Taylor Brown's Blog : Commentary

Performance Smack Down - Hyper-V vs. VMware vs. Citrix

taylorb — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 01:35:33 GMT

Virtualization Review posted the results of a performance shootout between Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware ESX, and Citrix XenServer… The launched three tests against the various platforms. First was a small number of heavy workload systems, one database server running a midsize database and six VMs with heavy workload of CPU and memory. Second - was a large number of heavy workload systems, with one database server running a midsize database and twelve VMs with heavy workload of CPU, memory and disk IO. Third – was a large number of light workload systems, with one database server running a midsize database and twelve VMs running a light CPU, memory and disk IO.

Take a look at the full article – it has a bunch of raw performance data and is definitely worth at least a quick read. Full Article: http://virtualizationreview.com/features/article.aspx?editorialsid=2641

Quotes:
”Hyper-V was the first product compared, and it performed quite differently from expectations. Hyper-V has been a focus of Microsoft dev efforts, and it shows. Overall, Hyper-V did well in this comparison and proved itself a worthy product.”

“In our tests, Hyper-V did well in all categories-it's a real, viable competitor for the competition. Table 2 shows Hyper-V's comparative performance.”

“After doing these comparisons of ESX to Hyper-V and XenServer, it's clear that at the hypervisor level, ESX is optimized for a large number of less-intensive workload VMs. For intensive workloads that may not be optimized for memory overcommit apps, Hyper-V and XenServer should definitely be considered-even if that means adding another hypervisor into the data center.”

Taylor Brown
Hyper-V Integration Test Lead
http://blogs.msdn.com/taylorb

Red Hat Support Coming To Hyper-V

taylorb — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 22:43:34 GMT

Last night Mike Neil posted to the Virtualization Team Blog regarding a new agreement between Microsoft and Red Hat to bring Red Hat guest support to Hyper-V. Take a look at Mike’s full blog post Microsoft and Red Hat Cooperative Technical Support and/or the Red Hat press release Red Hat Moves to Expand Server Virtualization Interoperability. Happy day to all..

Taylor Brown
Hyper-V Integration Test Lead
http://blogs.msdn.com/taylorb

Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta Download Public

taylorb — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 02:40:10 GMT

Ok the Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta is now available for public download…

Take a look at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/R2-Beta.aspx for all of the information. Or here’s the direct link to the download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=85cfe4c9-34de-477c-b5ca-75edae3d57c5&DisplayLang=en.

Taylor Brown
Hyper-V Integration Test Lead
http://blogs.msdn.com/taylorb

Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta… Ohh and Windows 7 too…

taylorb — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 22:58:08 GMT

Unless you’ve been under a rock all day you know that Windows 7 Beta was announced and released last night – along with Windows 7 Beta we also announced and released Server 2008 R2 (formally known as Windows 7 Server). If you have an MSDN subscription you can download the new hotness right now – just go to the subscriber downloads section. Apparently the build will be available to everyone as early as tomorrow – however I haven’t heard for sure yet…

New Hyper-V features include (not limited to): Live Migration, Improved Power Management (Core Parking/Timer Coalescing), Hot-Add/Remove of SCSI Disks, Native VHD Integration (Diskmgr/Diskpart can create/mount VHDs), Jumbo Frame Support, Performance Improvements, Deducted Guest External Networks, 32 Core Support and there are more that I am forgetting I am sure… I should say this is beta – these features are subject to change. Over the next month of so I as well as many others around the team will be posting information about new features and how they are used so look forward to that… For now I am just happy that you all get to play with Windows 7 (which btw ROCKs – I love it) and Server 2008 R2 w/Hyper-V…

Taylor Brown
Hyper-V Integration Test Lead
http://blogs.msdn.com/taylorb

Life w/out Internet

taylorb — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 04:44:36 GMT

As some of you might know Seattle had a rough few weeks with snow – for some parts of the country a few back to back 4”-6” snow storms isn’t a big deal but in Seattle it’s a “snow event”… Well the day before it started snowing my internet at home went out, effectively anyway, downstream was all of 50k-100k not enough for a VPN connection, barely enough for mail to really work. Well that was almost three weeks ago – first it was too snow to get a crew out, then they couldn’t find the box under the snow, then they had to order a part. *sigh* so much for playing with clustering and PowerShell – maybe next week.

