Windows Virtualization Team Blog : Virtualization AMD

Windows Server 2008 R2 & Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 RTM!!!!

WSV_GUY — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 23:40:00 GMT

Virtualization Nation,

Today is a really big day at Microsoft and more importantly for our customers. Both Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (our FREE standalone Hyper-V Server) have both been Released To Manufacturing (RTM)!! If you haven't seen the announcement on the main Windows Server blog, be sure to check it out. In this blog, I'm going to focus on the Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V release, I will follow-up with a blog on the standalone Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 soon.

These R2 releases continue to highlight one of our core goals for Hyper-V. Simply:

We believe everyone should have access to high performance hypervisor based virtualization. Period.

Virtualization shouldn't only be available to the largest enterprises with the largest budgets and we're delivering on that goal. We're pleased and humbled to announce that in the first 12 months of Hyper-V R1 availability with Windows Server 2008, there have been over 1+ million downloads of Hyper-V R1 Gold (RTM) software, making Hyper-V the fastest growing bare metal hypervisor in x86 history.

To our customers: Our deepest and sincerest thanks. We appreciate your support and are pleased to present Hyper-V R2 based on your input.

Hyper-V R2: Customer Focus

After the initial Hyper-V R1 release, we went back to our valued customers and asked them quite simply, "We have a very long list of potential features, help us prioritize. What are the features you want most?" Here's what our customers told us.

"Keep Reducing Costs"

Server consolidation continues to be the driving force behind virtualization and the fundamental reason is to reduce costs. In this economy, customers need to maximize their investments. Green IT has been important the past few years, but we've seen an even greater focus in the last year. In addition, it doesn't matter how small or how large your business is, everyone pays a power bill, it's a constant cost, so anything we can do to reduce power use has an impact on everyone's bottom line.

With Hyper-V R1, we already help customers reduce their cost for power, here are a few examples:

"With virtualization, we will save about 50 percent of our annual energy budget for cooling and electricity." -Lukoil CEEB

"The work that Microsoft has done in these areas-particularly the ability to shift workloads across CPUs-is doing wonders for reducing our energy consumption." Secure Endpoints

"89% Energy Savings with Microsoft Virtualization" -Kroll Factual Data

With Hyper-V R2, we continue to drive down power usage when servers are idle (usually nights and weekends) AND now we drive down server power usage even under load throughout the day through new enhancements like Core Parking, Timer Coalescing and more.

Bottom Line: Windows Server 2008 R2 continues to drive down power usage and lower power costs.

"Protect Our Investments"

Today, the majority of servers ship with up to 16 logical processors. However, our customers watch the industry closely and point out that AMD and Intel are continuing to increase core counts quickly. In addition, Intel has reintroduced Symmetric Multi-Threading (SMT) with their Nehalem processors which doubles the thread count. As our customers plan their capital investments over the next 12-24 months, they want to make sure to invest in a virtualization platform today that will take advantage of the latest hardware capabilities tomorrow. Hyper-V R2 is that platform.

CPU. From a compute standpoint, Hyper-V R2 scales to run on systems with up 64 logical processors (up to 384 running virtual machines) and takes advantage of the latest processor enhancements such as AMD's Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) and Intel's Extended Page Tables (EPT). This provides performance improvements across the board when these processor capabilities are present. It also means that when folks decide to move up to larger servers with more counts Hyper-V R2 is ready out of the box. No core tax here. (BTW: Let me point out that Hyper-V R2 works with RVI and EPT, but does not require it. If you have older hardware without those capabilities, Hyper-V R2 will run just fine on those too.)

Networking. From a networking standpoint, Hyper-V includes significant networking improvements. For 1 Gb/E networks, Hyper-V R2 now includes Jumbo Frame Support. For 10 Gb/E networks, Hyper-V R2 adds support for Chimney support and Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ). These two technologies allows Hyper-V R2 to take advantage of network offload technologies so instead of a core on the CPU processing network packets, these packets can be shunted to the offload engine on the 10 Gb NIC which helps free up processor usage and improves performance. Support for these technologies ensures the most efficient use of your server resources. For our customers who haven't made the investment in 10 Gb/E quite yet, no worries. Hyper-V R2 is ready when you are.

