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HyperV

Release: DotNetPanel 2.8.1 And A Hyper-V Hosting Control Panel Module

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DotNetPanel announced earlier this week the release of DotNetPanel 2.8.1 and the new Hyper-V module for creating, managing, and selling VPS accounts. Nearly two months in beta, hosting companies now have access to the first-ever Windows hosting control panel that uses Hyper-V technology.

DotNetPanel offers free 30-day trials of the new Hyper-V module, giving hosting companies the opportunity to experience the benefits of using a remarkably low-priced solution for managing and automating VPS hosting services.

DotNetPanel’s Hyper-V module also complements existing offerings including Virtuozzo. Compared to Virtuozzo, the Hyper-V provides complete VPS isolation, guaranteed memory for each VPS, snapshots management, DVD media library, and networking management.

Microsoft Eats Own Hyper-V Dog Food, Deploys Homegrown Hypervisor In Its Global Datacenters (Video Interview)

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At last week’s GigaOM VIP reception, just before their Structure 08 conference, we bumped into Arne Josefsberg, General Manager Online Infrastructure at Microsoft. He happened to be passing by in San Francisco and kindly agreed to get on record with comments on Hyper-V adoption at Microsoft. As he answered our late night questions, the party was just breaking up (hence the disturbing background sounds).

Update: also check out this article on GigaOM, since Om Malik caught up with Microsoft’s corporate VP of global foundation services, Debra Chrapaty, for a video chat as well.

Although Arne declined to put exact numbers to the amount of servers at Microsoft, he did confirm he is responsible for dozens of datacenters around the world to support the software giant’s online services. To give you an idea, Data Center Knowledge noted from a Microsoft executive that the company is adding no less than 10 000 servers per month.

Here is a datacenter lesson from Arne:

“As Microsoft obviously deploys a huge amount of processor, compute and storage capacity, [the need for] efficiency and utilization become super important to us. We work very closely with the Windows Operating system division. Hyper-V is actually becoming one of our key-technologies to drive better utilization of the hardware. We have Hyper-V in multiple datacenters in the Live-network, in production environments taking live traffic. It’s going quite quite well. So we are very jazzed about Hyper-V and virtualization as a technology to scale out our infrastructure.”

Arne’s team has been working closely with the Hyper-V development team for over a year and did not limit this collaboration to the hypervisor, but also the management tools and on how to manage hypervisors at very large scale.

When asked about cloud computing, Microsoft refers to its ‘Software plus Services’ strategy which combines software on the desktop (still the major revenue driver for Microsoft) with centralized datacenter-based services. Microsoft seems high on its hybrid flavor of cloud computing and hopes to lead the way in this nascent industry as well.

Microsoft Shipping Hyper-V Tomorrow? (Update: Yes)

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Does Microsoft intend to start shipping Hyper-V tomorrow?

Update: no official news out of Redmond just yet, but both ZDNet and NetworkWorld have confirmed.

Update 2: finally confirmation by Microsoft

The Redmond software giant’s proprietary hypervisor is currently in Release Candidate mode, but the final, nonbeta version could be shipping tomorrow, according to SearchWinIT. That would be well before the company’s projected release date (which would be in about 2 months).

The software is part of the Windows Server 2008 license, although here is a standalone version of Hyper-V expected later this year that will sell for (only) $28. The Microsoft hypervisor is highly anticipated, and lots of analysts are expecting Hyper-V to (finally) give VMware a run for its money. Of course, let’s not forget Hyper-V was initially scheduled to be part of Windows Server 2008, but was ultimately delayed and rescheduled for availability about six months after its introduction.

PCWorld points out that the upcoming release for tomorrow has not been confirmed by Microsoft officials, so we’re a little hesitant to run with the story just yet. We’ll update the post when more information is available.

Update: no official news out of Redmond just yet, but both ZDNet and NetworkWorld have confirmed.

Update 2: finally confirmation by Microsoft

Update 3: It’s all over the wire! Get more perspective on the milestone release and how it will compete with VMware, Xen and others from The Register, Virtually Speaking, OStatic, Virtualization.info, InformationWeek, Computing, Network World, VMBlog, GigaOM, Virtualization Review, DaniWeb, ChannelWeb, Reuters, Forbes, Washington Post, Virtual Strategy Magazine, Microsoft Watch, Virtual PC Guy, Scott Lowe, Intel Software Network, Dugie’s Pensieve, NetApp Blogs, The Hypervisor, PC World Forums, Dustin’s Tech Notes, Vinternals, The System Administrator, ArsTechnica, Silicon, ITwire, VolkerW’s Weblog, ChrisWolf, InternetNews, etc.

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager Updated, Now Supports Hyper-V

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Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), released in beta end of April, has been updated to enable it to function with Release Candidate 1 (RC1) to the Hyper-V role. Note that the VMM server and all of the hosts in your environment must be running Hyper-V RC1. After you install the update, you will not be able to add hosts running Hyper-V RC0 to your VMM environment.

[Source: Windows Virtualization Team blog]

Jeff Woolsey and Scott Lowe Discuss Hyper-V

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IT pro and virtualization expert Scott Lowe had an interesting discussion with Jeff Woolsey, Senior Program Manager for Hyper-V at Microsoft. Scott posted a summary of their conversation on his blog, here’s an excerpt:

What are the key architectural advantages of Hyper-V as compared to Xen or ESX?

Jeff indicated that Hyper-V and Xen are architecturally very similar. Both use a privileged VM; Microsoft calls it the parent partition, Xen calls it dom0. In both cases, I/O is routed through this privileged partition and only the privileged partition has access to the physical hardware. Microsoft believes the hypervisor should be as thin as possible; Hyper-V is only about 600K worth of code. The networking stack and the storage stack are pushed up into the parent partition to keep drivers out of the hypervisor. Jeff referred me back to his session earlier in the day, where he discussed the need for the parent partition (my summary of that session is here). ESX puts all the drivers in the hypervisor, which means that they have a harder time providing support for new hardware (the example given was 4Gbps Fibre Channel HBAs vs. 8Gbps Fibre Channel HBAs). In talking about the placement of device drivers, our discussion naturally led us to the next question.

How would you respond to the concerns about the quality of the device drivers in the parent partition affecting the stability of the hypervisor?

Jeff doesn’t buy into this argument. Unlike desktops or workstations, administrators don’t typically go willy-nilly with drivers on production servers. Drivers are generally provided by the hardware vendors. In addition, because Hyper-V requires the x64 edition of Windows Server 2008, this is even less of an issue; it’s impossible to use unsigned drivers with x64 Windows. This means that any driver that can be used with Hyper-V will be WHQL-tested. Supposedly, this will keep out potentially faulty device drivers. Jeff pointed to the exclusive use of Hyper-V to power the MSDN and TechNet web sites at Microsoft as proof. I can see his point, but I still have to wonder if another level of qualification and validation shouldn’t have been established to ensure that everything works as expected with Hyper-V. It still seems possible to me that organizations stepping outside the “Big 3? server vendors—Dell, HP, and IBM—could run into issues.

Read the rest (3 more questions) here.

Microsoft Hyper-V RC1 Now Available Through Windows Update

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A little over a week ago, Microsoft announced that Hyper-V (RC 1) was available through MS Download Center. The company has now let us know that the first Release Candidate for the much anticipated hypervisor is now also available on Windows Update.

“To install the update open the Windows Update control panel and click “View available updates” under the “Install Updates” button. Then check the Update for Windows Server 2008 (KB950049) and click install.”