As the release of Hyper-V gets closer, evaluting it as a virtualization solution becomes more practical. With the current release candidate Microsoft has stated that it is feature complete. We have installed it and put it through some testing in the Dell TechCenter lab, and would like to have an open discussion about our experiences and others experiences with Hyper-V.

Technical Community - Background Reading

Microsoft Virtualization Team Blog

Dell TechCenter - Hyper-V
Virtualization Frontier

Quick Migration and VMotion Part II
Quick Migration and VMotion Part I
Performance Testing with Hyper-V Beta II

5 Things I really Like About Hyper-V - Christian Sabrio's Blog

Transcript

	DELL-ToddM	Hello All!
		Dell-RogerF joined.
	DELL-ToddM	Hello Roger
		robby joined.
	DELL-ToddM	Welcome robby
	DELL-ToddM	We're waiting for people to get joined in before starting
	DELL-ToddM	I assume that you are here to talk about Hyper-v?
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	DELL-ToddM	Hello scott
	DELL-ScottH	Hey Todd, roger, robby, how goes it ?
	DELL-ToddM	Very well
	DELL-ScottH	I'm setting the line at 8, you want the over ?
	DELL-ToddM	I was able to get Quick Migration to work earlier today
	DELL-ScottH	cool, you going to have some screen shots ? .. or is there anything to shoot ?
	robby	glad to be here--i'm sorry I missed the last couple of sessions.
	DELL-ToddM	Can we put screenshots into the chat?
	DELL-ScottH	don't think so
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	DELL-ToddM	Hey Ranjith!
	DELL-ToddM	We have been joined by greatness
	DELL-ScottH	Hey ranjith ! how's your movie directing going ?
	DELL-ScottH	Yes Ranjith is the cat's meow !
	ranjith_purush	Doing well. Movie direction went very well. Thanks to Scott.
	DELL-ScottH	Is that something we can put on the wiki ?
	ranjith_purush	I'm sure it is something we can plan for the future
	DELL-ScottH	cool looking forward to it
	DELL-ToddM	Let's get started
	DELL-ToddM	Microsoft relelased the Release Candidate of Hyper-v recently
	DELL-ToddM	I have been testing Hyper-v, or kicking the tires, on it since late last year
	DELL-ToddM	Basically since the betas started appearing
	DELL-ToddM	Ranjith works in our Virtualization Solutions engineering team and has been working with it much longer than that!
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	Hywel	hello
	DELL-ToddM	Over the past couple of months there has been more and more discussion on the web about Hyper-v
	DELL-ToddM	Welcome Hywel
	DELL-ToddM	good to see you again this week
	Hywel	trying not too miss it :)
	DELL-ToddM	We're just getting started - I'm basically trying to do a quick intro to the current state of Hyper-v
	DELL-ToddM	One of the most recent "discussions" has been around Quick Migration
	DELL-ToddM	Before we get into any of that, does anybody have some specific areas with Hyper-v they want to discuss
	Hywel	is this where system centre gets involved?
	Hywel	or am i jumping ahead of myslef
	Hywel	myself even
	DELL-ToddM	The System Center Virtual Machine Manager will enable an easy way or more integrated way to do quick migrations
	DELL-ToddM	But you can do quick migration without Scvmm
	DELL-ToddM	Quick Migration is simliar to Vmware's Vmotion or live migration
	DELL-ToddM	The Vm is moved from one physical server to another physical server in both
	DELL-ToddM	Vmotion does it without any interruption to the Vm
	DELL-ToddM	Quick migration requires that the Vm be paused or suspended before moving
	DELL-ToddM	And then restarted on the new server
	Hywel	yeah in my tests its virtually always less than 1 sec
	DELL-ToddM	Vmotion is less than one second - right?
	Hywel	^ for vmware i mean
	DELL-ToddM	Quick Migration usually causing at least 10 or 15 seconds of interruption
	Hywel	from a virtualisation point of view how does it seem to perform. Is the overhead similar to that of Xen/vmware
	DELL-ToddM	I have done some performance tests, but not comparing Hyper-v vs Esx
	DELL-ToddM	The performance seems good - better than I expected
	Hywel	i forget your now allowed to beta testing are you?
	Hywel	i mean publish results
	DELL-ScottH	we're not publishing ... we are just "chatting"
	DELL-ToddM	Well it is fine to performance test with beta, but I don't think it would be fair to compare it with production code
	DELL-ToddM	So the tests that I published were just with Hyper-v compared against different versions of itself
