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<< Part 5 Virtuozzo Overview

1. 1. Microsoft’s Hyper-V
      1. Guest OS’s Supported
      2. Driver’s Support
      3. Speed of Guest OS
      4. Ease of Management
      5. Support
      6. Conclusion

Microsoft’s Hyper-V.

Microsoft is relatively new to the Hypervisor game, but their dominant position in the computing world gives them some distinct advantages over the competition. Two of these advantages are Driver Support and Bundling.

The Core of Hyper-V is available as a free download from the 2nd of October 2008 though the entire interface is text based. You can also buy various versions of Windows Server 2008 that have Hyper-V bundled in. These are not free of course, but have significantly more features mainly in the field of management of Hyper-V.

Guest OS’s Supported.

Microsoft’s Hyper-V architecture, like Xen, requires one guest OS to be the dominant OS. Microsoft calls this the Parent Partition. However unlike Xen, this Parent Partition must be Windows Server 2008.

In addition, Microsoft’s Hyper-V only runs on x64 based processors that have virtualization support. In other words, they must support the Intel-VT or the AMD-V technologies.

The guest OS’s must be enlightened, meaning that they must be aware of the underlying Hyper-V. Currently, Hyper-V supports only Windows Server (Right from Windows Server 2000 with SP4), Windows Vista SP1, Windows XP Professional, and SUSE Linux.

Driver’s Support.

This is a huge plus of using Microsoft Products. Since the Parent Partition has a version of Windows Server 2008 running already, and the guest OS’s are enlightened, it means that whatever guest OS’s are running will be able to leech of the driver support of Windows Server 2008 which will already support most of the hardware available.

The enlightened OS’s will communicate with the Parent Partition via a VMBus, that will facilitate all I/O requests to the hardware.

Speed of Guest OS.

Compared to other Hypervisor solutions like Xen and VMWare, Hyper-V is a bit slower. This is a direct consequence of having a slightly larger code base tying in to Windows Server 2008. However, given the fact that Hyper-V is still very new, and the difficulty of conducting tests in a full blown environment with say 300 Virtual machines, this result is debatable.

In addition, certain License agreements prevent the disclosure of performance parameters on open forums without the consent of the company in question, and this means that objective comparisons need the approval of all the major players. This isn’t likely to happen.

Ease of Management.

If you download the basic Hyper-V from Microsoft’s website, you’re not going to find it easy at all to manage the systems. Microsoft offers products that help you to remotely control the Hypervisors using MMC snap ins that point to the Hypervisor, but it’s still a pain.

However, if you buy Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V bundled into it, then it’s a whole new ball game. You have a full blown GUI with all the tools you need to manage and control the guest OS’s. In short, as far as Microsoft goes, you get what you pay for.

This is unlike Xen of course where you can easily find high quality free tools.

Support.

If you buy Windows Server 2008, you get the standard support that Microsoft offers you. In addition, you can buy separate support packages tailored for your business, as well as training programs for your employees.

Conclusion.

Which solution you decide to implement will depend not only on your business needs, buy also your mentality. If you’re looking for a cheap powerful hypervisor with great management tools, and you’re also a hands on kind of a person, you should go with Xen.

If your needs are not so specific and varied, and you’re just looking for a quick way to virtualize your hardware, but still need good support and management services, you should go with Virtuozzo.

If you’re a Microsoft fan, then you realize that there are benefits in dealing with Microsoft. For example, all their products work together, and it’s much easier for Microsoft based software to talk to each other. Given this outlook, you would probably go with the Hyper-V.

I hope you enjoyed this discussion on Virtualization, and wish you success in your efforts!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Blog Posts, Server Virtualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.