Taylor Brown
Hyper-V Integration Test Lead
http://blogs.msdn.com/taylorb

PDC Update Day 2 – Windows 7

taylorb — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:45:55 GMT

Day 2 started off with Ray’s talking about the convergence of the conventional pc platform and the internet, cloud, devices. He quickly handed the floor over to Steve Sinofsky who almost immediately handed to the floor to Julie Larson-Green (VP of Windows Experience aka WEX). She demoed several new features of windows including the new start bar (see photo below), Windows touch, Gadgets, the new Paint, the new Calculator etc… She also showed some of the great work done around home networking and device interaction – in the photo on the left you can see a song being played to a remote device – this song resides on not on the PC running media player but on another machine and the song isn’t being streamed from the PC running media player either it’s being streamed from the machine that has the song on it. All very cool and very practical.

Steve then did his own demo – his first demo was BitLocker for a USB key. He then demoed NATIVE VHD support, creating and mounting a vhd from disk manager (I’ll blog in detail on this latter). He also mentioned boot from VHD (allowing a physical server to boot from a a VHD) but didn’t show it (I wonder if someone will demo that). Also demoed the new projector support as well as multi-mon TS (that got a huge response). At our booth we setup a live migration demo (on Server 2008 R2) – I love that we can finally show and talk about these things!

Taylor Brown
Hyper-V Integration Test Lead
http://blogs.msdn.com/taylorb

PDC Update Day 1

taylorb — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:47:55 GMT

Day 1 has come and gone by the time I got back to my hotel last night I was pretty much dead on my feet. I had to miss the keynote to finish configuring my demo machines and put the finishing touches on my slides. I also realized yesterday that I completely forgot my camera which really limits my ability to provide photos – never fails so you’ll have to make due with flicker flickr.com tagged PDC2008 I spent most of yesterday manning the Microsoft Virtualization booth in the “big room” – which was fun I got to talk to a lot of different people and show three three layers of virtualization and four different virtualization products. Windows Hyper-V (obviously), System Center Virtual Machine Manager, App-V (aka Softgrid), and our VDI solution using Citrix’s broker. The new Windows Azure cloud platform made a huge splash – it was the buzz of the conference yesterday and it was all over the blogosphere (Windows Azure defined, Microsoft looks at new computing world through…, What Ray Ozzie sees in Azure's cloud).

I think that’s about it for now – more to come tomorrow.

Taylor Brown
Hyper-V Integration Test Lead
http://blogs.msdn.com/taylorb

PDC Update: Day –1 and Day 0

taylorb — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 04:23:52 GMT

I flew in on Saturday and I think the flight was about 90% Microsoft employees including Mike Swanson – so the migration has begun. I got in rented a car and got checked in to my hotel, I am staying at the Hilton Checkers hotel in downtown LA. I think the hotel is about 90% PDC attendees as they have a big sign with the daily agenda on it in the lobby and you can tell that tomorrow is going to be busy. The are running full size busses from the hotels to the convention center every 15 min all day. Today being the Pre-Conference day (day 0) the busses seemed pretty empty, everyone including myself just seemed to head down get registered, pick up a bag’o’swag (tee shirt, water bottle, notebook etc…) and take a look around. I want and checked out some of the bars in the area last night and ended up at the Seven Grand – meet some great people and had some good drinks. Tonight there is the Party with Palermo (Palermo being Jeffery Palermo CTO of Headspring) at Casey’s Bar & Grill – I am planning to attend so look for me if your there.

Taylor Brown
Hyper-V Integration Test Lead
http://blogs.msdn.com/taylorb

PDC T-1 Week…

taylorb — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 09:43:20 GMT

Wow it’s almost time… For the past 20 weeks or so I have been getting an email from Mike or one of the other PDC planners with titles like PDC2008 T-20 Weeks, PDC2008 T-10 Weeks, PDC2008 T-5 Weeks, PDC2008 T-02 Weeks and I know what’s coming on Monday! I had the dry run of my session last week and my demo servers are on a truck or something on there way down to LA right now… I’ll be flying out to LA a week from tomorrow to help setup our hands on lab and check out my demo equipment. I think this is going to be an awesome conference the content is insane and the speakers are excellent. I will be hanging out at the Hyper-V booth on Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday and I will be at the ask the experts dinner on Wednesday – look forward to seeing a bunch of you there.

