There
are numerous updates to functionality.
The last reasonable contender was
Hyper-V 2008. The following tables
summarise the differences and what they mean.
As
you can see from the table Windows 2008 R2 provided live migration, but relied
on the servers being built as windows cluster boxes, so it didn’t really
provide the functionality and flexibility that VMware gave you and being single
instance, you could only do one live migration event automatically. These changes mean that we’re now looking at
a far closer parity with vmware.
We
now have the option to migrate child partitions between Windows servers that
aren’t clustered and combined with live storage migration, migrate between
servers that aren’t running on shared storage as well. This now provides a good
deal of flexibility.
One
of the key differences in 2012 is the addition of SR-IOV support which allows
full access to the physical network adapters for a guest. You will see that
from the size of some of the virtual machines that could, in theory, be created
the next bottlenecks will undoubtedly be in shared networking. The SR-IOV
support is a key facilitator for having this size of virtual machine and allows
for complete access to the network adapter. So the required network bandwidth will
be available to cope with the volume of work that the guests are going to have
to do.
Dynamic
memory now has improved management. Memory reclamation is included which allows
you to balloon things when required and also to allow a guest to start up even
if minimum memory is not available. In a lot of respects this is a step forward
in terms of what VMware have available, as Hyper-V will allow you to ‘dig in’
to what the box is doing and balloon in an intelligent way, to free up memory
and allow you to get other resources available.
Guest
NUMA support extends the hardware based functionality into the realms of the
guest; again, key given the potential guest resource allocation.
Smart
paging is intelligent memory management that allows you to bridge the gaps
between minimum and start up memory if physical resource is low. This is more
dynamic in terms of how it is managing its memory and is an improvement over VMware.
Runtime
memory configuration allows you to
change the dynamic memory allocation when the virtual machine is running, which
is a big operational step forward when managing heavily utilized environments.
Resource
metering allows you to track how key
performance metrics are used over time. Not quite as good as it sounds,
predominantly around the network side of things and allows you to monitor some
of these key metrics tied really with chargeback more than anything else and
persists through live migration.
On Monday I'll be making some comparisons between Hyper-V and VMware.
Rob Ford
Principal Consultant
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