Storage. In Hyper-V R1, we focused most of our performance efforts for storage on fixed virtual hard disks (VHDs). We did this primarily because fixed disks pre-allocate their storage upfront when you create the disk and help prevent a situation where you could run out of storage at a later time. Because we focused our performance efforts on fixed virtual hard disks, Hyper-V R1 performance for VMs with fixed VHDs was stellar and we recommended using fixed virtual hard disks in production environments. In fact, Hyper-V R1 can achieve as high as ~94% throughput of native.

Because we focused on fixed VHDs in R1 and knew that would be our recommendation for production environments, we didn't spend as much time focusing on dynamically expanding virtual hard disks in R1. While customers understand our recommendation for using fixed virtual hard disks, many of them told us that they'd like to use dynamically expanding virtual hard disks because they are more efficient in terms of storage, only growing as needed.

You got it.

In Hyper-V R2, we spent time analyzing and optimizing the code path for dynamically expanding VHDs and found areas where we could significantly improve performance. In some cases we achieved a 15x improvement for dynamically expanding virtual hard disks. No, that's not a typo. With dynamically expanding VHDs we can achieve up to about ~87% performance of native throughput. While we were at it, we took another look at the fixed VHD code path and improved it further so that fixed VHD performance is now on par with native performance.

In the end, we still recommend fixed disks for production use with Hyper-V R2 because it pre-allocates disk usage upfront, but if you want to use dynamically expanding virtual hard disks and are willing to take a small performance hit, Hyper-V R2 is a must.

"Help Me Find The Right Hyper-V Hardware." Customers told us that they wanted to make sure that they were investing in "the right hardware" to use with Hyper-V. We made that easy with Hyper-V R1, but it's worth pointing out again. There's no special certification for Hyper-V. Just make sure that the hardware you're investing in (servers, storage, etc) have the Windows Server 2008 Logo and now, the new Windows Server 2008 R2 Logo and you're set. You can find certified hardware online at the Windows Server Catalog and the logos look like this:

"Help Us Obtain Broader Support For Our Applications in Virtual Machines"

One customer pain point we hear in the virtualization world is that "ISV X" doesn't support their application in a virtual machine. This impedes adoption and frustrates customers who see the tremendous benefits virtualization provides. We've heard this repeatedly from our valued customers who are trying to convince our ISV partners that virtualization adoption is only rising. As a company, we've been consistently messaging how important virtualization is to our customers and demonstrating that through our significant investments in all areas of virtualization whether it's Hyper-V, App-V, MED-V, Virtualized Desktops, Remote Desktop Services etc.

In response to rapid customer adoption of Hyper-V and the customer requirement that virtualization be treated as the standard way to deploy workloads, not the exception, the Windows Server 2008 R2 Logo program now reflects that customer requirement.

Specifically, for applications to receive the Windows Server 2008 R2 Logo, all applications must be tested and pass the Logo tests when running within virtual machine running on Microsoft Hyper-V.

(Note: If an application cannot be tested in this configuration ISVs must work with a Microsoft approved testing vendor to learn about alternate test paths. For example, an application needs access to a specific hardware device not present in a virtual machine.)

"Continue to Improve Interoperability"

Today, we currently distribute Linux Integration Components (ICs) for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 SP2 x86 & x64 which improves performance when run within a Hyper-V VM. While our customers appreciate SLES support, they have also requested support for Red Hat as a guest OS. So, with the Windows Server 2008 R2 release of the ICs, we're adding support for both SLES 11 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.2 and 5.3 for both x86 and x64.

While SLES and RHEL are the two most requested Linux distros supported within Hyper-V by far, we get requests now and then for other community supported distributions.

We wanted to do more.

Thus, the big Monday announcement. In case you missed it, on Monday, we released 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community under GPLv2. The code, which includes three Linux device drivers, has been submitted to the Linux kernel community for inclusion in the Linux tree. The drivers will be available to the Linux community and customers alike, and will enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Hyper-V R1/Hyper-V R2.

I've read numerous articles and blogs on the Linux IC GPL announcement (most using phrases like "pigs with wings" or "hell experiencing snow flurries") and while there has been some interesting conjecture out there, let me be clear: Microsoft is committed to interoperability and providing our customers the solutions that meet their needs. Releasing these device drivers for Linux is another example of that commitment.