Taylor Brown
Hyper-V Integration Test Lead
http://blogs.msdn.com/taylorb

Virtualization Sales Strong, Hyper-V Strong First Quarter

taylorb — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 21:40:22 GMT

IDC released a report this morning entitled “Virtualization Continues to See Strong Growth in Second Quarter, According to IDC”… Among the data they report Virtualization licence shipments in Q2 of 2008 increased 53% year over year. Vmware holds the largest market share at 44% (combined VMware ESX and VMware Server) however Microsoft now holds a market share of 23% (combined Hyper-V and Virtual Server). Back in October of 2006 IDC reported the Microsoft Virtualization share at a whooping 8.6% and in September of 2007 it was reported the Virtual Server market share was around 7%. So since this is my blog (hence I can draw any conclusions I want) I’ll say Hyper-V took at least 16% market share in one quarter.

Any way if you want to read the full report go take a look at www.idc.com (it’s on the front page).

Taylor Brown
Hyper-V Integration Test Lead
http://blogs.msdn.com/taylorb

Microsoft Hyper-V Server Available Now – For FREE!

taylorb — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 03:11:39 GMT

You can now download Microsoft Hyper-V Server for free from Microsoft Download center. It’s pretty cool take a look (after all it’s free).

Download Links:

English | Chinese Traditional (ZH-TW) | All Other Languages

Taylor Brown
Hyper-V Integration Test Lead
http://blogs.msdn.com/taylorb

Are You Signed Up For PDC Yet?

taylorb — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 09:02:46 GMT

Seriously are you? Today it was announced that in addition to Ray Ozzie and Rick Rashid they have added Bob Muglia (who demo’ed Live Migration last time he was on stage – what’s he going to show this time?) and they have added Steve Sinofsky to give some first looks at *shhh* Windows 7…

They also added a small bribe – a “Hard Drive Chock Full O’Bits” – I saw pictures of it and it’s actually pretty cool and no speakers don’t get them…

If you are a developer – you really should be looking at the session list. A lot of new technology is being talked about a lot of it’s not well documented yet and this is the best way to really learn it.

Ok where do I sign up? http://www.microsoftpdc.com

Taylor Brown
Hyper-V Integration Test Lead
http://blogs.msdn.com/taylorb

24 Core Support For Hyper-V Hosts!

taylorb — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:52:32 GMT

There is a newly released update for Hyper-V that will increase the support limit from 16 logical processors (cores) to 24 logical processors! Since we support up to eight virtual processors for every one logical processor (8:1 over subscription) this increases the maximum number of virtual machines from 128 virtual machines to 192! Keep in mind that if all of those virtual machines had two virtual processors the maximum number of supported virtual machines would be 96 (96 vm's x 2 vp's = 192).

BTW: If your server has 16 or fewer logical processors (cores) you don't need this update and I would advise not installing it as you should only install updates you need.

Link To The Update: Update for Windows Server 2008 x64 Edition (KB956710)

Taylor Brown
Hyper-V Integration Test Lead
http://blogs.msdn.com/taylorb

Free Hyper-V + Live Migration + SCVMM

taylorb — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 21:26:00 GMT

Yesterday was the official launch for Hyper-V. I was able to attend a good chunk of the day and there was a lot of excitement around Hyper-V and more about the direction and the future of Virtualization.

If you missed the event a lot of the content including the key note session from Bob Muglia showing off Live Migration (part of the code name Server 2008 R2 release) can be seen at Get Virtual Now. I will say that I have tested and used Live Migration and it really does work as well as the demo showed, so it’s not just a flash demo it real and it’s coming.

Taylor Brown
Hyper-V Integration Test Lead
http://blogs.msdn.com/taylorb

Happy Virtualization Launch Day!

taylorb — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 11:00:00 GMT

Today is the launch for Microsoft Virtualization including Hyper-V. I will be attending parts of the launch event (unfortunately I have a few other commitments in Redmond so I can’t stay for the whole event). I will post any major news at it occurs though out the day. See http://www.getvirtualnow.com for more information on the launch!

Taylor Brown
Hyper-V Integration Test Lead
http://blogs.msdn.com/taylorb