Copied from “http://www.windowsitpro.com/content1/tabid/57/catpath/virtualization/topic/windows-server-8-hyperv-30-evens-odds-vsphere-140573”

At the recent Windows Server Workshop at the Microsoft campus in Redmond Washington Jeff Woolsey, Principle Program Manager Lead for Windows Virtualization in the Windows Server and Cloud division presented the new features in the next version of their Hyper-V virtualization platform. In the introduction to the workshop Jeffery Snover, Distinguished Engineer and the Lead Architect for the Windows Server Division made the bold statement that with Microsoft it’s the third release is where Microsoft really gets it right and with regard to what Microsoft demonstrated in the next version of Hyper-V this is definitely true. The upcoming Hyper-V 3.0 release that’s included in the next version of Windows Server has closed the technology gap with VMware’s vSphere.

Hyper-V 3.0 Scalability

The days when Hyper-V lagged behind VMware in terms of scalability are a thing of the past. The new Hyper-V 3.0 meets or exceeds all of the scalability marks that were previously VMware-only territory. Hyper-V 3.0 hosts support up to 160 logical processors (where a logical processor is either a core or a hyperthread) and up to 2 TB RAM. On the VM guest side, Hyper-V 3.0 guests will support up to 32 virtual CPUs with up to 512 GB RAM per VM. More subtle changes include support for guest NUMA where the guest VM has processor and memory affinity with the Hyper-V host resources. NUMA support is important for ensuring scalability increases as the number of available host processors increase.

Multiple Concurrent Live Migration and Storage Live Migration

Perhaps more important than the sheer scalability enhancements are the changes in Live Migration and the introduction of Storage Live Migration. Live Migration was introduced in Hyper-V 2.0 which came out with Windows Server 2008 R2. While it filled an important hole in the Hyper-V feature set it wasn’t up to par with the VMotion capability provided in vSphere. Live Migration was limited to a single Live Migration at a time while ESX Server was capable of performing multiple simultaneous VMotions. In addition, vSphere supported a similar feature called Storage VMotion which allowed a VM’s storage to be moved to new locations without incurring any downtime. Hyper-V 3.0 erases both of these advantages. Hyper-V 3.0 supports multiple concurrent Live Migrations. There are no limits to the number of concurrent Live Migrations that can take place with Hyper-V 3.0. In addition, Hyper-V 3.0 also provides full support for Storage Live Migration where a virtual machine’s files ( the configuration, virtual disk and snapshot files) can be moved to different storage locations without any interruption of end user connectivity to the guest VM.

Microsoft also threw in one additional twist that vSphere has never had. Hyper-V 3.0 has the ability to perform Live Migration and Storage Live Migration without the requirement of a shared storage on the backend. The removal of this requirement really helps bring the availability advantages of Live Migration to small and medium sized businesses that came afford a SAN or don’t want to deal with the complexities of a SAN. The ability to perform Live Migration without requiring shared storage really sets Hyper-V apart from vSphere and will definitely be a big draw – especially for SMBs that haven’t implemented virtualization yet.

VHDX, ODX, Virtual Fiber Channel & Boot from SAN

Another important enhancement with Hyper-V 3.0 was the introduction of a new virtual disk format called VHDX. The new VHDX format breaks the 2TB limit that was present in the older VHD format and pushes the maximum size of the virtual disk up to 16 TB per VHDX. The new format also provides improved performance, support for larger block sizes and is more resilient to corruption.

Hyper-V 3.0 also supports a feature called Offloaded Date Transfer (ODX). ODX enables Hyper-V to take advantage of the storage features of a backend shared storage subsystem. When performing file copies on an ODX enabled SAN the OS hands off all of the data transfer tasks to the SAN providing much high file copy performance with zero to minimal CPU utilization. There is no special ODX button. Instead ODX works in the backend. ODX requires the storage subsystem to support ODX.

Companies that use fiber channel SANs will appreciate the addition of the virtual Fiber Channel support in the Hyper-V guests. Hyper-V 3.0 guests can have up to four virtual fiber channel host bus adapters. The virtual HBAs appear in the VMs as devices very like virtual NICs and other virtual devices. Hyper-V VMs will also be able to boot from both fiber channel and iSCSI SANs.

Extensible Virtual Switch & NIC Teaming

In keeping par with the sweeping changes in Hyper-V’s compute capabilities and storage Microsoft also made a some of significant enhancements to Hyper-V’s networking capabilities. First, they updated the virtual switch that’s built into the Hyper-V hypervisor. The new virtual switch has a number of new capabilities multi-tenant capability as well as the ability to provide minimum and maximum bandwidth guarantees. In addition to these features the new virtual switch is also extensible. Microsoft provides a API that allows capture, filter and forwarding extensions. To ensure the high quality of these virtual switch extensions Microsoft will be initiating a Hyper-V virtual switch logo program.

