Microsoft®Virtual Server Sales and Support
With Hyper-V, the Microsoft hypervisor-based server virtualization technology,
plus flexible licensing policies, it's now easier than ever to take advantage of
the cost savings of virtualization through Windows Server 2008 R2. This enables
you to make the best use of your server hardware investments by consolidating
multiple server roles as separate virtual machines (VMs) running on a single
physical machine and also efficiently run multiple different operating
systems—Windows, Linux, and others—in parallel, on a single server, and fully
leverage the power of x64 computing.
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V builds on the architecture and
functions of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V by adding multiple new features that
enhance product flexibility. The adoption of virtualization in the enterprise
has increased flexibility in deployment and life cycle management of
applications. IT professionals deploy and use virtualization to consolidate
workloads and reduce server sprawl. Additionally, they deploy virtualization
with clustering technologies to provide a robust IT infrastructure with high
availability and quick disaster recovery. Even so, customers are looking for
more flexibility.
Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V provides greater flexibility with live migration.
Live migration is integrated with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft
Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. With Hyper-V live migration, you can move running
virtual machines (VMs) from one Hyper-V physical host to another, without any
disruption or perceived loss of service. IT professionals increasingly look to
live migration to create a dynamic and flexible IT environment that responds to
emerging business needs. Live migration provides the core technology required
for dynamic load balancing, VM placement, high availability for virtualized
workloads during physical computer maintenance, and reduced data center power
consumption.
Core Scenarios for Hyper-V
Hyper-V provides a dynamic, reliable, and scalable virtualization platform
combined with a single set of integrated management tools to manage both
physical and virtual resources, enabling you to create an agile and dynamic data
center. Hyper-V enables:
Businesses are under pressure to ease management and reduce costs while
retaining and enhancing competitive advantages, such as flexibility,
reliability, scalability, and security. The fundamental use of virtualization to
help consolidate many servers on a single system while maintaining isolation
helps address these demands. One of the main benefits of server consolidation is
a lower total cost of ownership (TCO), not just from lowering hardware
requirements but also from lower power, cooling, and management costs.
Businesses also benefit from server virtualization through infrastructure
optimization, both from an asset utilization standpoint as well as the ability
to balance workloads across different resources. Improved flexibility of the
overall environment and the ability to freely integrate 32-bit and 64-bit
workloads in the same environment is another benefit.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Business continuity is the ability to minimize both scheduled and unscheduled
downtime. That includes time lost to routine functions, such as maintenance and
backup, as well as unanticipated outages. Hyper-V includes powerful business
continuity features, such as live backup and quick migration, enabling
businesses to meet stringent uptime and response metrics.
Disaster recovery is a key component of business continuity. Natural disasters,
malicious attacks, and even simple configuration problems like software
conflicts can cripple services and applications until administrators resolve the
problems and restore any backed up data. Leveraging the clustering capabilities
of Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V now provides support for disaster recovery (DR)
within IT environments and across data centers, using geographically dispersed
clustering capabilities. Rapid and reliable disaster and business recovery helps
ensure minimal data loss and powerful remote management capabilities.
Testing and development are frequently the first business functions to take
advantage of virtualization technology. Using virtual machines, development
staffs can create and test a wide variety of scenarios in a safe, self-contained
environment that accurately approximates the operation of physical servers and
clients. Hyper-V maximizes utilization of test hardware which can help reduce
costs, improve life cycle management, and improve test coverage. With extensive
guest OS support and checkpoint features, Hyper-V provides a great platform for
your test and development environments.
Hyper-V, together with your existing system management solutions, such as
Microsoft System Center, can help you realize the dynamic data center vision of
providing self-managing dynamic systems and operational agility. With features
like automated virtual machine reconfiguration, flexible resource control, and
quick migration, you can create a dynamic IT environment that uses
virtualization to not only respond to problems, but also to anticipate increased
demands.
Microsoft Hyper-V Server
Microsoft Hyper-V Server is a stand-alone product that provides a simplified,
reliable, cost-effective, and optimized virtualization solution enabling
organizations to improve server utilization and reduce costs. It allows
organizations to consolidate workloads onto a single physical server and is a
good solution for organizations that want a basic and simplified virtualization
solution for consolidating servers as well as for development and test
environments. Low utilization infrastructure workloads, departmental
applications, and simple branch office workloads are also candidates to
virtualize using Hyper-V Server.
Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 includes the much-anticipated live migration
feature, which allows you to move a virtual machine between two virtualization
host servers without any interruption of service. Hyper-V live migration is
integrated with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008
R2. With it you can move running VMs from one Hyper-V physical host to another
without any disruption of service or perceived downtime. Moving running VMs
without downtime using Hyper-V live migration:
-
Provides better agility. Data centers with multiple Hyper-V physical hosts can
move running VMs to the best physical computer for performance, scaling, or
optimal consolidation without affecting users.