"Increase Flexibility"

Live Migration. Customers appreciate the flexibility that virtualization provides (deploy virtualized workloads in a fraction of the time versus physical) and wanted us to continue to improve in this area. To that end, the number #1 customer requested feature was Live Migration.

Done. Included. Live Migration Built-In.

We weren't done there. One thing that customers would always follow-up with is, "Do the processors have to be exactly the same? Can you ease that restriction a little?"

You got it.

Processor Compatibility Mode. With Hyper-V R2's new processor compatibility mode, we're able to easily LIVE MIGRATE between four different generations of Intel hardware. From an Intel Pentium 4 VT circa 2005 to an Intel Core i7 circa 2009.

Just by checking a checkbox:

That's flexibility. You can also move virtual machines between different generations of AMD processors as well. Just so we're clear: Processor Compatibility still means AMD<->AMD and Intel<->Intel. It does not mean you can Live Migrate between different processor vendors AMD<->Intel or vice versa. For more info about processor compatibility mode, check out my earlier blog post here.

Dynamic Storage. Another request to increase flexibility from our customers was to be able to hot add/remove virtual storage. Think about it, you're running a virtualized SQL server or file server and you need additional storage, but don't want to bring down the VM. No problem, with Hyper-V R2 you can hot add/remove storage while the VM is running without downtime.

"Virtualized Desktops"

One area of interest that's been percolating the last few years is the concept of Virtualized Desktops. At a high level, virtualized desktops is the concept of using a virtualization server to serve virtual machines running client operating systems like Windows XP or Vista. There are a few reasons customers are interested in this model such as to centralize management operations or to securely manage IP for remote developers. This model is very much like using Remote Desktop Services (formerly Terminal Services), except instead of Remote Desktop sessions, users are provisioned virtual machines.

From a Hyper-V standpoint, we've supported Windows XP and Vista as Hyper-V guests since the R1 release and with Hyper-V R2 we've added support for Windows 7 (x86 & x64 with up to 4 virtual processors per VM). However, Hyper-V support for client operating systems is only one piece of the puzzle. To improve this experience for our customers, the Remote Desktop Services team made significant enhancements in Windows Server 2008 R2 such as.

Connection Broker. Windows Server 2008 R2 includes a Connection Broker so that when a user logs in they can be brokered to their appropriate Virtual Machine OR Remote Desktop session on the back end. Yes, that's right. The Windows Server 2008 R2 broker actually brokers both Virtual Machines and Remote Desktops! This provides customers the flexibility to choose the solution based on their business requirements as opposed to being shoehorned into one technology.

RDP Protocol Enhancements. Windows Server 2008 R2 includes major enhancements for the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) that greatly improve the user experience such as:

Multi-monitor support
Bi-directional audio support (VoIP anyone?)
Aero Glass Support
Enhanced Bitmap Acceleration

Read that again. That's huge.

One big reason is that in the past, RDP was more focused on lower bandwidth connections. Customers have since told us they're willing to use more network bandwidth to provide a richer, greater fidelity user experience.

How good is the remoting? I recently tested the new RDP enhancements by doing the following. I used my three year old laptop running Windows 7 RTM and the built-in Remote Desktop Connection client. I went to the Experience tab and set Performance for WAN settings.

I then remoted into a virtual machine running Windows 7 (the VM was allocated 1 GB of memory) and then fired up three videos running within the VM simultaneously. Specifically,

a TV show streaming over the Internet using the Hulu desktop application (the show was “The Greatest Generation” by Tom Brokaw. Highly recommended.)
a large resolution QuickTime movie preview also streaming
an online Silverlight demo

Here's a screenshot from my laptop running the Window 7 inbox RDP client and this all just worked using my little old 1 Gb/E switch.

These RDP enhancements are big folks. Really big.

Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V

With our customers input first and foremost, we developed Hyper-V R2 to meet their requirements.

