Microsoft Hyper-V

Free Virtualization Capacity Planning, Courtesy of Microsoft MAP

April 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Are you familiar with the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Solution Accelerator (MAP)? If you’re not, you might want to be. From the resources library:

“MAP (download) is a powerful inventory, assessment, and reporting tool that can securely run in small or large IT environments without requiring the installation of agent software on any computers or devices. The data and analysis provided by this Solution Accelerator can significantly simplify the planning process for migrating to Windows Vista, Microsoft Office 2007, Windows Server 2008, Microsoft Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid), and Windows Server virtualization technologies including Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.”

As Virtualization.info points out, Microsoft doesn’t seem to put much effort into making the tool known by the rest of the world. The tool could however be useful, and comes at a great price considering its feature list; it’s completely free!

Hyper-V Quick Migration Breaks Network Connections, Says VMware

April 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Check out the following demo by Blip.tv account ‘VMware TV‘, expressing the difference between moving a VM from one physical server to another with downtime (Hyper-V Quick Migration) and VMware’s Vmotion, which offers zero downtime when transferring virtual machines.

Keith Ward over at Virtualization Review picked up the demo and writes about what happens in the video:

“The demo shows a Quick Migration of a Windows Server 2003 VM from one physical machine to another. At the same time, a Microsoft Dynamics client is trying to access a database residing on the VM. Through a constant ping of the VM, we can see how a) the connection to the VM is dropped for a time, and b) how the Dynamics client fails in its attempt to get the database information (an error box pops up, showing a TCP failure). Shortly thereafter, another popup informs us that the VM has actually been deleted. It’s re-started a few moments later.”

To be balanced, here’s what ‘Jeff’ recently posted on the Windows Virtualization Team blog:

After my last blog I received almost two dozen email telling me that VMotion was far superior for unplanned host downtime and that it was a much better HA solution because it could live migrate virtual machines. I’ve heard this fallacy espoused for many years and, folks, this simply isn’t the case.

In the case of unplanned downtime, VMotion can’t live migrate because there is no warning. Instead you must have VMware HA configured and the best it can do is restart the affected virtual machines on other nodes which is the same as what is provided with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Failover Clustering.

Here are a couple of quotes from VMware’s own document, Automating High Availability (HA) Services with VMware HA.

Page 1 paragraph 2 states:

Using VMware HA, virtual machines are automatically restarted in the event of hardware failure…

Page 8 states:

How does VMware HA work?

VMware HA continuously monitors all ESX Server hosts in a cluster and detects failures. An agent placed on each host maintains a “heartbeat” with the other hosts in the cluster and loss of a heartbeat with the other hosts in the cluster and loss of a heartbeat initiates the process of restarting all affected virtual machines on other hosts.

HA monitors whether sufficient resources are available in the cluster at all times in order to be able to restart virtual machines on different physical host machines in the event of host failure.

The point being VMware HA and Hyper-V with failover clustering accomplish the same thing: virtual machines are RESTARTED on another node. No better, no worse. If you still don’t believe me, find one of your ESX Servers and go pull out the power plug. (Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

So what do you think about all this?

Hyper-V Release Candidate Now (Optional) Part Of Windows Update

April 9, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

In a post on the WSUS Product Team Blog, Program Manager Cecilia Cole lets us know that the Hyper-V RC is now an optional part of Windows Update.

Today, April 8, the Windows Update team is making the Hyper-V Release Candidate package available as an “Optional Update” via Windows Update for all Windows Server 2008 SKUs. It will also be published as an “Optional Update” to WSUS. For more detailed instructions, please refer to How to Install Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Release Candidate.

For more information about the availability of new and changed updates available for WSUS, please visit our TechNet site under “WSUS Updates”.

[Source: Dugie’s Pensieve]

Marathon Technologies Releases Virtualization Tool, Attempts To Simplify Disaster Recovery With everRun VM

March 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Marathon Technologies made a splash at the fall 2007 VMworld show with a preview of its everRun VM product for high availability and disaster recovery and will formally announce the product today; it’s available in beta and is expected to ship in April, according to the company.

Based on the same everRun automated availability software employed by over 1,800 organizations, everRun VM prevents outages and data loss in Citrix XenServer virtual infrastructures. The significance of this new software for the IT industry is threefold:

Companies can now reliably run production applications in virtual machines, gaining the benefits of virtualization across a much broader range of applications
It will now be practical to make high availability and DR a standard part of the IT infrastructure for midsize and larger companies
A key component is in place to accelerate the next wave of server virtualization adoption

With virtualization moving beyond test and dev environments and into the realm of key business applications, more CIOs are looking for high availability (HA) solutions now. If those apps are running in a VM, the last thing IT would want is a slowdown or outage for business users. The higher profile the app, the greater the need for a high availability solution for VMs.

Marathon is betting that its product will appeal in particular to midmarket CIOs, some of whom have had a hard time justifying the cost of traditional high availability/disaster recovery solutions, many of which require the added expense of a storage area network (SAN) and staffers with specialized SAN skills. Marathon’s product can use direct connect attached storage, which is a plus for CIOs who don’t have a SAN and don’t want to pay to install and maintain one.

Marathon’s product works only with the Citrix /Xen virtualized server architecture, not marketshare-leader VMware‘s. Microsoft Hyper-V support is planned at a later date, but no VMware support is on the drawing board, according to Marathon (which cites its ability to get its product to market faster and ensure proper performance with the Citrix/Xen architecture, among the reasons for this decision.).

By the fourth quarter of this year, Marathon is expected to ship everRun VM Lockstep Option, providing system-level fault tolerance, designed for scenarios where you lose a whole server for any reason, for example, if you lose a building in a fire. This will essentially be an add-on solution to everRun VM, the company says. Customers will be able to set the desired level of protection VM by VM, to keep costs down for VMs that don’t need the highest level of protection.

Also check out the interview our occasional guest blogger Tarry Singh did with Marathon’s CTO Jerry Melnick, where he reveals more information about the pricing strategy.

“everRun VM is available in two flavors. For companies that already have XenServer Enterprise, they can buy everRun VM for $2,000 per physical server. If they don’t have a hypervisor installed, they can buy an integrated bundle from us that includes XenServer Enterprise Edition and everRun VM for $4,500 per physical server. That’s for a perpetual license by the way. We’ve briefed a lot of channel partners and potential customers on the product and the pricing and more than once we’ve had them respond, “what’s the catch.” There is no catch. We’re just trying to make this so easy and inexpensive that companies don’t have to think to hard about adding it to XenServer.“

[Source: The Register UK]

Dell Reportedly Plans To Give Away VMware ESX Server 3i For Free, World Keeps Turning

March 15, 2008 by Robin Wauters 4 Comments

According to The Inquirer, it appears Dell is considering to stop charging VMware ESX Server 3i licensing fees on its PowerEdge servers to its customers. This was reportedly said by VMWare’s Senior Product Marketing Manager Martin Niemer and comes two weeks after the virtualization vendor announced it would start embedding the 32 MB hypervisor across Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP and IBM servers.

This doesn’t come as a big surprise, as VMware had added to the previous announcement that hardware vendors would be able to choose which premium they would charge to end customers, if any. Expect the other hardware vendors to follow suit and drop the prices for including the hypervisors significantly (or even zero) if Dell comes through, especially with the sharp-priced Microsoft hypervisor Hyper-V on its way.

But don’t expect this to have a serious impact on the whole VMware reseller channel’s bottom line, as some blogs are proclaiming already. The real money is in the enterprise offering and upgrades anyway, and the smaller distributors and resellers have other advantages when it comes to SMB offerings besides pricing.