP, you now have two tiers of paging to disk one within the guest and one below it at the virtualization layer. Here’s another picture to illustrate how Second Level Paging fits in. Again, there are four virtual machines running and each of the guest kernels are managing their own memory. However, notice that below them is the Second Level of Paging managed independently by the virtualization platform.
One common argument used in favor of Second Level Paging I’ve heard is this “If Windows and modern OSes all use paging today, why is this bad with virtualization?"
Great question.
Answer: Performance.
With Second Level Paging, memory assigned to a virtual machine can be backed by memory or by disk. The result is that Second Level Paging creates issues that are unique to a virtualized environment. When the system is oversubscribed, the virtualization layer can and will blindly and randomly swap out memory that the guest is holding even critical sections that the guest kernel is specifically holding in memory for performance reasons. Here’s what I mean.
Swapping the Guest Kernel
Swapping the guest kernel is an example where virtualization is creating an issue that doesn’t exist on physical systems. In an OS kernel, there are specific critical sections in memory that an operating system kernel never pages to disk for performance reasons. This is a subject where Microsoft and VMware agree and VMware states as much in their documentation.
“…hypervisor swapping is a guaranteed technique to reclaim a specific amount of memory within a specific amount of time. However, hypervisor swapping may severely penalize guest performance. This occurs when the hypervisor has no knowledge about which guest physical pages should be swapped out, and the swapping may cause unintended interactions with the native memory management policies in the guest operating system. For example, the guest operating system will never page out its kernel pages since those pages are critical to ensure guest kernel performance. The hypervisor, however, cannot identify those guest kernel pages, so it may swap them out. In addition, the guest operating system reclaims the clean buffer pages by dropping them. Again, since the hypervisor cannot identify the clean guest buffer pages, it will unnecessarily swap them out to the hypervisor swap device in order to reclaim the mapped host physical memory.
Understanding Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server p. 9-10; http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10062
Thus, the more you oversubscribe memory, the worse the overall performance because the system has to fall back to using disk and ultimately trade memory performance for disk performance. Speaking of comparing memory to disk performance...
Memory vs Disk Performance
Finally, there is the performance comparison, or, really lack thereof, because there is no comparison between memory and disk. This isn’t debatable. This is fact. Let’s do a little math. Let’s assume that the typical disk seek time is ~8 milliseconds. For memory access, here are the response times in nanoseconds:
So, if you want to compare disk access to DDR-3 1600 memory access the formula is .008/.000000005. Here are the results:
We’ve heard on many occasions that virtualization users have been told that performance of Second Level Paging “isn’t that bad.” I don’t know how anyone can say with a straight face that a performance penalty of greater than six orders of magnitude isn’t that bad. To put 1.6 million times faster in perspective, assume it took you an hour to walk one mile. If you traveled 1.6 million times faster, you could roughly travel to Saturn and back in an hour. (Saturn is approximately 746 million miles away at its minimum distance to the Earth.)
Microsoft & VMware Agree: Avoid Oversubscription
The fact that swapping to disk carries a significant performance penalty and you should avoid it is another area where Microsoft and VMware agree. This isn’t new guidance so I’ve included examples from ESX 3 and VSphere.
From VMware:
Example 1: Make sure the host has more physical memory than the total amount of memory that will be used by ESX plus the sum of the working set sizes that will be used by all the virtual machines running at any one time.
--Performance Tuning Best Practices for ESX Server 3
Example 2: if the working set is so large that active pages are continuously being swapped in and out (that is, the swap I/O rate is high), then performance may degrade significantly. To avoid swapping in specific virtual machines please configure memory reservations for them (through the VI Client) at least equal in size to their active working sets. But be aware that configuring resource reservations can limit the number of virtual machines one can consolidate on a system.
--Performance Tuning Best Practices for ESX Server 3 page 15
Example 3: ESX also uses host-level swapping to forcibly reclaim memory from a virtual machine. Because this will swap out active pages, it can cause virtual machine performance to degrade significantly.
