Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate! (Free Live Migration/HA Anyone?)

RC for Windows Server 2008 R2 & Hyper-V server R2

Clive Watson's Weblog — Wed, 06 May 2009 10:49:24 GMT

  The Release Candidate (RC) is now available @ http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsServer2008R2 which

re: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate! (Free Live Migration/HA Anyone?)

jasonboche — Wed, 06 May 2009 15:01:52 GMT

Congratulations on having a release candidate bringing you up to the year 2006 in virtualization technology timeline innovation speak, however, you are crazy if you think I'd run any business on a RC, let alone the 1.0 GA version which will be available when? 2010 as originally projected?

And what about your current Hyper-V product which blue screens Microsoft workloads under stress? http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/05/01/great-hyper-v-youtube-movie/

Free does not equal better. Shame on you and your marketing departments. People with any business or technology sense won't be fooled by your deep pocket approach. If you want to impress me, show me some real innovation and stability. That along with a price break might make me think of Microsoft as a seriously viable option. But for now you don't have what I need to run highly available workloads in the virtual datacenter, and no amount of money fixes that.

You can't buy your way to success every time and you certainly can't buy the respect of intelligent people.

re: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate! (Free Live Migration/HA Anyone?)

roidude — Wed, 06 May 2009 18:42:56 GMT

I have spent 20 years developing, writing and speaking about ROI as the appropriate tool for making intelligent IT platform decisions. TCO is inadequate because it fails to consider the context of the overall savings realized. Such is the case here. When organizations successfully virtualize their data centers, they are typically able to save hundreds of thousands, millions or tens of millions (depending upon the size of the environment). Moreover, because the bulk of virtualization cost is absorbed up-front in terms of hardware (servers/storage), consulting and training – the marginal ROI that results as an organization virtualizes closer to 100% of its data center is even higher.

The enormous savings at stake make it imperative that an organization considering virtualization should evaluate its overall projected savings/cost avoidance versus the overall costs to achieve those savings. Data center virtualization typically enables a truly amazing reduction in costs relative to the investment, resulting in payback periods commonly less than 12 months. And these savings/cost avoidances are not the type of reduced risk or increased agility type of ROI commonly touted. While virtualization certainly includes these benefits, we’re talking about only very hard savings of hardware, data center space and power that the CFO will validate and sign off on. When calculating ROIs for our clients, we don’t even bother to quantify the large reduction in IT staff time required http://www.dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=9425, because this figure is a little more fuzzy and can therefore lead to skepticism. Besides, there is no need – the other savings are compelling enough on their own.

The first step to a successful virtualization project is therefore to calculate an ROI for which we only need a general idea of the investment in order to get an acceptable order of magnitude for the ratio. Assuming the numbers overwhelmingly justify an enterprise virtualization deployment, the optimal platform (HW/SW) for successfully enabling the virtualization project can then be evaluated. While the comparative cost of any specific solution component can be a factor, much more important is its ability to facilitate the overall goal of 100% virtualization with the required performance, reliability, scaleability and manageability.

A lot has been written about the superior capabilities of ESX to any other virtualization platform in these areas including features such as Storage vMotion, DRS, Distributed Power Management, etc. Even Redmond Magazine, “The Independent Voice of the Microsoft IT Community” gave its 2008 Editors Choice award for the most reliable IT technology to VMware ESX (the IBM mainframe came in #2). Now vSphere takes these capabilities up a level with new features such as Fault Tolerance, vmSafe, storage thin provisioning and around 150 more. And the enhanced performance capabilities of vSphere mean that even the largest workloads can now run as fast or faster as virtual machines.

One of the major inhibitors to organizations virtualizing their data centers today has been the lack of networking support within any virtualization hypervisor. This becomes even more important in facilitating a seamless cloud computing strategy. vSphere includes the vNetwork Distributed Switch enabling QOS and the application of security and network policies that follow virtual machines as they migrate across hosts. By adding the Cisco Nexus 1000v (which only works with vSphere), network administrators can use the same Cisco command line tools in the same way they manage physical switches.

The competition to VMware vSphere isn’t Hyper-V or any other hypervisor, it’s inertia. By not virtualizing, organizations continue to purchase servers, network and SAN ports, rack space, power and cooling, UPS and generator slices, cable runs, etc. It makes far more sense for an organization to virtualize today with the best platform available and achieve what is likely to be an amazingly short payback on the investment while also reducing IT staffing requirements.