	Hywel	anyway doesn't really matter i would say anything <15% overhead is pretty good
	DELL-ToddM	The results are on this page http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/windows+server+virtualization+-+hyper-v
	DELL-ToddM	I think that performance of Hyper-v is going to be good
	DELL-ToddM	The reason for the tests that I did was mostly to test stability under load
	DELL-ToddM	and to see if Hyper-v could fairly distribute resources among the Vms
	DELL-ToddM	And it did a good job in both respects
	DELL-ToddM	Hywel - Have you had a chance to try out Hyper-v?
	Hywel	not yet
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	DELL-ToddM	Welcome slbrown!
	Hywel	i have 18 Esx servers, at the moment i can see the only reason for it is Sql licensing...i knew they would get us somewhere on that front!
	DELL-ToddM	We are talking about Hyper-v.. you can catch up with the Action - Recent Room History
	DELL-ToddM	Is there an advantage with licensing and Sql Server and Hyper-v?
	Hywel	i am open to it, but the "tools" are the biggest part of the software not the virtualisation layer
	Hywel	yeah, vmware presents itself as vcpu;s whereas hyper-v is seen as real cpu's.....we this was according to a Ms evangelist at the 2k8 release
	Hywel	so Sql under vmware is licensed per core and under hyperv is on cpu's
	DELL-ToddM	I wasn't aware of this difference. Could be big with quad core processors
	DELL-ToddM	I agree that tools are a huge part of the virtualization solution
	DELL-ToddM	This is the main reason why I really really didn't like Ms Virtual Server - their web admin interface was really bad
	DELL-ToddM	I haven't had a chance to use Scvmm yet.
	DELL-ToddM	Ranjith - Can you comment on Scvmm?
	ranjith_purush	Incidently, Ms released Scvmm 2008 Beta publicly earlier today
	ranjith_purush	It is available via https://connect.microsoft.com
	DELL-ToddM	Cool - I will have to try it out
	DELL-ToddM	The Mmc for Hyper-v is pretty nice
	DELL-ToddM	It is very simliar to the other Microsoft Mmcs on 2008, so pretty easy to pick up
	DELL-ToddM	Setting up Quick Migration was pretty easy once I found a doc online explaining it
	DELL-ToddM	And after Ranjith kinda told me how to do it :)
	DELL-ToddM	You basically setup a failover cluster between the two nodes
	DELL-ToddM	And then use the wizard in failover clustering to create a service for the Vm you want to be highly available
	DELL-ToddM	It is a 3 or 4 step wizard
	DELL-ToddM	The only problem I had is that I didn
	DELL-ToddM	put the Hyper-v update on my servers
	DELL-ToddM	This caused me to get an error when the Vm was moved to the new server about the network settings being wrong
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	DELL-ToddM	After I put the Hyper-v update on and retried the Quick Migration (failover) it worked with no problem
	DELL-ToddM	Welcome dammmifino
	dammmifino	thanks
	DELL-ScottH	Dammmifino, you can click on "actions" .. "recent room history" to catch up
	DELL-ToddM	robby - Any hyper-v experience or questions?
	DELL-ToddM	I found this blog entry today http://csaborio.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/5-things-i-really-like-about-windows-hyper-v/
	DELL-ToddM	Which is a review of Hyper-v and the writer gives his 5 favorite things about it
	DELL-ToddM	Most interesting I thought was that he felt the snapshot capability was really great
	DELL-ToddM	I have only briefly looked at the snapshots
	DELL-ToddM	dammmifino - Any Hyper-v evaluation experience or questions?
	dammmifino	more with Esx--y was looking here to see other info
	DELL-ToddM	What is your current Esx environment like?
	dammmifino	several farms--looking at the 805v--
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	dammmifino	interested in hypervisor and hw Vmand Ms will handle
	Hywel	one good thing aboutr hyper-v, is that you can have proper multipathing to san's, althought there are rumours that this will be out in the next version of vmware
	dammmifino	explain?
	dammmifino	multipathing as in like powerpath capability?
	Hywel	well vmware will only do prefered path or a specified path....yeah like powerpath
	dammmifino	kewl--good to know
	DELL-ToddM	Esx 3.5 has some capability to do a round robin load balancing to storage
	DELL-ToddM	I will have to check - it might be only with iscsi
	DELL-ToddM	Are you looking at the embedded or Esx3i on the r805?