Another overdue feature that will be a part of Windows Server 8 is the built-in ability to provide NIC teaming natively in the operating system. VMware’s ESX Server has provided NIC teaming for some time. Prior to Windows Server 8 you could only get NIC teaming for Windows via specialized NICs from Broadcom and Intel. The new NIC teaming works across heterogonous vendor NICs and can provide support for load balancing as well as failover.

The Magic Number 3

As Jeffery Snover pointed out three does seem to be the magic number – at least for Hyper-V. Hyper-V 3.0 brings Microsoft’s virtualization on par with VMware’s vSphere. Businesses that are just getting into to virtualization or those businesses that may be bulking at VMware’s latest price increases will find Hyper-V to be a very cost effective and highly competitive alternative.

Copied from http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/07/bringing-hyper-v-to-windows-8.aspx

In this post we talk about how we will support virtualization on the Windows "client" OS. Originally released for Windows Server where the technology has proven very popular and successful, we wanted to bring virtualization to a core set of scenarios for professionals using Windows. The two most common scenarios we focused on are for software developers working across multiple platforms and clients and servers, and IT professionals looking to manage virtualized clients and servers in a seamless manner. Mathew John is a program manager on our Hyper-V team and authored this post. One note is that, as with all features, we're discussing the engineering of the work and not the ultimate packaging, as those choices are made much later in the project. --Steven PS: We didn't plan on doing so many posts in a row so we'll return to more sustainable pace -- sorry if we inadvertantly set expectations a bit too high. We're getting ready for BUILD full time right now!!

Whether you are a software developer, an IT administrator, or simply an enthusiast, many of you need to run multiple operating systems, usually on many different machines. Not all of us have access to a full suite of labs to house all these machines, and so virtualization can be a space and time saver.

In building Windows 8 we worked to enable Hyper-V, the machine virtualization technology that has been part of the last 2 releases of Windows Server, to function on the client OS as well. In brief, Hyper-V lets you run more than one 32-bit or 64-bit x86 operating system at the same time on the same computer. Instead of working directly with the computer’s hardware, the operating systems run inside of a virtual machine (VM).

Hyper-V enables developers to easily maintain multiple test environments and provides a simple mechanism to quickly switch between these environments without incurring additional hardware costs. For example, we release pre-configured virtual machines containing old versions of Internet Explorer to support web developers. The IT administrator gets the additional benefit of virtual machine parity and a common management experience across Hyper-V in Windows Server and Windows Client. We also know that many of you use virtualization to try out new things without risking changes to the PC you are actively using.

An introduction to Hyper-V

Hyper-V requires a 64-bit system that has Second Level Address Translation (SLAT). SLAT is a feature present in the current generation of 64-bit processors by Intel & AMD. You’ll also need a 64-bit version of Windows 8, and at least 4GB of RAM. Hyper-V does support creation of both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems in the VMs.

Hyper-V’s dynamic memory allows memory needed by the VM to be allocated and de-allocated dynamically (you specify a minimum and maximum) and share unused memory between VMs. You can run 3 or 4 VMs on a machine that has 4GB of RAM but you will need more RAM for 5 or more VMs. On the other end of the spectrum, you can also create large VMs with 32 processors and 512GB RAM.

As for user experience with VMs, Windows provides two mechanisms to peek into the Virtual Machine: the VM Console and the Remote Desktop Connection.

The VM Console (also known as VMConnect) is a console view of the VM. It provides a single monitor view of the VM with resolution up to 1600x1200 in 32-bit color. This console provides you with the ability to view the VM’s booting process.

For a richer experience, you can connect to the VM using the Remote Desktop Connection (RDC). With RDC, the VM takes advantage of capabilities present on your physical PC. For example, if you have multiple monitors, then the VM can show its graphics on all these monitors. Similarly, if you have a multipoint touch-enabled interface on your PC, then the VM can use this interface to give you a touch experience. The VM also has full multimedia capability by leveraging the physical system’s speakers and microphone. The Root OS (i.e. the main Windows OS that’s managing the VMs) can also share its clipboard and folders with the VMs. And finally, with RDC, you can also attach any USB device directly to the VM.

For storage, you can add multiple hard disks to the IDE or SCSI controllers available in the VM. You can use Virtual Hard Disks (.VHD or .VHDX files) or actual disks that you pass directly through to the virtual machine. VHDs can also reside on a remote file server, making it easy to maintain and share a common set of predefined VHDs across a team.

