Windows Virtualization Team Blog : Intel

Hyper-V in WS08 R2 Release Candidate: Bringing More to the Table

porourke — Tue, 12 May 2009 08:43:00 GMT

You'll want to read Isaac's blog post about the RC milestone of Windows Server 2008 R2. His post focuses on 64 LP support and processor compatibility mode for live migration. Read the post here.

Here's an excerpt:

64LP Support

We have seen processors grow from 1, 2, 4, and now 6 cores on a single processor, soon to hit 8. Within the Windows Server 2008 R2 lifecycle, 64 logical processor servers will become commonplace (8 processors x 8 cores). Virtualization is the natural fit for these next-gen servers, allowing them to consolidate a greater number of virtual machines on a single host. Hyper-V is in line with these hardware trends all with an eye towards bringing you greater VM density. The dev team has done a fantastic job in building and testing a platform that can scale.

Let's take a quick look at the history of logical processor support for Hyper-V:

Server 2008 Hyper-V                                         16 LP Support
Server 2008 Hyper-V +update (KB95670)      24 LP Support
Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Original POR           32 LP Support
Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V RC/RTM                   64 LP Support!

Processor Compatibility Mode for Live Migration

Live Migration is the killer-feature in Windows Server 2008 R2! Previous to the RC build of Windows Server 2008 R2, identical CPUs were needed across every node in the cluster in order to perform a live migration. As we came closer to the RC milestone we got feedback from customers and partners asking, "What if I deploy additional nodes that contain newer processors with features not contained in the original nodes?" Well, we've solved that problem due to tremendous effort by the Hyper-V development team.

Processor compatibility mode is very straightforward. It enables live migration across different CPU versions within the same processor family (i.e. Intel-to-Intel and AMD-to-AMD). However, it does NOT enable cross platform from Intel to AMD or vice versa. It works by abstracting the VM down to the lowest common denominator, in terms of instruction sets, which enables live migrations across a broader range of Hyper-V host hardware.

There are a few things to note: Processor compatibility mode is disabled by default but you can configure it on a per-VM basis. There are no specific hardware requirements other than the CPUs must support hardware assisted virtualization (i.e. Intel's IVT and AMD's AMD-V).

Patrick

Beta of standalone hypervisor: Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

porourke — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 03:29:00 GMT

Hello fellow virtualization fans,

Bryon here again. With all the excitement around the beta release of Windows Server 2008 R2, it’s important to call attention to another important beta release: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2!

To ensure there is no confusion, let me be clear that I’m talking about Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Not Hyper-V the feature of Windows Server 2008 R2. Alessandro’s post did a good job showing the differences. Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is the next generation of the standalone hypervisor based product.

Building on the solid virtualization platform of Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, the R2 Beta release adds some highly anticipated features including live migration, increased memory/processor support, and an updated configuration utility. Let’s take a closer look at each of these:

§ Failover Clustering/Live Migration: With the addition of host clustering technology, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 beta provides support for unplanned downtime and planned migrations. Live migration enables customers to move running virtual machines between servers without any perceived downtime or dropped network connections.

§ Process/Memory Support: Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 beta now provides native support for up to 32-cores and up to 1TB of RAM on a physical system enabling even greater consolidation.

§ Updated Configuration Utility: Since Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 is command line only, the configuration utility is designed to simplify the most common initial configuration tasks. It helps you configure the settings without having to type long command-line strings. Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 beta adds new options to ease the configuration of options such as remote management, failover clustering, and software update installation just to name a few.

So make sure to check out more information on Microsoft Hyper-V Server and download R2 Beta at the Microsoft Hyper-V Website.

Additionally, the beta can be downloaded by subscribers on TechNet and MSDN.

Virtually Yours,

Bryon Surace

Senior Program Manager for Microsoft Virtualization

UPDATE: Hey MountainDrew, sorry to respond so late. HVS supports up to 16 nodes. Thanks for the Q.

WinServer 2K8 Hyper-V is alive

porourke — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 03:02:00 GMT

Fellow Virtualization Fans,

Bryon Surace here. I’m a senior program manager on the server virtualization team. Last week Steve Ballmer officially announced the public availability of Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta! So did my friends over at the Windows Server Division blog. With this release, there are a tremendous number of new features and capabilities that I encourage everyone to check out. However, since I am somewhat partial to virtualization, let’s talk about my Top 5 favorite new Hyper-V features:

Bryon’s Favorite New Hyper-V Feature #1: Live migration of Virtual machines

Microsoft is enhancing the product with the ability to “live migrate” a virtual machine. With this, there will be no perceived downtime in the workloads running in the VM, and network connections from and to the VM being migrated will stay connected. This capability will be possible between hosts within a High Availability cluster. In addition, Microsoft is adding ‘Clustered Shared Volumes’ (CSV) capability to failover clustering that allows multiple virtual hard disks (VHDs) from different virtual machines (VM’s) to be stored on a single LUN, presented as a single continuous namespace. This not only simplifies management of shared storage for a cluster, but provides a significant reduction in the migration time for VM’s being live migrated.

Bryon’s Favorite New Hyper-V Feature #2: Hot Addition/Removal of Virtual Storage

Virtualization decouples the software running on a system from the hardware and makes it convenient for customers to deploy and manage their IT environments. With this flexibility it is inevitable that customers also seek the ability to expand and reduce storage coupled with virtual machines. With the next generation of the virtualization platform, Microsoft is adding the ability to hot add and remove VHDs and pass through disks in a virtual machine while it is in operation. This capability opens up a range of possibilities including new storage solutions for backup.

