Virtual Machine Technology
Virtual machine technology applies to both server and client hardware. Virtual machine technology enables multiple operating systems to run concurrently on a single machine. In particular, Hyper-V, a key feature of Windows Server 2008 R2, enables one or more operating systems to run simultaneously on the same physical system. Today, many operating systems are supported by Virtual PC 2007, Virtual Server 2005, and Hyper-V.
Virtual machine technology serves a variety of purposes. It enables hardware consolidation, because multiple operating systems can run on one computer. Key applications for virtual machine technology include cross-platform integration as well as the following:
· Server consolidation. If several servers run applications that consume only a fraction of the available resources, virtual machine technology can be used to enable them to run side by side on a single server, even if they require different versions of the operating system or middleware.
· Consolidation for development and testing environments. Each virtual machine acts as a separate environment, which reduces risk and enables developers to quickly recreate different operating system configurations or compare versions of applications designed for different operating systems. In addition, a developer can test early development versions of an application in a virtual machine without fear of destabilizing the system for other users.
· Legacy application re-hosting. Legacy operating systems and applications can run on new hardware along with more recent operating systems and applications.
· Simplify disaster and recovery. Virtual machine technology can be used as part of a disaster and recovery plan that requires application portability and flexibility across hardware platforms.
· Moving to a dynamic datacenter. Hyper-V, along with systems management solutions, helps you to now create a dynamic IT environment that not only enables you to react to problems more efficiently but also to create a proactive and self-managing IT management solution.
Our goal is to help customers make their IT systems more self-managing and dynamic so that they can gain more control of their IT systems, and enable their businesses to respond faster and stay ahead of the competition. We're doing this by:
· Providing a complete set of virtualization products that span from the desktop to the datacenter
· Helping manage all IT assets—both physical and virtual—from a single platform
We are making broad investments—in the areas of the platform, management, applications, interoperability, and licensing, and working to enable customers to take advantage of their existing platform investments, utilize their existing support skills and infrastructure, and to reduce costs associated with implementing virtualized environments.
Hyper-V—General
What is Hyper-V?
Hyper-V, previously codenamed Viridian, is a hypervisor-based technology that is a key feature of Windows Server 2008 R2. It provides a scalable, reliable, and highly available virtualization platform. It is part of Microsoft's ongoing effort to provide our customers and partners with the best operating system platform for virtualization.
A core component of Hyper-V, Windows hypervisor is a thin layer of software between the hardware and the OS that allows multiple operating systems to run, unmodified, on a host computer at the same time. It provides simple partitioning functionality and is responsible for maintaining strong isolation between partitions. It has an inherently secure architecture with minimal attack surface, as it does not contain any third-party device drivers.
Hyper-V provides customers an ideal platform for key virtualization scenarios, such as production server consolidation, business continuity management, software test and development, and development of a dynamic datacenter.
Hyper-V provides key functionality, which an ideal virtualization platform should provide—scalability, high performance, reliability, security, flexibility, and manageability. It provides scalability and high performance by supporting features like guest multi-processing support and 64-bit guest and host support; reliability and security through its hypervisor architecture; flexibility and manageability by supporting features like quick migration of virtual machines from one physical host to another, and integration with System Center Virtual Machine Manager.
Yes, Microsoft provides integration components and technical support for customers running select Linux distributions as guest operating systems within Hyper-V. Please check the Supported Guest Operating Systems page for more information and updates.
Some of the capabilities of Hyper-V include x64 host and guest support, ability to run guest machines in a multi-processor environment, large memory allocation per virtual machine, integrated virtual switch support, and ability to migrate virtual machines across hosts with minimal downtime. With the R2 release of Hyper-V, Live Migration, new processor support, and dynamic virtual machine capabilities were added.
Customers who invest in the .vhd file format—the format used by Virtual Server, as well as a multitude of vendor licensees—will have a clear path forward to Hyper-V. Customers can leverage V2V capabilities in System Center Virtual Machine Manager to conveniently migrate from Virtual Server or VMware to Hyper-V or work with Microsoft's partners who provide migration solutions.
Yes, the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit helps you plan for Hyper-V migration by determining which of your physical servers are underutilized and, therefore, good candidates for server virtualization.
Architecture
Hyper-V supports isolation in terms of a partition. A partition is a logical unit of isolation, supported by the hypervisor, in which operating systems execute. A hypervisor instance has to have at least one parent partition, running Windows Server 2008. The virtualization stack runs in the parent partition and has direct access to the hardware devices. The parent partition then creates the child partitions which host the guest OSs. A parent partition creates child partitions using the hypercall API, which is the application programming interface exposed by Hyper-V.
A virtualized partition does not have access to the physical processor, nor does it handle its real interrupts. Instead, it has a virtual view of the processor and runs in Guest Virtual Address, which, depending on the configuration of the hypervisor, might not necessarily be the entire virtual address space. A hypervisor could choose to expose only a subset of the processors to each partition. The hypervisor handles the interrupts to the processor, and redirects them to the respective partition using a logical Synthetic Interrupt Controller (SynIC). Hyper-V can hardware accelerate the address translation of Guest Virtual Address-spaces by using second level address translation provided by the CPU, referred as EPT on Intel and NPT on AMD.