	DELL-ToddM	This is the slimed down Esx that is loaded on flash storage on the server
	DELL-ToddM	There was a demo on stage at Vmworld in Sf last sept with r805 and Esx 3i
	dammmifino	both--understand some limitations and Vm saying use in test/dev for now--
	dammmifino	did pre-production testing on 805 and it Smoked!!!
	dammmifino	was really rock solid
	DELL-ScottH	link to demo Todd referenced -- http://direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2007/09/13/29651.aspx
	DELL-ToddM	There are going to be some differences in terms of how the embedded version is managed becuase the service console is gone
	DELL-ToddM	The r805 has great Ram capacity and will be a really great system for virtualization
	DELL-ToddM	The one really big drawback with Hyper-v is that there is no cluster file system to put the Vms on
	DELL-ToddM	The failover clustering that is used to enable Quick Migration is the same shared-nothing architecture
	DELL-ToddM	Only one host can access the shared storage at a time
	DELL-ToddM	So when you failover a Hyper-v Vm the Lun or disk that it is on must be failed over as well.
	DELL-ToddM	So if you want to be able to move Vms seperately, they have to be on seperate Luns
	DELL-ToddM	With Esx you have Vmfs - which is actually a cluster file system
	DELL-ToddM	It allows for many Esx servers to be accessing the same Lun at the same time
	DELL-ToddM	So you can move Vms independent of each other, even though they might reside on the same Lun
	DELL-ToddM	For smaller enironments, this probably isn't a big deal to manage 10 or so Luns
	DELL-ToddM	But in a big environement with lots of Vms - it could get complicated
	DELL-ToddM	I've been following the Quick Migration vs Vmotion discussion on my blog - http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/virtualization+frontier
	DELL-ToddM	Basically there were a few videos put togther about a month ago that really showed Quick Migration in a bad light
	Hywel	ah, forgot that
	DELL-ToddM	So Microsoft virtualization team has decided to respond on their blog - http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/default.aspx
	DELL-ToddM	They are on part Iii of their response.
	DELL-ToddM	I think that it is really good to have these discussions and understand what the differences between the two are
	DELL-ToddM	Before you try to deploy it
	DELL-ToddM	Overall it has remained civil so far :)
	DELL-ToddM	But it is fun to follow
	DELL-ToddM	I'm planning to create a demo video of Quick Migration myself - now that I got it working this morning
	DELL-ToddM	The intent is to be fair and balanced
	dammmifino	hearing similar on the i version and prob why Vm says now--test/dev--not production
	dammmifino	thanks for the info--good stuff
	DELL-ToddM	Glad that you were able to make it to the session
	DELL-ToddM	We try to keep it as fun as possible
	dammmifino	just fyi--we love the 805 for the Nic and mem ability--incredible
	dammmifino	course dont know how to afford to fill it with 8gb dimms--lol
	dammmifino	ciao--till next time
	DELL-ToddM	I agree about the 805 - and Ram prices seem to be falling faster these days
	DELL-ToddM	Next week Scott is going to have the command chair - where the topic will be.....
	DELL-ScottH	Decoding systems managment with the secret decoder ring !
	DELL-ScottH	looking forward to seeing everyone next week
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	Hywel	Todd, does Hyper-v impact Dns and Ad at all?
	DELL-ToddM	I don't think there is any impact..... In what way do you think that it might?
	Hywel	when you format luns?
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	DELL-ToddM	The impact to our Dns and Ad was due to a poor storage admin (me???)
	Hywel	:)
	DELL-ScottH	yeah, where's my Dns ?!?! :-)
	DELL-ToddM	I could blame it on Vcb - but it was Me (As Scott is very fond of pointing out)
	Hywel	hehe
	DELL-ToddM	Alright - I've taken enough beatings for today :)
	DELL-ScottH	I think its funny that he was installing backup software - and we didn't have a backup of the Dc !
	DELL-ToddM	Ugh! Ouch!
	DELL-ScottH	I can't wait until I wipe out the new one , imagine what a beating I will get from Todd
	Hywel	i hope you have a 2nd dc???
	DELL-ScottH	we have about a dozen
	DELL-ScottH	all different !
	DELL-ScottH	ahhh the beauty of a lab
	DELL-ToddM	Gotta go - See everybody next week
	DELL-ScottH	later
	Hywel	yeah, ta ta