Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2

Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2

Ben Armstrong [MSFT]

8 Jan 2009 7:59 PM

Comments 8

The Windows Server 2008 R2 beta is here! (keep an eye here for details on how to get it) This is a significant release for Hyper-V and this beta contains a number of new features and capabilities.

First and foremost – Live Migration is here! You can now move virtual machines inside a cluster without experiencing any downtime or connectivity loss. Along with Live Migration we also have the Clustered Shared Volumes (CSV) feature – that allows you to store multiple virtual machines on a single storage device.

Other changes include:

Support for 32 core physical computers
Support for CPU Core Parking
- Core Parking allows Windows and Hyper-V to consolidate processing onto the fewest number of possible processor cores, and suspends inactive processor cores.
Support for Second Level Address Translation (SLAT) in CPUs
- On Intel processors this is called “EPT” while AMD calls it “NPT”. SLAT adds a second level of paging below the architectural x86/x64 paging tables in x86/x64 processors, providing an indirection layer from virtual machine memory access to the physical memory access. In many virtualization scenarios, hardware based SLAT support can offer performance improvements.
Support for Jumbo Frames on networking
The ability to hot add / remove SCSI virtual hard disks

So please get involved in the beta and let us know what you think of it.

Cheers,

Ben

Tech / Microsoft Talk, Hyper-V

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Simon

8 Jan 2009 8:39 PM

Is there an official position on whether Hyper-V will find its way into Windows 7 pre or post RTM or is the current position that desktop based virtualisation will continue to be provided by Virtual PC 2007 SP1 only?
netweb

8 Jan 2009 9:22 PM

Simon,

See Ben's previous post http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2009/01/07/bad-performance-with-high-end-graphics-and-hyper-v.aspx

At this stage if Hyper-V were to be put in Windows 7 you would have the same thing happen.

Cheers,

Stephen
oreidomar

9 Jan 2009 5:03 AM

I was about to ask the same question as Simon. Ben, is that a "no, there won't be any Hyper-V on Windows 7", at least by now?

Thanks.
Ray Aslin

9 Jan 2009 11:09 AM

Love the new option in networking to choose to allow mgmt OS to use an external virtual switch. The new virtual nic showing up in the parent partition was confusing for admins. Also, potentially you could get dhcp addresses assigned to 2 different nics (the real one, and the virtual one) I was advising folks to unbind IP from the physical nic.

Also like that during the install wizard for hyper-v (server manager) that it forces you to leave a nic available for the mgmt OS.

at any rate - looks great so far.
Ben Armstrong [MSFT]

9 Jan 2009 6:00 PM

Simon & oreidomar -

Correct, no Hyper-V in Windows 7 client.

Ray Aslin -

Thanks for the feedback!

Cheers,

Ben
Paul Adare

10 Jan 2009 9:39 AM

Hey Ben, it appears that the use of NTFS compressed VHDs is now blocked. Can you comment on this. To me, this is a huge issue.
Ray

12 Jan 2009 10:06 AM

Paul - I know this isn't a forum, and its not even my blog - but I can comment on this to some degree. My experience is that using compressed vhd = bad performance.

You might try using dynamic expanding vhd files, and occasionally shrinking(compact) them as necessary.

at any rate "God speed John Glenn" - good luck.

Ray
Paul Adare

12 Jan 2009 4:30 PM

Ray, sorry but I've actually benchmarked this and you can get a perf increase, in addition to the saved disk space, my using NTFS compression on VHDs.