Will Hyper-V Change the Virtualization Game?

Nelson RuestTechnology Futurist and AuthorResolutions Enterprises Ltd.Web: www.Reso-Net.comEmail: nelson@reso-net.com © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd. Will Hyper-V Change the Virtualization Game?

Agenda Best of breed virtualization scenarios Hyper-V Features Hyper-V versus market leaders Hyper-V workarounds Top Hyper-V deployment scenarios Final thoughts © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd.

Architect Virtualization Most organizations rely on a Seven-Layer Virtual Architecture

Achieving Best Of Breed Infrastructures VMware has been at work in the virtualization realm for over 10 years They have offered a firmware-based hypervisor for more than one year and it is now free Their virtualization management and administration toolkit is ripe and complete They pretty well invented x86 virtualization With a 10-year lag behind, can Microsoft really make an impact? © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd.

“Missing” Elements In Hyper-V Much of the industry claims Microsoft’s Hyper-V is missing key features VMware offers VMotion — a technology that moves Virtual Machines (VMs) from host to host while they deliver services to end users VMware offers Distributed Resource Scheduling —policy-based resource allocation to VMs VMware offers special RAM management features Microsoft Hyper-V does not offer any of these features © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd.

Hyper-V Features Built on Windows Server 2008 Enables Hyper-V to support a multitude of devices and server configurations Guest OS Support Supports different types of 32- or 64-bit operating systems that run simultaneously (Windows and Linux) © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd.

Hyper-V Features (Continued) SMP Support Supports up to four processors in a virtual environment Virtual Networking Includes a new virtual switch — VMs can be configured to run Windows NLB or Failover Clustering © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd. 11

Hardware Sharing Architecture Provides access and utilization of core resources (disk, networking and video) using the virtual service provider/virtual service client (VSP/VSC) architecture Quick Migration Can move a running VM from one system to another with minimal downtime with Windows Server and System Center management tools © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd. Hyper-V Features (Continued)

Virtual Machine Snapshot Can take up to 512 snapshots of a running VM Scalability Can support several VMs within a given host Runs exclusively on x64 platform Extensible Includes WMI and APIs that allow ISVs to build custom tools or utilities Hyper-V Features (Continued) © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd. 13

Come in two flavors: Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Standard edition supports one virtual machine Enterprise and Datacenter editions support failover clustering and therefore high availability for all virtual machines Windows Hyper-V Server Free version (download from Microsoft Web site) Based on standard edition Does not support high availability (HA) Must run a host re-installation to obtain HA (replace with complete Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V version) © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd. Hyper-V Features (Continued)

Market Leader Hypervisor Metrics © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd. * 32 MB for Standard edition, 1 TB for Enterprise and Datacenter Editions ** 32 MB plus 30 MB plus 15% of allocated RAM per VM plus VM memory *** 512 MB Server Core plus 32 MB for each VM plus the VM memory **** License does not limit number of sockets or number of running guests. However, physical resources will limit these numbers to 32 cores and 50 VMs. ***** Only for Windows Server 2008

Memory Management VMware supports key memory management features RAM Over-Commitment lets you allocate more memory to VMs than exists on a host Relies on policy-based VM management to move machines if they need it Transparent Page Sharing stores only one copy of a duplicate file in host RAM Min/Max Memory Settings on VMs let you assign a minimum and a maximum memory setting to a VM Memory Ballooning lets you recover memory from VMs that are not using it and allocate it to others Hyper-V does not support any of these features © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd.

Hyper-V Configurations Typical Host Two CPUs with four cores each (eight cores) 32 GB RAM With VMware, this host can run up to 64 virtual machines running a single virtual processor core each; more if they are virtual desktops Each VMware machine can be assigned amounts of RAM that total more than the physical RAM in the host server because of ESX’s memory features © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd.

Hyper-V Configurations (Continued) With Hyper-V, this host can potentially run up to 56 virtual machines, but because the VMs cannot use memory over-commitment, the actual number will be limited by the host RAM and the amount of RAM allocated to each VM To run 56 VMs on this configuration, each VM could only have access to 512 MB of RAM However, Windows Server is certified on thousands of server configurations and hosts can potentially have up to 2 TB of RAM VMware is only certified on hundreds of server configurations © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd. 21

Hyper-V Management Microsoft offers almost as many virtualization management tools as VMware However, Microsoft’s interfaces are all different —Hyper-V Manager, SCVMM, SCOM, SCCM and so on — and even some terminology is different Administrators must relearn each tool and interface VMware uses one single interface for all tools: VirtualCenter (now vCenter) Each new added function simply adds more functionality to the tool © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd.

Achieving HA With Hyper-V High availability is a must for any hypervisor VMware’s HA function relies on two key tools: The HA feature links host servers together into a cluster-like formation The Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) creates a sharable virtual machine file system Note that the Network File System (NFS) can also provide sharable VM file storage © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd.

