As the release of Hyper-V gets closer, evaluting it as a virtualization solution becomes more practical. With the current release candidate Microsoft has stated that it is feature complete. We have installed it and put it through some testing in the Dell TechCenter lab, and would like to have an open discussion about our experiences and others experiences with Hyper-V.

Technical Community - Background Reading

Microsoft Virtualization Team Blog

Dell TechCenter - Hyper-V
Virtualization Frontier

Quick Migration and VMotion Part II
Quick Migration and VMotion Part I
Performance Testing with Hyper-V Beta II


5 Things I really Like About Hyper-V - Christian Sabrio's Blog

Transcript

DELL-ToddM Hello All!
Dell-RogerF joined.
DELL-ToddM Hello Roger
robby joined.
DELL-ToddM Welcome robby
DELL-ToddM We're waiting for people to get joined in before starting
DELL-ToddM I assume that you are here to talk about Hyper-v?
DELL-ScottH joined.
DELL-ToddM Hello scott
DELL-ScottH Hey Todd, roger, robby, how goes it ?
DELL-ToddM Very well
DELL-ScottH I'm setting the line at 8, you want the over ?
DELL-ToddM I was able to get Quick Migration to work earlier today
DELL-ScottH cool, you going to have some screen shots ? .. or is there anything to shoot ?
robby glad to be here--i'm sorry I missed the last couple of sessions.
DELL-ToddM Can we put screenshots into the chat?
DELL-ScottH don't think so
ranjith_purush joined.
DELL-ToddM Hey Ranjith!
DELL-ToddM We have been joined by greatness
DELL-ScottH Hey ranjith ! how's your movie directing going ?
DELL-ScottH Yes Ranjith is the cat's meow !
ranjith_purush Doing well. Movie direction went very well. Thanks to Scott.
DELL-ScottH Is that something we can put on the wiki ?
ranjith_purush I'm sure it is something we can plan for the future
DELL-ScottH cool looking forward to it
DELL-ToddM Let's get started
DELL-ToddM Microsoft relelased the Release Candidate of Hyper-v recently
DELL-ToddM I have been testing Hyper-v, or kicking the tires, on it since late last year
DELL-ToddM Basically since the betas started appearing
DELL-ToddM Ranjith works in our Virtualization Solutions engineering team and has been working with it much longer than that!
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Hywel hello
DELL-ToddM Over the past couple of months there has been more and more discussion on the web about Hyper-v
DELL-ToddM Welcome Hywel
DELL-ToddM good to see you again this week
Hywel trying not too miss it :)
DELL-ToddM We're just getting started - I'm basically trying to do a quick intro to the current state of Hyper-v
DELL-ToddM One of the most recent "discussions" has been around Quick Migration
DELL-ToddM Before we get into any of that, does anybody have some specific areas with Hyper-v they want to discuss
Hywel is this where system centre gets involved?
Hywel or am i jumping ahead of myslef
Hywel myself even
DELL-ToddM The System Center Virtual Machine Manager will enable an easy way or more integrated way to do quick migrations
DELL-ToddM But you can do quick migration without Scvmm
DELL-ToddM Quick Migration is simliar to Vmware's Vmotion or live migration
DELL-ToddM The Vm is moved from one physical server to another physical server in both
DELL-ToddM Vmotion does it without any interruption to the Vm
DELL-ToddM Quick migration requires that the Vm be paused or suspended before moving
DELL-ToddM And then restarted on the new server
Hywel yeah in my tests its virtually always less than 1 sec
DELL-ToddM Vmotion is less than one second - right?
Hywel ^ for vmware i mean
DELL-ToddM Quick Migration usually causing at least 10 or 15 seconds of interruption
Hywel from a virtualisation point of view how does it seem to perform. Is the overhead similar to that of Xen/vmware
DELL-ToddM I have done some performance tests, but not comparing Hyper-v vs Esx
DELL-ToddM The performance seems good - better than I expected
Hywel i forget your now allowed to beta testing are you?
Hywel i mean publish results
DELL-ScottH we're not publishing ... we are just "chatting"
DELL-ToddM Well it is fine to performance test with beta, but I don't think it would be fair to compare it with production code
DELL-ToddM So the tests that I published were just with Hyper-v compared against different versions of itself