Bryon’s Favorite New Hyper-V Feature #3: Enhanced Virtualization Capabilities in the Hardware

Over the years hardware vendors such as AMD and Intel have made significant enhancements (such as AMD-V and Intel VT) to processors and chipsets with capabilities specifically targeting virtualization. Continuing with these enhancements, AMD and Intel are adding capabilities to their processors called Nested Page Tables (NPT) and Extended Page tables (EPT) respectively. These capabilities improve the performance of translation of memory addresses.

Bryon’s Favorite New Hyper-V Feature #4: VDI Connection Broker

The need for a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is becoming ever more present. With this in mind, Microsoft is including a Remote Desktop Connection Broker which creates a unified admin experience for traditional session-based remote desktops and virtual machine-based remote desktops in a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. The two key deployment scenarios supported by the Remote Desktop Connection Broker are persistent (permanent) VMs and pooled (temporary) VMs. Today, most early adopters of VDI deploy persistent VMs as they provide the greatest flexibility to the end user.

Bryon’s Favorite New Hyper-V Feature #5: Power Management Enhancements

Microsoft has updated the Windows Hypervisor with enhancements to reduce the power footprint of virtualized workloads. These capabilities include the use of “core parking” wherein the hypervisor proactively consolidates idle workloads to fewer cores, freeing up processor packages which can then be put into a deep sleep state reducing the power consumption of the server

In addition to my top 5, there are many other great new features including VMQ support and Jumbo Frame support.

Be sure to check out all the great new Hyper-V features in R2 at the Windows Server 2008 R2 website.

Virtually Yours,

Bryon Surace

Senior Program Manager for Microsoft Virtualization

Guest Post: Intel Inside for Hyper-V Virtualization

porourke — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 08:43:00 GMT

Hi my name is Radhakrishna Hiremane, a senior product marketing engineer at Intel based in Portland, Oregon, and I’m responsible for marketing of virtualization technology on Intel servers and workstations.

Microsoft recently extended the processor core support for Hyper-V to 24-cores. A shift from the initially announced 16 core support in Hyper-V, this highlights the long standing collaboration between Intel and Microsoft in the area of innovation inclusive of the most valued technology in the datacenter today - virtualization. With the support of 24 cores, Hyper-V is able to support the performance increments of Intel Xeon 7400 processor-based servers. The performance of Intel Xeon 7400 processor-based servers with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V was demonstrated in a recent vConsolidate version 2.0 (profile 2) benchmark. The measurement of power and performance was done by Principled Technologies commissioned by Intel. The result showed that the Intel Xeon processor x7460-based server produced 52.1% better performance per watt than the Intel Xeon processor x7350-based server. In addition, the Intel Xeon processor x7460-based server delivered 40% more performance running vConsolidate with the optimum number of CSUs that the Intel Xeon processor x7350-based server. These results show great performance and scalability of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V running on Intel Xeon 7400 processor-based servers and for more information on these results, please visit here. Those who live and breathe virtualization understand the relevance of the virtualization and multi-core processors. But for those who may be wondering why this is so important, please read on.

Virtualization performance is coupled with native performance. As the native performance increases the virtualization performance increases. However, virtualization software adds some overhead over native environment as it is a layer of software that now has to manage the hardware resources and the guest OSes or VMs that need these resources. The overhead is typically dependent on the application being run in the guest OS and the extent to which the hypervisor emulates the resources in software to share the same with multiple VMs. This is where Intel’s hardware assist for virtualization helps to lower the overhead of virtualization software. Intel VT (introduced first in 2005) today represents a platform centric innovation in hardware assist encompassing Intel VT-x in the processor, Intel VT for Directed I/O (VT-d) for I/O virtualization in chipset and Intel VT for Connectivity (VT-c) in the networking devices, all of which help VMs reduce the virtualization software overhead across the platform and increase the performance.

Hyper-V leverages several key features of the hardware architecture. First and foremost is the Intel multi-core architecture and ability to leverage the performance and scalability of the Intel Xeon processor-based servers. Since 2006, Intel has delivered power efficient performance increases on a regular cadence. It began with Intel Core Micro-architecture that can execute more instruction per clock and includes fine grain power control in the processor. At a high level virtualization is about doing more with less, so being able to execute more instruction per clock means better performance and better performance per watt. This is evident from Intel’s leadership in industry standard power benchmark results - SPECpower. Further, Windows Server 2008 is able to exploit the per core power controls using Demand Based Switching capability for efficient power management.

Beyond the Core Micro-architecture, Intel delivered Quad Core processors in Q4 2006 that increased the virtualization performance up to 60% within the same power envelope as a dual core. On a predictive cadence Intel delivered further increase in performance with 45nm process technology in Q4 2007. With the new process technology, Intel is able to add more cache, faster transistors and hence more processing capability that resulted in up to 20% more virtualization performance and all within the same power envelope. All this means that IT managers are able to take advantage of these performance increments on a predictive cadence and deploy virtualization with confidence and gain better TCO of their infrastructure.

Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is built on hardware assists for virtualization. It requires VT-x and 64-bit capable processor. It utilizes hardware assist such as Intel VT FlexPriority (interrupt virtualization hardware assist) to reduce the interrupt overheads and increase performance (in particular legacy OSes such as Windows 32-bit OSes). Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V also supports Intel Dynamic Power Manager, which allows datacenter managers to monitor and cap the power utilization of the servers. Power management essentially is one of the most critical factors in datacenters today. Overall, with Hyper-V on Intel, customers can benefit in terms of TCO and power efficient performance for virtualization deployment.

Radhakrishna Hiremane