Since I’ve covered the ROI, I do want to bring a TCO item you highlighted. You say that you leave the cost of the guest OS out of your calculations because, “That cost is the same whether you're running Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 or VMware so I didn't bother to include it.” This is silly – if we’re running a Linux VM on vSphere, we obviously, as opposed to Hyper-V, do not require a copy of Windows Server.

Finally, even when evaluating Hyper-V and vSphere on a TCO comparative basis, we still need to consider the context of the overall cost requirements for each. We estimate that Hyper-V will require twice the number of servers as vSphere to handle a similar number of virtual machines (Microsoft and VMware’s recent documents reflect this ratio today for the organizations’ internal virtualization projects). This means a requirement not only for twice as many hosts, but also more rack space, network ports, SAN ports, maintenance contracts, generator and UPS slices, etc. Additionally, Gartner says that it now costs more to power and cool a server than it costs to purchase the machine itself. So when factoring in all of the additional costs that v-Sphere requires up front, it doesn’t even compare favorably on an isolated TCO basis.

http://brianmadden.com/blogs/windows_virtualization_team_blog/archive/2009/05/06/microsoft-hyper-v-server-2008-r2-release-candidate-free-live-migration-ha-anyone.aspx

TrackBack — Wed, 06 May 2009 20:10:24 GMT

re: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate! (Free Live Migration/HA Anyone?)

vmdoug — Wed, 06 May 2009 20:30:45 GMT

Don't you need an OS license to connect to Hyper-V? (That Windows7 license isn't exactly free now is it) This cost needs to be factored in. With VMware you can connect to their management system with a web browser running on a (free) open source OS.

Also, since VMware supports many more open source OS's wouldn't that also factor into price since Hyper-V has very limited (if non at all) support for open source?

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate

The World Simplified is a Virtual World — Wed, 06 May 2009 21:43:41 GMT

Today the Windows Virtualization Team , Blogged the availability of Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

The Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate is now available for download

System Center Virtual Machine Manager — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:32:56 GMT

Here’s another FYI that may not be System Center Virtual Machine Manager specific but it’s probably something

Japan Windows Server : Hyper-V Server R2 Release Candidate 公開

OPC Diary — Fri, 08 May 2009 06:30:24 GMT

いやはや、次から次へと。。 Japan Windows Server : H...

Hyper V Server 2008 R2: So what's new ????

Virtually Yours... — Fri, 08 May 2009 13:05:26 GMT

Read this great post from Jeff Woolsey Principal Group Program Manager from Microsoft Virtualization

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 RC verfügbar

German Virtualization Blog — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:05:59 GMT

Neben dem Windows Server 2008 R2 RC und einer neuen Version der Rolle Hyper-V ist jetzt auch die kostenfreie

Hyper-V Winning Daily/VMware FUD Reaching New Heights.

Windows Virtualization Team Blog — Sat, 09 May 2009 17:12:10 GMT

Virtualization Nation, I prefer to spend my time talking about the great things we're doing with Hyper-V

re: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate! (Free Live Migration/HA Anyone?)

Tanveer Badar — Sun, 10 May 2009 10:51:32 GMT

I believe VMWare will file a lawsuit for Microsoft bundling virtualization platform with Windows, just like what happened in the case of IE and EU's hopeless reasoning.

Hyper-V Winning Daily/VMware FUD Reaching New Heights.

HyperVoria — Mon, 11 May 2009 17:50:29 GMT

Jeff Woolsey:I prefer to spend my time talking about the great things we're doing with Hyper-V and Microsoft virtualization. We have a lot of very happy customers today with Hyper-V R1 and the upcoming R2 release delivers even more in terms of scalability,

VMware FUD Fiasco Final

Windows Virtualization Team Blog — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 00:19:01 GMT

Virtualization Nation, For those of you who have been following the "VMware FUD Fiasco" blog thread (

re: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate! (Free Live Migration/HA Anyone?)

Deb0 — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 03:45:43 GMT

Microsoft has been promising Enterprise-grade virtualization platform for quite some time while VmWare has bee busy delivering.

No doubt the SMB market, along with certain firms lured by the "Free" tag will bite and stake their reputations and infrastructure on Hyper-V. But they will painfully find out that not only is Enterprise Hyper-V NOT free, but woefully inadequate when compared to VmWare comprehensive virtualization suite.

As the Virtualization architect of a revenue-generating data center, I will only take a look at Hyper-V when it demonstrates an Enterprise ready product for a few years. After all, that's exactly the kind of track record VmWare built their reputation on.

Some things are worth paying for...