Live Migration

#1 Customer Requested Feature
Processor Compatibility Mode

New Processor Support

Improved Performance
Lower Power Costs

Enhanced Scalability (4x Improvement)

Support for 64 Logical Processors
Support for up to 384 Running VMs or up to 512 virtual processors
Greater VM Density
Lower TCO

Networking Enhancements

Improved Network Performance
10 Gb/E Ready

Dynamic Virtual Machine Capabilities

Live Migration
Hot Add/Remove Virtual Storage

Usability Enhancements

SCONFIG for Server Core

In short, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V delivers more of everything:

Capabilities
Efficiency
Performance
Scalability
Flexibility
Ease of use

Windows Server 2008 R2: Customers Win

Ultimately, Windows Server 2008 R2 delivers the richest overall platform by offering:

Hyper-V
Remote Desktop Services
Rich RDP enhancements
Powerful Hardware and Scaling Capabilities
Reduced Power Consumption
Connection Broker for a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
Ubiquitous Remote Access
Improved Branch Office Performance and Management
Simplified Management for SMBs
Remote Application and Desktop Access

and its numerous roles such as:

Active Directory
Application Server
DHCP
DNS
Fax
File
Network Policy & Access Services
Print
and many more

In the end, Windows Server 2008 R2 delivers in spades and ultimately, our customers win.

Cheers,

Jeff Woolsey

Principal Group Program Manager

Windows Server, Hyper-V

Correction: I had a comment stating that VMware View only brokered VMs which was not correct and have since removed it. VMware View does, in fact, broker both VMs and Remote Desktop sessions. -JW

Guest post: Hyper-V gives every Windows shop a free pass into “innovation”

porourke — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:39:00 GMT

Hi, my name is Matt Lavallee and I am the Director of Technology at MLS Property Information Network, Inc., based in Massachusetts. Although you may not recognize the company name, we are one of the 700+ multiple listing service (MLS) companies that provide data warehousing for the Real Estate industry in the U.S. As my company took the early step to virtualizing our environment on Hyper-V last year, Microsoft asked me to share my opinion on the results of its recent survey on the state of IT infrastructure investments, conducted by Harris Interactive.

One point that stands out on the survey — and should surprise no one — is the shift to belt-tightening in IT: 84% of US respondents cited improving business efficiency (51%) and reducing IT costs (33%) as their priorities in light of the economic downturn. However, I personally disagree that this new mindset is a direct reaction to the economy or that the decreased allocation of IT budget to innovation (29% in the US) are necessarily bad things.

First, let us consider that the IT budget is a relatively fixed value year over year — while it may respond to inflation and some cyclical purchases, the vast majority of budget is spent on payroll, annualized licensing, backups, ISP costs, and the regular refresh of equipment. To me, this eliminates a significant stratum of budget from consideration for “innovation” unless you just built your environment last year on five-year-old technology.

Second, the actual varying allocation of budget goes to “special projects”, which, for lack of a better term, includes “innovation”. Here is where the survey findings drew too many conclusions and where I feel the indication is astray from real trends.

Consider my environment: We recently made the switch to virtualization and the broad deployment of Hyper-V. This included a change in direction for our hardware refresh (bigger servers), incremental SAN purchases, and some new investment in networking (10GbE)… perhaps enough to reflect the 25% investment in “innovation”, per the survey. A balance sheet, however, would not reflect that we redesigned the entire infrastructure and now run up to 60% more efficiently: all you will see is a marked decrease in operational overhead at the end of the year (i.e., improved business efficiency and reduced IT costs, as the survey reflected).

So why is there no correlation between advancing the infrastructure and innovation spending? I believe that the technology ecosystem has afforded smarter IT spending, particularly with the (dramatic) rise in computing density, the problems it has solved and challenges it introduced, and the tools that were created (or improved) to meet those challenges. PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) and “green” concepts were alien just five years ago, but now dominate most datacenter conversations. Virtualization via Hyper-V gives every Windows shop a free pass into “innovation” and grants us many new opportunities that were previously out of budgetary reach.

Some question whether this change indicates that IT is no longer aligned with business goals and driving success… I offer that our current focus clearly demonstrates that we are doing exactly what the business needs us to do.

Matt

Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and AMD's 6-core Opteron

porourke — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:39:00 GMT

Hello, this is Bryon Surace. I’m a senior program manager on the Windows virtualization team at Microsoft. The recent announcement by AMD regarding the 6-core AMD Opteron processor (codenamed ‘Istanbul’) marks another milestone in AMD’s continued mission to create processors designed to provide performance, efficiency, and value.