Achieving HA With Hyper-V (Cont’d) Windows Server 2008 — even Server Core — includes Failover Clustering Can create both single site and multi-site clusters to link hosts together for high availability Must use a third-party replication technology for multi-site clusters Note that the free Hyper-V Server does not include the Failover Clustering feature © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd. 27

Products Supported In An HA Configuration

Services Supported In An HA Configuration

Rely On Shared Storage For Single Site HA Store all VMs on shared storage subsystem Supports high availability through ‘clustering’ — one system can hand off VM workload to another without moving files Provides site-level redundancy © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd.

Host Server Configurations The very best host server configuration is: 64-bit server (up to 2 TB of RAM and 16 TB of virtual memory) Minimum two quad-core CPUs Minimum 32 GB of RAM (64 GB or more preferred) Minimum four 1 Gbit/s NICs, two for iSCSI, two for VMs No DAS, boot from SAN or firmware © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd.

Server Configurations For Multi-Site HA Hyper-V can provide multi-site HA through its built-in Failover Clustering feature, however a third-party replication tool is required © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd. Replication Site B Site A

Configure For High Availability Make sure you configure your host systems to support high availability and virtual workload mobility This means having spare host servers in each pool Each host should be a backup for another host(active-active clusters) © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd.

Achieve VMotion With Hyper-V VMware achieves VM mobility through VMotion VMotion offers zero downtime Hyper-V uses Quick Motion which saves the state of a VM and then restarts it Quick Motion offers minimal downtime when moving machines (less than 4 seconds in some host configurations) However, virtual machines running Windows Server can rely on Failover Clustering or Network Load Balancing to provide VMotion-like machine mobility Host each VM cluster node on a different host server for maximum availability © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd.

Dynamic Machine Movement With Hyper-V © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd. VMA is hosted on ServerA Workload from VM A is failed over to VMB on ServerB Virtual workloads are highly available because of Windows features Clustering at the Virtual Layer lets you move workloads without impact to end users while running in any hypervisor!

Policy-Based Resource Management Management through policies is also highly useful when you need to patch or update host servers Given the right tools, you can even turn off the secondary host server once the job is finished © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd.

Policy-Based VM Management VMware uses Distributed Resource Scheduler along with VMotion to move VMs and reallocate resources as needed All you need to do is create the policy Windows Server 2008 relies on SC Operations Manager and SC Virtual Machine Manager together to perform a similar activity But, since it does not support memory over-commitment, there is little point in moving VMs except for host maintenance purposes © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd.

Best Uses For Hyper-V VMware is a more dynamic solution than Hyper-V since it supports resource over-commitment After all, low resource usage is the reason you transform physical servers into virtual machines VMware hosts can run more machines on any given host than other hypervisors because of this feature But you must have additional hosts with spare resources to support machine movements during peak loads Because of this, VMware supports Variable Resource VMs Both XenServer and Hyper-V are limited to Fixed Resource VMs Because of this, host RAM is a hard limit for the supported number of VMs per host © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd.

© 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd. Windows Server R2 Enterprise Edition includes 4 Virtual Instances Old License Model Total: 5 Windows Licenses Windows Server R2 and 2008 Total: 1 License + $28 Windows Vista Desktop Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop 4 running instances per user License includes physical host OS and up to 4 guests Each additional license gives you up to 4 more guests Windows Server Datacenter Edition allows unlimited guests Valid on any hypervisor Use the Microsoft Virtualization Calculator at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/howtobuy/licensing/calculator.mspx Learn about VECD at: http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/solution-product-vecd.mspx Understand OS Licensing Windows Windows Windows Windows Virtualization Layer ‘Any’ Hypervisor Hardware

Hyper-V Virtualization Scenarios © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd. Production Server Consolidation Business Continuity Management Test and Development Despite its higher hardware overhead, Hyper-V supports every virtualization scenario Dynamic Datacenter

The Bottom Line Small and medium businesses will be very attracted to Hyper-V No relearning; built into Windows Integrated license Can run on Server Core or Full Install Can run on thousands of low-cost hardware configurations Can even rely on DAS to create HA configurations Remote offices can also rely on Hyper-V to keep costs down Datacenters that are serious about VM mobility will continue to rely on VMware, not the first version of Hyper-V This is one reason why large organizations will most likely run at least two, if not more, hypervisors © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd.

Senior enterprise consultant with over 20 years experience in migration, planning and network, PC and server design, MVP Failover Clustering, MCSE + Security, MCT Free eBook: The Definitive Guide to Vista Migration Free Chapters are available at: http://www.realtime-nexus.com/DGVM.htm New book: “Virtualization: A Beginner’s Guide” Also co-author of several other books Passionate Advocate for doing things right with information technologies! Speaker Background © 2008, Resolutions Enterprises Ltd. 45

Will Hyper-V Change the Virtualization Game?