Hywel anyway doesn't really matter i would say anything <15% overhead is pretty good
DELL-ToddM The results are on this page http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/windows+server+virtualization+-+hyper-v
DELL-ToddM I think that performance of Hyper-v is going to be good
DELL-ToddM The reason for the tests that I did was mostly to test stability under load
DELL-ToddM and to see if Hyper-v could fairly distribute resources among the Vms
DELL-ToddM And it did a good job in both respects
DELL-ToddM Hywel - Have you had a chance to try out Hyper-v?
Hywel not yet
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DELL-ToddM Welcome slbrown!
Hywel i have 18 Esx servers, at the moment i can see the only reason for it is Sql licensing...i knew they would get us somewhere on that front!
DELL-ToddM We are talking about Hyper-v.. you can catch up with the Action - Recent Room History
DELL-ToddM Is there an advantage with licensing and Sql Server and Hyper-v?
Hywel i am open to it, but the "tools" are the biggest part of the software not the virtualisation layer
Hywel yeah, vmware presents itself as vcpu;s whereas hyper-v is seen as real cpu's.....we this was according to a Ms evangelist at the 2k8 release
Hywel so Sql under vmware is licensed per core and under hyperv is on cpu's
DELL-ToddM I wasn't aware of this difference. Could be big with quad core processors
DELL-ToddM I agree that tools are a huge part of the virtualization solution
DELL-ToddM This is the main reason why I really really didn't like Ms Virtual Server - their web admin interface was really bad
DELL-ToddM I haven't had a chance to use Scvmm yet.
DELL-ToddM Ranjith - Can you comment on Scvmm?
ranjith_purush Incidently, Ms released Scvmm 2008 Beta publicly earlier today
ranjith_purush It is available via https://connect.microsoft.com
DELL-ToddM Cool - I will have to try it out
DELL-ToddM The Mmc for Hyper-v is pretty nice
DELL-ToddM It is very simliar to the other Microsoft Mmcs on 2008, so pretty easy to pick up
DELL-ToddM Setting up Quick Migration was pretty easy once I found a doc online explaining it
DELL-ToddM And after Ranjith kinda told me how to do it :)
DELL-ToddM You basically setup a failover cluster between the two nodes
DELL-ToddM And then use the wizard in failover clustering to create a service for the Vm you want to be highly available
DELL-ToddM It is a 3 or 4 step wizard
DELL-ToddM The only problem I had is that I didn
DELL-ToddM put the Hyper-v update on my servers
DELL-ToddM This caused me to get an error when the Vm was moved to the new server about the network settings being wrong
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DELL-ToddM After I put the Hyper-v update on and retried the Quick Migration (failover) it worked with no problem
DELL-ToddM Welcome dammmifino
dammmifino thanks
DELL-ScottH Dammmifino, you can click on "actions" .. "recent room history" to catch up
DELL-ToddM robby - Any hyper-v experience or questions?
DELL-ToddM I found this blog entry today http://csaborio.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/5-things-i-really-like-about-windows-hyper-v/
DELL-ToddM Which is a review of Hyper-v and the writer gives his 5 favorite things about it
DELL-ToddM Most interesting I thought was that he felt the snapshot capability was really great
DELL-ToddM I have only briefly looked at the snapshots
DELL-ToddM dammmifino - Any Hyper-v evaluation experience or questions?
dammmifino more with Esx--y was looking here to see other info
DELL-ToddM What is your current Esx environment like?
dammmifino several farms--looking at the 805v--
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dammmifino interested in hypervisor and hw Vmand Ms will handle
Hywel one good thing aboutr hyper-v, is that you can have proper multipathing to san's, althought there are rumours that this will be out in the next version of vmware
dammmifino explain?
dammmifino multipathing as in like powerpath capability?
Hywel well vmware will only do prefered path or a specified path....yeah like powerpath
dammmifino kewl--good to know
DELL-ToddM Esx 3.5 has some capability to do a round robin load balancing to storage
DELL-ToddM I will have to check - it might be only with iscsi
DELL-ToddM Are you looking at the embedded or Esx3i on the r805?