--Performance Tuning Best Practices for VSphere page 23
Translation: Ensure that the memory used by ESX and its virtual machines reside in physical memory and avoid swapping to disk, i.e. avoid oversubscribing memory.
Final Points on Second Level Paging
The good news is that there are other ways to pool and allocate memory and Hyper-V Dynamic Memory is a good solution for desktop and server operating systems... In my next blog, we’ll explain Hyper-V Dynamic Memory.
Cheers,
Jeff Woolsey
Principal Group Program Manager
Windows Server, Virtualization
Hello from San Francisco, host city of Citrix Synergy, where I will be joining Citrix’s CEO, Mark Templeton, for a keynote on desktop virtualization, Microsoft’s vision for the datacenter, and how we will extend our partnership to help you in the cloud.
Helping business and IT manage across shifting conditions has been a shared focus between Microsoft and Citrix. It was just a little over a year ago that I penned an internal memorandum that talked about Microsoft’s user centric computing vision, which I also shared with the executive team at Citrix. At the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) in April, we discussed how this vision embodies a new approach to client management services, which helps IT respond to the demands of a new mobile workforce and a new IT environment. By shifting management from the device to enabling the end user, we’re able to deliver services that are tailored to users’ specific conditions -- regardless of device or location. You can take advantage of this approach with the same Windows platform and management environment you use today. You can watch a demo of the next version of System Center Configuration Manager here.
Citrix and Microsoft are working together across engineering, sales and marketing on desktop virtualization to offer you unmatched value. We’ll keep investing in our virtualization products, such as Hyper-V, App-V and Citrix XenDesktop, to bring you comprehensive and cost-effective solutions with the best user experience. In addition, with the work we are doing with partners like HP and Dell, we will help organizations integrate VDI into their overall desktop management strategy. We are working to integrate all forms of virtualization on the desktop for the admin and the end user.
In addition, at MMS, we announced the early integration work of Citrix’s XenApp connector for System Center Configuration Manager, which simplifies application delivery for physical and virtual desktops. Now not only can you use a unified management console to manage all of your organization’s applications, but you can also incorporate full orchestration of Citrix’s power and capacity management to deliver applications to the XenApp farm – all from the System Center Configuration Manager console. You can expect to hear much more from Microsoft and Citrix as we work on tighter integration between our offerings, such as HDX and RemoteFX.
Going forward, you’ll see Microsoft and Citrix teaming up to provide more ways for you to make the most of your current investments and reap the benefits of cloud computing on your terms. With many of you considering cloud computing, there is a huge opportunity to simplify processes and reduce costs. For example, today in my keynote I’ll show how the next version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager will be able to deliver unparalleled benefit to you by making the deployment and update of server-side applications as easy as an App-V package deployment on the desktop – all from a single deployment and management structure. The hardware integration will include network configurations such as VM IP addresses and even configuration of load balancers, such as Citrix’s Netscaler VPX.
When I talked to MMS attendees last month, I challenged the System Center administrators to reach out to their Citrix counterparts and discover all the integration points that Microsoft and Citrix have created to make their lives easier – whether it is managing application delivery to the end-user or setting up security parameters for mobile devices. At Synergy, I ask that all of the Citrix administrators, who preside over the Citrix infrastructure to reach out to and connect with your System Center counterparts to find out all the synergies within your own companies. We believe it will pay off.
Brad Anderson
(Pardon the interruption on the Dynamic Memory blogs, but I was busy at MMS 2010 and needed to blog this content. I'll have more on DM soon.)
