Planet Lowyat

What? Why VMware is better than Citrix Xen or Microsoft Hyper-V?

Personally, I’m using VMware ESX 3 and VMware ESX 3.5 and I have evaluated Microsoft Hyper-V. But I have never try Citrix XenServer yet and I found VMware blog said why VMware is better here.

“The architecture for Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V puts standard device drivers in their management partitions. Those vendors claim this structure simplifies their designs compared to the VMware architecture, which locates device drivers in the hypervisor. However, because Xen and Hyper-V virtual machine operations rely on the management partition as well as the hypervisor, any crash or exploit of the management partition affects both the physical machine and all its virtual machines.”

“The Xen and Microsoft architectures rely on routing all virtual machine I/O to generic drivers installed in the Linux or Windows OS in the hypervisor’s management partition. These generic drivers can be overtaxed easily by the activity of multiple virtual machines - exactly the situation a true bare-metal hypervisor, such as ESXi, can avoid.
Hyper-V and Xen both use generic drivers that are not optimized for multiple virtual machine workloads.”

“Products like Xen and Microsoft Hyper-V lack an integrated cluster file system. As a result, storage provisioning is much more complex. For example, to enable independent migration and failover of virtual machines with Microsoft Hyper-V, one storage LUN must be dedicated to each virtual machine. That quickly becomes a storage administration nightmare when new VMs are provisioned. VMware Infrastructure 3 and VMFS enable the storage of multiple virtual machines on a single LUN while preserving the ability to independently migrate or failover any VM.”

In fact, I do agreed with VMware. I like simplicity of VMware Infrastructure Client, I like Virtual Center Centralized management, I like Update Manager and etc.

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For a prospect customer there’s nothing better than a real-world implementation to realize the potential or a certain technology. And this is very true in an almost unexplored technology like virtualization.

Microsoft, which eats its own dog food since the Virtual Server 2005 era, just announced the complete migration of both MSDN and TechNet, two of the most popular web sites in the world, on virtual machines.

Microsoft kept the back-end database on physical boxes, but moved 100% of its IIS7 frond-ends on Hyper-V RC0 VMs with 4 virtual CPUs and 10GB RAM. The virtualization hosts (no mention of the brand obviously) are powered by 2 Intel quad-core CPUs and 32GB RAM (2GB are reserved for the Windows Server 2008 parent partition).

The performance report after this migration is very interesting:

• Hyper-V CPU overhead (as measured by the parent partition utilization) was 5% to 6% with linear progression as the number of requests increased.
• CPU over subscription (three four-processor VMs on an eight-processor physical server) resulted in 3% lower overall performance per physical server based on overall requests per second per 1 percent CPU.
• Requests per second per 1% CPU performance of MSDN over the previous physical server platform improved. This demonstrates to us the viability of efficient consolidation from dedicated older physical servers to shared virtualized platforms.
• Physical MSDN handled 21% more requests per second per 1% CPU than virtualized MSDN.

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Do you have any AMD Opteron processor? How to check if their AMD system is capable of running Hyper-V? Power monitoring in Linux? Machine Check Analysis?

Go to AMD website, download the AMD Processor Utilities and Updates.

AMD Opteron™ Cpufreq Driver for Linux 2.10.00 - Allows the system to automatically adjust the CPU frequency, voltage and power combination that match the instantaneous user performance need. Supports all AMD Turion™ 64 Mobile Technology, AMD Opteron™ Processors, and Athlon™ 64 Processors released through 2007. Provides support for AMD PowerNow!™ technology and, where appropriate, AMD’s Cool-n-Quiet™ technology for Linux systems. Works with all kernels, version 2.6.10 or later. Requires the ondemand kernel module or the cpufreq-1.20, cpuspeed-1.20.1, or powersaved-0.8.19 or later user programs to support SMP and multi-core systems. This driver is already included in the 2.6.18 or later kernels and does not need to be downloaded again.

AMD Virtualization™ Technology and Microsoft® Hyper-V™ System Compatibility Check Utility - This utility checks your system’s capabilities to facilitate testing of Microsoft Hyper-V on platforms with AMD microprocessors. To use this utility: Download and unzip AMD-V_Hyper-V_Compatibility_Check_Utility.zip. Change to the directory where the files were extracted to and click on amdhyperv.exe. On Windows Vista™ or Windows Server® 2008, you need to run the application with elevated privilege, so right click the .exe and select run as administrator. Note: the .sys files must be in the same directory as the .exe file.

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Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 management tools for the Hyper-V release candidate are now available.

This update package installs the Hyper-V remote management tools on a computer that is running Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1). This package includes the following:

• The Hyper-V Manager. The Hyper-V Manager is a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in that provides management access to a Windows Server 2008-based server that uses the Hyper-V role.
• The Virtual Machine Connection. The Virtual Machine Connection is a remote connection tool that you can use to establish an interactive session on a virtual machine.

Hyper-V provides customers with efficient and cost-effective virtualization infrastructure software. It enables customers to reduce operating costs by increasing hardware utilization, optimizing infrastructure and improving server availability. Customers and partners can download the release candidate at http://www.microsoft.com/Hyper-V by 10 a.m. PDT today.

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I was looking for How to Install Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V for some time and finally I found here.

This page discusses the Hyper-V Release Candidate (RC). The information in this article is provided as is and is subject to change without notice. No formal product support is available from Microsoft for this beta release of this feature.

• Prerequisites
• Pre-installation Steps for Migrating from the Beta
• Enabling the Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V role
• Migrating from Hyper-V Beta to RC
• Managing Hyper-V via MMC
• Recommended Configuration for Guest OS
• Operating System Availability
• Recommended Hardware Devices
• Partner Tested Hardware
• Removing Hyper-V

PrerequisitesThe Release Candidate for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is only available for x64 editions of Windows Server 2008 RTM. If you are using a version of Windows Server 2008 that is pre-RTM, you will need to perform a clean install of Windows Server 2008 RTM x64 edition on your host system. Hyper-V cannot be enabled on systems running inside virtual machines or on x86 versions of Windows Server 2008.

The full set of prerequisites for installing Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 will be published separately closer to RTM. The RC release of Hyper-V is available with Windows Server 2008 x64 editions. Hyper-V requires an x64-based processor, hardware-assisted virtualization, and hardware data execution protection. For the RC release, a maximum of sixteen logical processors are tested.

Pre-installation Steps for Migrating from the Beta

If you had previously installed the Beta of Hyper-V  on Windows Server 2008 RTM, the following steps are recommended for moving to the RC version of Hyper-V:

• Take a backup of all your Virtual Hard Disks (VHDs) once you have shutdown the virtual machines.
• Take a note of all of the Virtual Machine (VM) configuration settings such as storage configuration, memory allocations, etc. You will need to re-create the virtual machine settings as these are not compatible with the RC version.
• Take a backup of all your data on the system.
• Install the updates from Download Center or Windows Update (available post March 25, 2008) for the RC version. As mentioned above the RC update package will only install on RTM version Windows Server 2008. Reboot as requested.

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