DELL-ToddM This is the slimed down Esx that is loaded on flash storage on the server
DELL-ToddM There was a demo on stage at Vmworld in Sf last sept with r805 and Esx 3i
dammmifino both--understand some limitations and Vm saying use in test/dev for now--
dammmifino did pre-production testing on 805 and it Smoked!!!
dammmifino was really rock solid
DELL-ScottH link to demo Todd referenced -- http://direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2007/09/13/29651.aspx
DELL-ToddM There are going to be some differences in terms of how the embedded version is managed becuase the service console is gone
DELL-ToddM The r805 has great Ram capacity and will be a really great system for virtualization
DELL-ToddM The one really big drawback with Hyper-v is that there is no cluster file system to put the Vms on
DELL-ToddM The failover clustering that is used to enable Quick Migration is the same shared-nothing architecture
DELL-ToddM Only one host can access the shared storage at a time
DELL-ToddM So when you failover a Hyper-v Vm the Lun or disk that it is on must be failed over as well.
DELL-ToddM So if you want to be able to move Vms seperately, they have to be on seperate Luns
DELL-ToddM With Esx you have Vmfs - which is actually a cluster file system
DELL-ToddM It allows for many Esx servers to be accessing the same Lun at the same time
DELL-ToddM So you can move Vms independent of each other, even though they might reside on the same Lun
DELL-ToddM For smaller enironments, this probably isn't a big deal to manage 10 or so Luns
DELL-ToddM But in a big environement with lots of Vms - it could get complicated
DELL-ToddM I've been following the Quick Migration vs Vmotion discussion on my blog - http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/virtualization+frontier
DELL-ToddM Basically there were a few videos put togther about a month ago that really showed Quick Migration in a bad light
Hywel ah, forgot that
DELL-ToddM So Microsoft virtualization team has decided to respond on their blog - http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/default.aspx
DELL-ToddM They are on part Iii of their response.
DELL-ToddM I think that it is really good to have these discussions and understand what the differences between the two are
DELL-ToddM Before you try to deploy it
DELL-ToddM Overall it has remained civil so far :)
DELL-ToddM But it is fun to follow
DELL-ToddM I'm planning to create a demo video of Quick Migration myself - now that I got it working this morning
DELL-ToddM The intent is to be fair and balanced
dammmifino hearing similar on the i version and prob why Vm says now--test/dev--not production
dammmifino thanks for the info--good stuff
DELL-ToddM Glad that you were able to make it to the session
DELL-ToddM We try to keep it as fun as possible
dammmifino just fyi--we love the 805 for the Nic and mem ability--incredible
dammmifino course dont know how to afford to fill it with 8gb dimms--lol
dammmifino ciao--till next time
DELL-ToddM I agree about the 805 - and Ram prices seem to be falling faster these days
DELL-ToddM Next week Scott is going to have the command chair - where the topic will be.....
DELL-ScottH Decoding systems managment with the secret decoder ring !
DELL-ScottH looking forward to seeing everyone next week
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Hywel Todd, does Hyper-v impact Dns and Ad at all?
DELL-ToddM I don't think there is any impact..... In what way do you think that it might?
Hywel when you format luns?
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DELL-ToddM The impact to our Dns and Ad was due to a poor storage admin (me???)
Hywel :)
DELL-ScottH yeah, where's my Dns ?!?! :-)
DELL-ToddM I could blame it on Vcb - but it was Me (As Scott is very fond of pointing out)
Hywel hehe
DELL-ToddM Alright - I've taken enough beatings for today :)
DELL-ScottH I think its funny that he was installing backup software - and we didn't have a backup of the Dc !
DELL-ToddM Ugh! Ouch!
DELL-ScottH I can't wait until I wipe out the new one , imagine what a beating I will get from Todd
Hywel i hope you have a 2nd dc???
DELL-ScottH we have about a dozen
DELL-ScottH all different !
DELL-ScottH ahhh the beauty of a lab
DELL-ToddM Gotta go - See everybody next week
DELL-ScottH later
Hywel yeah, ta ta