I wrapped up a quick round of performance testing with the Release Candidate 1 of Hyper-V (Included with Windows Server 2008 RC1) using the same test that I used with RC0. The initial test with RC0 was just to measure how well Hyper-V distributed the system resources among 8 virtual machines that were under load. In the case of RC0, and now in RC1, it appears that Hyper-V does a pretty good job of evenly distributing these system resources. The test showed that the variation in performance between the 8 VMs was small.

By using the same test (same server, storage, and test application) it is now also possible to compare the performance of RC0 vs RC1. The performance guy from the Hyper-V team at Microsoft claims on their performance blog page that performance is improved with RC1, which were able to confirm with an increase of 3% in Orders Per Minute and a 5% decrease in average response time. These percentages are not large, but they are improvements!

Todd