Child partitions do not have direct access to hardware resources, but instead have a virtual view of the resources, in terms of virtual devices. Any request to the virtual devices is redirected via the VMBus to the devices in the parent partition, which will manage the requests. The VMBus is a logical channel which enables inter-partition communication. The response is also redirected via the VMBus. If the devices in the parent partition are also virtual devices, it will be redirected further until it reaches the parent partition, where it will gain access to the physical devices. Parent partitions run a Virtualization Service Provider (VSP), which connects to the VMBus and handles device access requests from child partitions. Child partition virtual devices internally run a Virtualization Service Client (VSC), which redirect the request to VSPs in the parent partition via the VMBus. This entire process is transparent to the guest OS.
Virtual Devices can also take advantage of a Windows Server Virtualization feature, named Enlightened I/O, for storage, networking and graphics subsystems, among others. Enlightened I/O is specialized virtualization-aware implementation of high level communication protocols like SCSI to take advantage of VMBus directly, that allows bypassing any device emulation layer. This makes the communication more efficient, but requires the guest OS to support Enlightened I/O. Windows 2008, Windows Vista, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux are currently the only operating systems that support Enlightened I/O, allowing them therefore to run faster as guest operating systems under Hyper-V than other operating systems that need to use slower emulated hardware.
Hyper-V — Windows Server 2008 R2 Specific
How do users access the Hyper-V?
Users can go to Server Manager and install the Hyper-V role. After the Hyper-V role is enabled, Hyper-V Manager will become available as a part of Administrative Tools. From the Hyper-V Manager users can easily create and configure virtual machines.
Yes, technical support for Hyper-V is part of the support for Windows Server 2008 R2. For more information on support, please refer to the Windows Server 2008 R2 Support page.
What is the expected performance of Hyper-V? How does it compare to Virtual Server? How does it compare to ESX server?
We are not publishing performance numbers currently. Based on independent reports and benchmarks from partners like QLogic, we believe that we have a competitive virtualization offering.
What is the list of guests that will be supported on Hyper-V? When can we expect support for key operating systems like Windows Vista, Windows XP, Linux, etc.?
Microsoft supports a number of guest OS environments including Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000 Server, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP and Novell SUSE. For the complete list of operating systems that will be supported with Hyper-V, please refer to
Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 is the current server virtualization solution from Microsoft and is based on a hosted virtualization platform. Hyper-V, a key feature of Windows Server 2008 R2, is a hypervisor-based virtualization platform that will enable customers to not only consolidate a vast array of workloads but also enable moving toward a dynamic IT environment. Core feature set differences include support for 64 guest virtual machines, SMP support, performance improvements, and other key features in Hyper-V.
Hyper-V is now available in English and partially localized in German (Germany), Japanese (Japan), Czech (Czech Republic), Hungarian (Hungary), Korean (Korea), Polish (Poland), Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian (Russia), Swedish (Sweden), Turkish (Turkey), Chinese (People's Republic of China), Chinese (Taiwan), and Chinese (Hong Kong S.A.R.).
Technical Information
What are the system requirements for Hyper-V?
In addition to the systems requirement for Windows Server 2008 R2, the two key requirements for the Hyper-V platform are the need to ensure that the server is a 64-bit environment and supports hardware-assisted virtualization (Intel VT or AMD-V) technology.
How many virtual machines can run per processor?
The number of virtual machines running per host depends on many factors, including physical memory, processor, and workload running in the guest. With Hyper-V, you define the amount of memory available to a virtual machine, and that memory allocation can be altered to reflect the needs of the virtual machine.
Hyper-V runs on a 64-bit (x64) server platform and requires support of either AMD64 or Intel IA-32e/EM64T (x64) processors with hardware-assisted virtualization support. Note that Hyper-V does not support Itanium (IA-64) processors. For the virtual machines, Hyper-V supports both 32-bit and 64-bit systems as guest OSes.
Hyper-V supports both uniprocessor and multiprocessor configurations in the virtual machine environment.
Setup and Requirements
What are the prerequisites to install and use Hyper-V?
In addition to the system requirements for Windows Server 2008 R2 as described in the release notes, a 64-bit system with hardware-assisted virtualization enabled and data execution prevention (DEP) is required. It is also recommended to ensure that you have a clean install of x64 edition of Windows Server 2008 R2 to be able to use the Hyper-V technology.
Prerequisites, installation steps, OS recommendations, and known issues can be found here.
Thanks & Regards,
"Remember Me When You Raise Your Hand For Dua"
Raheel Ahmed Khan
System Engineer
send2raheel@engineer.com
sirraheel@gmail.com
http://raheel-mydreamz.blogspot.com/
http://raheeldreamz.wordpress.com/
"Remember Me When You Raise Your Hand For Dua"
Raheel Ahmed Khan
System Engineer
send2raheel@engineer.com
sirraheel@gmail.com
http://raheel-mydreamz.blogspot.com/
http://raheeldreamz.wordpress.com/
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