Hyper-V’s “Live Storage Move” capability helps your VMs to be fairly independent of the underlying storage. With this, you could move the VM’s storage from one local drive to another, to a USB stick, or to a remote file share without needing to stop your VM. I’ve found this feature to be quite handy for fast deployments: when I need a VM quickly, I start one from a VM library maintained on a file share and then move the VM’s storage to my local drive.

Another great feature of Hyper-V is the ability to take snapshots of a virtual machine while it is running. A snapshot saves everything about the virtual machine allowing you to go back to a previous point in time in the life of a VM, and is a great tool when trying to debug tricky problems. At the same time, Hyper-V virtual machines have all of the manageability benefits of Windows. Windows Update can patch Hyper-V components, so you don’t need to set up additional maintenance processes. And Windows has all the same inherent capabilities with Hyper-V installed.

Having said this, using virtualization has its limitations. Features or applications that depend on specific hardware will not work well in a VM. For example, Windows BitLocker and Measured Boot, which rely on TPM (Trusted Platform Module), might not function properly in a VM, and games or applications that require processing with GPUs (without providing software fallback) might not work well either. Also, applications relying on sub 10ms timers, i.e. latency-sensitive high-precision apps such as live music mixing apps, etc. could have issues running in a VM. The root OS is also running on top of the Hyper-V virtualization layer, but it is special in that it has direct access to all the hardware. This is why applications with special hardware requirements continue to work unhindered in the root OS but latency-sensitive, high-precision apps could still have issues running in the root OS.

As a reminder, you will still need to license any operating systems you use in the VMs.

Here’s a quick run-through of how the Hyper-V works in Windows 8.

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Supporting VM communication through wireless NICs

As you saw in the demo, creating an external network switch is as simple as selecting a physical network adapter (NIC) from a drop-down list and clicking OK. This already worked well for Windows Server Hyper-V, but to have similar results in Windows 8, we needed to get it working with wireless NICs, a new challenge.

The problem

The virtual switch in Hyper-V is a “layer-2 switch,” which means that it switches (i.e. determines the route a certain Ethernet packet takes) using the MAC addresses that uniquely identify each (physical and virtual) network adapter card. The MAC address of the source and destination machines are sent in each Ethernet packet and a layer-2 switch uses this to determine where it should send the incoming packet. An external virtual switch is connected to the external world through the physical NIC. Ethernet packets from a VM destined for a machine in the external world are sent out through this physical NIC. This means that the physical NIC must be able to carry the traffic from all the VMs connected to this virtual switch, thus implying that the packets flowing through the physical NIC will contain multiple MAC addresses (one for each VM’s virtual NIC). This is supported on wired physical NICs (by putting the NIC in promiscuous mode), but not supported on wireless NICs since the wireless channel established by the WiFi NIC and its access point only allows Ethernet packets with the WiFi NIC’s MAC address and nothing else. In other words, Hyper-V couldn’t use WiFi NICs for an external switch if we continued to use the current virtual switch architecture.

Figure 1: Networking between VM and external machine using wired connection

The solution

To work around this limitation, we used the Microsoft Bridging solution, which implements ARP proxying (for IPv4) and Neighbor Discovery proxying (for IPv6) to replace the virtual NICs’ MAC address with the WiFi adapter’s MAC address for outgoing packets. The bridge maintains an internal mapping between the virtual NIC’s IP address and its MAC address to ensure that the packets coming from the external world are sent to the appropriate virtual NIC.

Hyper-V integrates the bridge as part of creating the virtual switch such that when you create an external virtual switch using a WiFi adapter, Hyper-V will:

1. Create a single adapter bridge connected to the WiFi adapter

2. Create the external virtual switch

3. Bind the external virtual switch to use the bridge, instead of the WiFi adapter directly

In this model, Ethernet switching still happens in the virtual switch, and MAC translation occurs in the bridge. For the end user who is creating an external network, the workflow is the same whether you select a wired or a wireless NIC.

Figure 2: Networking between VM and external machine using WiFi connection

In conclusion, by bringing Hyper-V from Windows Server to Windows Client, we were able to provide a robust virtualization technology designed for the scalability, security, reliability, and performance needs of most data centers. With Hyper-V, developers and IT professionals can now build a more efficient and cost-effective environment for using and testing across multiple machines.

Amazing article about Windows Server 8 and how it will beat down VMware… Spare some time and read this article here

Windows Server 8 ROCKS!

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Through MVA, IT Pros can select a track, study a wide range of on-demand material and perform self-assessments to gauge their understanding.  Individuals that register from the Gulf are automatically eligible for exclusive offers in conjunction with Open Doors and other Gulf initiatives.

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