This blog post was originally written by Michael Schroeder.

With the recent release of Windows Server 2012 Beta, Microsoft has made great improvements in virtualization scalability. To put the new scalability enhancements in perspective, here’s a quick table comparing Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V to Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V. The improvements are major - ranging from 2x to 32x.

System

Resource

Maximum Number

Improvement Factor

Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V

Windows Server 2012 Beta Hyper-V

Host

Logical processors on hardware

Up to 64

Up to 160

2.5×

Physical memory

Up to 1 TB

Up to 2 TB

2×

Virtual processors per host

Up to 512

Up to 1,024

2×

Virtual machine

Virtual processors per virtual machine

Up to 4

Up to 32

8×

Memory per virtual machine

Up to 64 GB

Up to 1 TB

16×

Maximum size per virtual disk

Up to 2 TB

Up to 64 TB

32x

To demonstrate how these new scale up capabilities harness the capabilities of our Dell PowerEdge R910 Rack Server, I created a large VM configured with 1 TB of memory and 32 virtual processors using the Datacenter Edition of Windows Server 2012 Beta. 

From inside the VM, Task Manager gives you a clean view of each of the virtual processors assigned—

Figure 1: Windows Server 2012 running a 32 Virtual Processor VM!

In addition, you can see below in the Hyper-V Manager that I was able to assign a whopping 998144 MB RAM to my Windows Server 2012 Beta Datacenter guest. 

Figure 2: Windows Server 2012 running a VM with 900+ GB of memory!

Now, you may not have a bunch of workloads in your infrastructure that require 32 virtual processors and a 1 terabyte of memory; the ability to support these workloads, however, demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to improving hypervisor scalability as well as helping you get the most out of your hardware. Larger sized database, data mining and scientific workloads are very likely to benefit from these types of improvements. The large jump in officially supported processors and memory for both the VMs and the Host (from Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2012 Beta) takes better advantage of today’s large-scale server hardware, and in future platform releases, if testing is successful, will further improve the price/performance ratio of virtualization.

Because Windows Server 2012 Beta is a pre-release product still in active development, all features are of course subject to change. Dell does not provide any support for this pre-release software and it is not recommended for use in a production environment. Feel free to check out the new features of the Beta release on your test servers and let us know what you think.