-
Reduces costs and increases productivity. Data centers with multiple Hyper-V
physical hosts can service those systems in a controlled fashion, scheduling
maintenance during regular business hours. Live migration makes it possible to
keep VMs online, even during maintenance, increasing productivity for users and
server administrators. Data centers can now also reduce power consumption by
dynamically increasing consolidation ratios and powering off un-used physical
hosts during lower demand times.
Increased Hardware Support for Hyper-V Virtual Machines
Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 now supports up to 64 logical processors in
the host processor pool. This is a significant upgrade from previous versions
and allows not only greater VM density per host, but also gives IT
administrators more flexibility in assigning CPU resources to VMs. Also new,
Hyper-V processor compatibility mode for live migration allows lmigration across
different CPU versions within the same processor family (for example, ”Intel
Core 2-to-Intel Pentium 4” or “AMD Opteron-to-AMD Athlon”), enabling migration
across a broader range of server host hardware.
With Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V uses Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) storage
to simplify and enhance shared storage usage. CSV enables multiple Windows
Servers to access SAN storage using a single consistent namespace for all
volumes on all hosts. Multiple hosts can access the same Logical Unit Number
(LUN) on SAN storage. CSV enables faster live migration and easier storage
management for Hyper-V when used in a cluster configuration. Cluster Shared
Volumes are available as part of the Windows Failover Clustering feature of
Windows Server 2008 R2.
Improved Cluster Node Connectivity Fault Tolerance
Because of the architecture of CSV, there is improved cluster node connectivity
fault tolerance that directly affects VMs running on the cluster. The CSV
architecture implements a mechanism, known as dynamic I/O redirection, where I/O
can be rerouted within the failover cluster based on connection availability.
Enhanced Cluster Validation Tool
Windows Server 2008 R2 includes a Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) for all major
server roles, including Failover Clustering. This analyzer examines the best
practices configuration settings for a cluster and cluster nodes.
Improved Management of Virtual Data Centers
Even with all the efficiency gained from virtualization, VMs still need to be
managed. The number of VMs tends to proliferate much faster than physical
computers because machines typically do not require a hardware acquisition.
Therefore, management of virtual data centers is even more imperative than ever
before.
Improved Virtual Networking Performance
The new Hyper-V leverages several new networking technologies contained in
Windows Server 2008 R2 to improve overall VM networking performance.
Increased Performance and Reduce Power Consumption
Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 adds enhancements that reduce virtual machine
power consumption. Hyper-V now supports Second Level Address Translation (SLAT),
which uses new features on today’s CPUs to improve VM performance while reducing
processing load on the Windows Hypervisor. New Hyper-V VMs also consume less
power by virtue of the new Core Parking feature implemented in Windows Server
2008 R2.
Enhanced Networking Support
In Windows Server 2008 R2 there are three new networking features that improve
the performance of virtual networks. Support for Jumbo frames, previously
available in non-virtual environments, has been extended to work with VMs. This
feature enables VMs to use Jumbo Frames up to 9014 bytes if the underlying
physical network supports it. Supporting Jumbo frames reduces the network stack
overhead incurred per byte and increases throughput. In addition, there is a
significant reduction of CPU utilization due to the fewer number of calls from
the network stack to the network driver.
TCP Chimney, which allows the offloading of TCP/IP processing to the network
hardware, has been extended to the virtual environment. It improves VM
performance by allowing the VM to offload network processing to hardware,
especially on networks with bandwidth over 1 GB. This feature is especially
beneficial for roles involving large amounts of data transfer, such as the file
server role.
The Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ) feature allows physical computer network
interface cards (NICs) to use direct memory access (DMA) to place the contents
of packets directly into VM memory, increasing I/O performance.
Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V supports hot plug-in and hot removal of storage.
By supporting the addition or removal of Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) files and
pass-through disks while a VM is running, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V makes
it possible to reconfigure VMs quickly to meet changing workload requirements.
This feature allows the addition and removal of both VHD files and pass-through
disks to existing SCSI controllers for VMs.
Broad support for simultaneously running different types of operating systems,
including 32-bit and 64-bit systems across different server platforms, such as
Windows, Linux, and others.
Hyper-V includes new virtual switch capabilities. This means virtual machines
can be easily configured to run with Windows Network Load Balancing (NLB)
Service to balance load across virtual machines on different servers.
New Hardware Sharing Architecture
With the new virtual service provider/virtual service client (VSP/VSC)
architecture, Hyper-V provides improved access and utilization of core
resources, such as disk, networking, and video.
Hyper-V provides the ability to take snapshots of a running virtual machine so
you can easily revert to a previous state, and improve the overall backup and
recoverability solution.
Standards-based Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) interfaces and APIs in
Hyper-V enable independent software vendors and developers to quickly build
custom tools, utilities, and enhancements for the virtualization platform.