The newly announced 6-core AMD Opteron processor will provide a total of 24 logical processors (cores) on a 4-socket system and 48 logical processors (cores) on an 8-socket system. In a non-virtualized IT environment, there aren’t many apps/services that are designed to utilize these large system resources. However, with Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2, it’s a natural fit. WS08 R2 Hyper-V provides support for these new processors allowing large resources to be used to consolidate potentially hundreds of virtual machines on a single host.

Hyper-V, as part of Windows Server 2008 R2 (RTM by end of July) will provide support for up 64 Logical processors (see blog announcement here). As such, Hyper-V combined with AMD’s new 6-core Opteron processors provide a solid virtualization platform on which to consolidate large numbers of virtual workloads. Combined with WS08 R2 Core Parking technology, cores on the new Opteron processors can be fully utilized during peak times, or can be put into a sleep state (‘parked’) during idle times further reducing power consumption.

In addition to the increase of supported logical processors, WS08 R2 Hyper-V also takes full advantage of advancements included in the newest generation processors. Specifically Hyper-V will take advantage of Second Level Address Translation such as AMD’s Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI). Through RVI, the AMD processor provides two levels of address translation. This additional page table is used to translate guest physical addresses to system physical address allowing the guest to control its own page tables. In WS08 R2, Hyper-V can use the AMD RVI technology to increase performance of the virtualization platform and results in system resource savings. These savings include a drop in Hypervisor CPU time as well as a reduction in memory overhead.

The cooperative development efforts between Microsoft and AMD continue to be highly valued and directly result in providing an industry-leading virtualization platform.

Bryon

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

Guest post: Moving Virtualization into the Mainstream

porourke — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 23:41:00 GMT

I’d like to start this post by saying thank you to our friends at Microsoft for running my blog post here. As AMD is mid-way through Virtualization Ecosystem Month (VEM), it has been exciting to see the partner support around the topic of virtualization and I encourage you to check out Microsoft’s guest post on my blog.

Both AMD and Microsoft are continually asked if virtualization can really become a sustainable technology in the mainstream computing market. Skeptics are quick to point out that the technology world is littered with products that have never made it beyond the early adopter edge of the market. Names like Apple Newton, Betamax, Sega Dreamcast, and OS/2 come up in various articles and discussions about technologies that didn’t become widespread market successes. Will virtualization suffer this same fate? Is it destined to stay on the fringe?

In my opinion, all indications are that virtualization is jumping the technology chasm between early adopters and the mainstream market. Recent survey results from Forrester demonstrate that firms (both large and small) are in the midst of rethinking and overhauling IT infrastructure and client systems. Virtualization is one of technologies at the center of these efforts with Forrester reporting that 54% of the enterprises and 53% of the SMBs surveyed have either implemented x86 server virtualization or plan to do so within the next 12 months—which is significant in today’s current economy.

It is no secret that Microsoft’s virtualization solutions play a critical role in virtualization’s march into the mainstream. In my view, virtualization for Microsoft means helping businesses of all sizes maximize cost savings and improve business continuity with products based on familiar Windows interfaces and well-known Windows-based technologies.

AMD and Microsoft have an on-going technology collaboration designed to integrate our respective hardware and software products to better handle the rigors of memory-intensive virtualization environments. The AMD Opteron processor provides the underlying foundation with AMD-V hardware-assisted virtualization technology, along with a broad range of power management capabilities. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 utilize these virtualization and power management technologies to help deliver well performing and highly efficient virtualization solutions. Together, Microsoft and AMD products provide flexible management, optimal user performance, and enable data centers to conserve power through workload consolidation—a big win for any company looking for ways to cut costs and optimize their IT infrastructure.

AMD and Microsoft have already clocked some impressive successes with mid-market companies who are turning virtualization into a business advantage. For example, ServiceU used AMD-based Dell server running Hyper-V to reduce the number of physical servers in its three data centers by 35 percent, and lower the energy utilization at one data center by up to 60 percent—yes, you read that correctly, 60 percent! While WASSER used AMD-based HP blades and Hyper-V to create a virtualized environment that reduced the number of physical servers by more than half without a major sacrifice in performance. With the next versions of Microsoft’s highly anticipated server virtualization products, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, there will be added support for AMD-V Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) technology. In case you aren’t familiar, RVI enables virtual machines to directly manage memory utilizing hardware resources rather than software resources. This process can help to accelerate the performance of demanding virtualized applications, such as database and Web serving, by reducing hypervisor cycles and the associated performance penalty that is commonly associated with virtualization.