Virtualization Nation,
We just wrapped up Microsoft Management Summit 2010 (MMS) in Las Vegas. MMS is the premier event of the year for deep technical information and training on the latest IT Management solutions from Microsoft, Partners, and Industry Experts. MMS 2010 was a huge success from a number of standpoints. Starting with sold out attendance (and attendance was way up from last year), compelling keynotes from Bob Muglia and Brad Anderson to the release of new products including:
...there was something for everyone. Furthermore, many folks were very pleased to learn that Opalis (our datacenter orchestration and automation platform) was joining the System Center family. Why is this a big deal? Well, for our customers who have purchased the System Center Datacenter Suite license it means that Opalis is now included in the System Center Suite. That's customer focus. You can find out more about Opalis here.
There was a lot to experience at MMS, but I'd like to focus on something you may or may not have heard about...
MMS 2010 Labs
One of the most popular activities at MMS are the MMS Labs. The MMS Labs are very busy and constantly booked. These advanced, usually multi-server, labs are created and configured to walk IT professionals through a variety of tasks such as:
In past MMS events, virtualization has been used throughout in a variety of ways and to varying degrees, but this year the team decided to move to an entirely Hyper-V infrastructure. In short:
>> ALL OF THE MMS 2010 LABS WERE VIRTUALIZED USING WINDOWS SERVER 2008 R2 HYPER-V AND MANAGED VIA SYSTEM CENTER <<
.and the results in terms of manageability, flexibility, power usage, shipping costs and more are staggering. What do I means, let's start with this factoid:
>> The MMS 2010 Labs delivered ~40,000 Hyper-V VMs for ~80 different labs in 5 days on just 41 physical servers <<
No, that's not a typo, that's just the tip of the iceberg.
>> In the past for MMS, we shipped 36 RACKS,
~570 servers, to host MMS labs.
For MMS 2010, we shipped 3 RACKS.
Yes, 3 RACKS with 41 servers.
(Ok, technically, 6 half racks because they're easier to ship.) <<
So, what were these racks filled with?
Servers. All servers were configured identically as follows:
The power draw on each server when fully loaded was about 200 watts. Maximum power draw for the 41 servers was 8,200 watts. If we do a broad comparison against our previous 570 servers (assuming a similar power draw) the comparison looks like this:
>> Power reduction of 13.9x on the servers. << Figure 1: HP DL380G6 & Hyper-V R2 Rock Solid
Rich vs. Thin Clients. On the client side, MMS historically uses rich clients at each station averaging about 120 watts per system. For MMS 2010, thin clients running Windows Embedded 7 (deployed using Windows Deployment Services) were used with each one averaging about 19 watts each. From a power standpoint the comparison looks like this:
>> Power reduction of 6.3x on the clients. <<
Shipping. From a shipping standpoint, thin clients are smaller and weigh less than traditional rich clients.
>> In the past for MMS, we shipped 650 rich clients for MMS labs. From a shipping standpoint this meant about 20 desktops per pallet and a total of ~32 pallets. For MMS 2010, thin clients were used and we were able to ship 650 thin clients on 3 pallets. Using thin clients instead of rich clients allowed us to use one less semi for shipping to MMS. <<
That's right, one less semi for shipping labs to MMS. In addition to one less truck, let's not gloss over the savings in terms of the manpower having to lift and carry 650 50 pound workstations...
Manageability. Before the show began, there was some initial concern that there was only 15 minutes between lab sessions and would that be enough time to reset >400 labs (about ~1300 VMs) over 41 servers in 15 minutes? Resetting the labs means reverting the VMs to previous states based on Hyper-V virtual machine differencing disks and snapshots. The initial concern turned out to be totally unwarranted as resetting the full lab environment only needed 5 minutes giving the team a full 10 minutes to grin from ear to ear, er, I mean "diligently manage lab operations." :-) Speaking of System Center.
System Center. Naturally, the MMS team used System Center to manage all the labs, specifically Operations Manager, Virtual Machine Manager and Configuration Manager.
Flexibility. Finally, due to overwhelming popularity of the Service Manager labs, the MMS team wanted to add more Service Manager labs to meet the increased demand. With Hyper-V & System Center, the team was able to easily create a few dozen more Service Manager labs to meet the demand on the fly. In short, MMS 2010 Labs was a huge success.
