After over three years of development (the product was originally announced at WinHEC 2005 conference) Microsoft finally releases today its first bare-metal virtualization platform: Hyper-V.
During this very long process the product was delayed, changed name, and lost some planned key features.
Unlike Virtual Server and Virtual PC, Hyper-V is a type-1 virtual machine monitor (aka hypervisor) which features an architecture very similar to the one used by Xen and its commercial derivatives.
This allows a direct comparison with platforms like Citrix XenServer, Virtual Iron, the upcoming Sun xVM Server and obviously with VMware ESX.
Unlike the latter, Hyper-V adopts a microkernel developed from scratch (so it’s not the Windows kernel) which is less than 1MB in size and delegates most of the tasks to a so called Parent Partition.
Depending on the configuration you adopted, the parent partition automatically loads a full copy of Windows Server 2008 or the new Windows Server 2008 Core.
Being a first generation product, Hyper-V cannot really compete with the above in features, but it clearly offers a performance boost (up to +107% in case of disk I/O activity) and some much deserved improvements over Virtual Server 2005 R2:
- Support for 32bit and 64bit virtual machines
- Support for up to 4 virtual CPU per VM (the actual number depends on the guest OS)
- Support for up to 64GB RAM per VM
- Support for the Windows 2008/2003/2000, Windows XP/Vista and Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux guest operating systems
- Quick Migration (the capability to suspend, migrate and resume a VM from one host to another)
- Automatic patching through Windows Update and WSUS
Posted
Jun 27 2008, 10:00 PM
by
Charles Aunger