In addition to the virtualization technology coming out of AMD and our technology partners, we’re also seeing a lot of conversation on community sites such as Spiceworks, which I personally think is very indicative to a maturing (and thriving) technology and definitely not one that could ever be in the same category as Pets.com. In fact, I have a feeling if virtualization continues to be the go-to technology for businesses looking to maximize efficiency and streamline their data center, we might start seeing virtualization fanboys start popping up—now wouldn’t that be cool?

Margaret Lewis, Product Marketing Director at AMD

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: Virtualization; Something Old, Someone New and Some Really Big Cost Savings

porourke — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:58:00 GMT

Hello, I’m Kevin Knox, VP Worldwide Commercial Business at AMD. Microsoft invited me to do this guest blog post in conjunction with our sponsorship of Microsoft’s “Get Virtual Now” event on Sept. 8.

I always find it interesting to hear people singing the praises of x86 virtualization and talking about how this recently introduced technology is already revolutionizing the industry. Fact of the matter is that virtualization technology was originally introduced for the purpose of time sharing on mainframes in the early 1970’s. One could probably trace the roots of x86 virtualization to the early 90’s when IT managers finally realized that people’s desks and wiring closets were probably no place for servers and started to relocate them into the datacenter. The next step in the evolution of x86 virtualization was a few years later when IT managers realized they could safely run multiple applications on a single server simultaneously. And if you are reading this blog, you can probably figure out what came next…..running multiple versions of an OS on a single piece of hardware, or what has affectionately become known as virtualization. While certainly an interesting history, there are two major happenings on the near horizon that I believe will permanently change the face of virtualization.

First is the notion of virtualization becoming “intelligent.” Think about the possibilities when an enterprise infrastructure becomes smart enough to essentially manage itself based on a predefined set of rules, policies and current application requirements. Application A runs for 1 hour and when it is finished, it shuts down, creates a new virtual session with ½ its resources to start a nightly backup and it reallocates the other ½ of the resources to another session getting ready to kick off a major batch run. While just an example, hopefully it shows the possibilities of what some are calling Dynamic Provisioning. In the end what this will enable is the elimination of human capital, which for most IT shops is still the largest budget item they have. No longer will masses of IT people be needed for starting, stopping, configuring and managing virtual sessions. On top of that, by optimizing the software environment in such a way, less, better utilized hardware will result.

The second and probably more important happening is Microsoft’s entry into the virtualization space. While Microsoft has invested in a variety of virtualization areas over the years including partnerships, acquisition and new technologies, they now seem to have a clear strategy and roadmap for delivering broad virtualization technologies across the enterprise. This is not to suggest they will be better or worse than anyone else, but rather having Microsoft in the game will help drive innovation, push the competition and allow for a more competitive marketplace, which ends up being a good thing for end users. Microsoft’s years of experience in operating systems and infrastructure software will also help enable new features and function and enable emerging technologies such as Dynamic Provisioning. One thing I can assure you from my years at AMD is that competition drives innovation and value for the end-users, for the ecosystem and the industry as a whole.

To illustrate this, consider the following advances that AMD has driven into the x86 processor over the past 5 years together with greater choices in virtualization software that are starting to open the doors for IT departments, enabling them to run a larger range of workloads on virtualized servers. 64-bit and multi-core processor technologies now provide the robust platform needed for memory-intensive virtualization. More advanced power management capabilities of the processor are helping to reduce power and cooling costs. AMD-V technology, hardware-enabled virtualization inherent in our processors, is enabling software like Hyper-V to handle the most demanding applications.

So what does the future hold? Well I can’t tell you that, but I can assure you we are in the midst of the most interesting time in the history of x86 virtualization from both a competitive as well an innovation perspective. As Bob Dylan once sang “The Times They Are A-Changin.”

Kevin Knox is Vice President of Worldwide Commercial Business at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.