Finally, I'd like to thank our platinum sponsor, HP, for their support and the tremendous hardware.
Cheers, -Jeff
P.S. I've included a few screenshots below.
Pictures Anyone?
Here's one of the 6 Hyper-V half racks...
Figure 2: Brings a tear to me eye...
Here's a picture of all the Hyper-V hosts. Over 40,000 MMS Labs were served from 6 half racks of servers.
Figure 3: MMS 2010 Lab Servers...
Operations Manager 2007 R2 Dashboard View for all of the labs.
Operations Manager 2007 R2 more detailed view providing end-to-end management; managing the hardware, the parent partition and the apps running within the guests.
In March, we had announced the beta release of the Linux Integration Services for Microsoft Hyper-V, which added support for SMP-based virtual machines, timesync, and integrated shutdown. Today we're announcing the release candidate (RC) version of the integration services.
In addition to the features that were present in the beta release, the following features have been added for this release candidate:
· Heartbeat: This provides a way for the host to detect if the guest is still running and responsive.
· Pluggable Time Source: A pluggable clock source module is included for a more accurate time source to the guest.
This version of the integration services for Hyper-V can be downloaded from here, and supports Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP3, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 / 5.3 / 5.4 / 5.5.
The other day the folks at IDC published their worldwide quarterly server virtualization tracker report. You can see the news release here. Some of the main takeaways are:
· 18% of all new servers shipped in Q4’09 were virtualized, up 3% year over year
· Sales of virtualized servers declined 14% for 2009
· Virtualization licenses declined 7% for 2009, but were up 13% in Q4 compared to Q4 of 2008.
· HP was the #1 server OEM for annual new server shipments virtualized (38%), followed by Dell (28%) and IBM (15%).
· IDC said virtualization continues to remain a top priority
IDC didn’t publish market share for virtualization software licenses, but rather published growth stats. VMware, Microsoft and Citrix were the only vendors called out in the news release. See IDC’s news release for details.
Microsoft’s take. I received some interesting points from colleagues. I thought you’d be interested, too.
· Almost 1/5 of new servers are now virtualized, and we expect the largest growth to come from servers sold to mid-market customers, and those customers finally getting around to consolidating Linux servers.
· Customers are cost-conscious when choosing a server virtualization software.
· According to IDC, Microsoft’s share of new x86 virtualization licenses, which includes Hyper-V and Virtual Server, is now 25%. This represents an increase of 3 points year over year, the growth obviously attributed to Hyper-V and not Virtual Server ;-).
· During our Q3 earnings call [April 22], we reported that System Center server revenue grew by more than 20%. This figure represents enterprise customers adopting System Center management tools for configuring virtual machines, monitoring and backup of virtual and non-virtual applications.
· On the same Q3 earnings call, we reported that the high-end editions of Windows Server have grown by more than 20%. This figure represents customers who are using Hyper-V, multiple instances of the OS to run multiple applications, and other enterprise features such failover clustering.
· During the last several months customers switching away from VMware, or adding Hyper-V and System Center alongside their VMware tools, became more common. These customers include Premiere Global Services (US), Group Health (US), Miele Appliances (Germany), Union Pacific (US), Telecom Italia, SuperGroup (South Africa), Mercuri Urval (Switzerland), Fpweb.net (US), Landratsamt Bayreuth (Germany), Swedish Red Cross, Apps4Rent (US), Kolektor Group (Slovenia). You can find case studies for these customers here.
Most of the above enterprise customers turned to Microsoft because we were able to extend their existing investments in Windows and System Center, and we have key features they need (e.g., live migration, manage ESX Server and Hyper-V from single console, built-in clustering). And we’re painting a picture for the future. Customers are learning more about our PaaS, Saas and IaaS capabilities to help them transition to the cloud. Check out Bob’s take on managing the gap between on-premises datacenter and online services. It’s about delivering cloud computing on your terms, with one common platform, one application model and one set of management tools.