Hyper-V Goes RTM as VMware Hiccups

Corrected: July 9, 2008

by Alex Woodie

Yesterday marked the official delivery of Microsoft Hyper-V, the much-anticipated hypervisor that carves an X64 server into multiple virtual servers or PCs running separate images of Windows Server, Windows client, or Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Server operating systems. With broad backing from its huge partner program, Microsoft's chances of success with Hyper-V look promising, especially with the recent problems of its rival VMware. However, Hyper-V ships without some critical tooling to manage virtual machines.

Hyper-V officially was released to manufacturing (RTM) two weeks ago, beating its self-imposed delivery deadline by more than a month. New Windows Server 2008 customers were the only recipients of that head start, however, while organizations already running Windows Server 2008 had to wait until today to be able to download Hyper-V from Windows Update.

Microsoft provides a long list of supported guest operating systems for Hyper-V. Part of the reason the list is so long is the way Microsoft divided its operating systems into those that have Hyper-V (which haven't shipped until two weeks ago), and those "without Hyper-V," which shipped several months ago.

In any case, as long as you have an X64 version of Windows Server 2008 on which to run Hyper-V, you can pretty much run any version of Windows Server 2008. Any of the Windows Server 2008 variants can be assigned one, two, or four virtual processors. You can assign one or two virtual processors to run X86 or X64 versions of Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2), or give one virtual processor over to running Windows 2000 Server SP4.

As far as Linux server distributions go, Hyper-V will only run SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 or SP2, in either X86 or X64 variants. Like Windows 200 Server, you can only assign one virtual processor to running SLES 10 on Hyper-V. It would be interesting to see if other Linux distributions, such as Red Hat's, will run on Hyper-V, although it is unlikely considering the need to write special drivers.

Applications running on top of Hyper-V will run slightly slower than if they were running on bare metal. According to performance data released in May along with the RC1 candidate, application throughput will take about a 3 percent performance hit when applications running under Hyper-V are "oversubscribed," or pushed to their limits.

The throughput of a virtual LAN running on a virtualized server with Hyper-V will be about 10 percent lower than if traditional hardware-based network drivers are used, compared to the software-based virtual drivers used to connect virtual machines in a virtualized environment, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft highlighted the work it's doing with partners around Hyper-V. For starters, its collaboration with Citrix Systems in the area of virtual machine portability enables users to move virtual machines between Citrix's Xen hypervisor and Hyper-V, using the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) standard. It has also handed out the first three Hyper-V certifications, to Symantec, Diskeeper and IBM.

However, all of Microsoft's virtual ducks were not in a row for the Hyper-V launch. A critical Hyper-V-related product, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, is still in beta. SCVMM 2008 provides the interface and controls for defining the policies that govern virtual machines' consumption of resources, and manages the virtual machines once they've been created through the initial Hyper-V VM wizard.

SCVMM 2008 isn't expected to ship for the next few months, and this should factor into an organization's decision to deploy Hyper-V on production systems. As such, it's probably advisable for organizations with moderately complex environments to start using Hyper-V in test environments, and wait until all the management tooling is in place before bringing it into production. Less complex small and mid size businesses (SMBs), that aren't as likely to use any of Microsoft's System Center tooling anyway, can probably get away without SCVMM.

Microsoft has, however, shipped the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 3.1, which brings new Hyper-V planning features. The MAP Toolkit 3.1 will automatically generate upgrade recommendations for virtualization migration scenarios, in addition to making other recommendations.

Microsoft's competitors, including VMware and Sun Microsystems, jumped at the chance to highlight some of the deficiencies in Hyper-V, compared to their own offerings. Sun, for one, was all over Hyper-V's lack of support for live migration--or migrating virtual machines without bringing them offline.

Limited cross-platform support (i.e., no Hyper-V support for Solaris), was also on the sounding board. "We're glad to see Microsoft finally entering the hypervisor market," said Vijay Sarathy, senior director of xVM at Sun. "Customers are hungry for virtualization solutions that support a wide range of operating systems and virtualization platforms. Simply put, Sun is committed to building a heterogeneous (Windows, Linux and Solaris) and interoperable (ESX and Hyper-V) virtualization platform." To that end, Sun has joined Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program, supporting Windows as a guest operating system on Sun's xVM Server hypervisor, he said.

While VMware's dominance of the enterprise virtualization market isn't expected to be threatened any time soon, Wall Street is already becoming fearful of VMware's prospects. The EMC business unit recently lowered growth projections for the rest of 2008, and now only expects to grow by 50 percent, to about $2 billion in revenues. The company's chief executive officer, Dianne Greene, abruptly resigned this week, and was replaced by a former Microsoft executive, Paul Maritz.

Normally, 50 percent growth would be seen as a huge success. But for a company whose stock valuations have soared to stratospheric levels as it exercised a defacto monopoly on the virtualization software market, it was perhaps inevitable that the balloon would pop as competing alternatives, such as Hyper-V, Sun xVM, and open source Xen, became stronger in the market. To that end, VMware's stock has fallen from a high of around $120 last fall to $40 this week.

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This article has been corrected. The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit version 3.1 became available on June 29, and is no longer in beta. IT Jungle regrets the error.

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