Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Beta now available

@ CES 2009 we also announce the availability for the Windows Server 2008 R2, there is some cool stuff in here.  Live migration for one.  Check it out, download and test.

 

Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Overview

The following is a brief description of each Hyper-V feature included in R2.  In addition, you can refer to the Hyper-V R2 Feature-By-Feature announcements I have sent to the DLs over the last several weeks.  I will be continuing this series over the next several days which will provide further details.

Live migration of Virtual machines

Microsoft is enhancing the product with the ability to “live migrate” a virtual machine. With this, there will be no perceived downtime in the workloads running in the VM, and network connections from and to the VM being migrated will stay connected. This capability, as with Quick Migrate, will be possible between hosts within a High Availability cluster. In effect, the infrastructure investment customers have made in order to use Quick Migrate will just be used as is with live migration. In addition Microsoft is adding a “Clustered Shared Volumes” (CSV) capability to “Failover clustering” that allows multiple VHD’s from different VM’s to be stored on a single LUN. This not only simplifies management of shared storage for a cluster, but provides a significant reduction in the blackout period for VM’s being live migrated.

Enhanced virtualization capabilities in the hardware

Over the years hardware vendors such as AMD and Intel have made significant enhancements (such as Intel® VT and AMD-V^TM) to processors and chipsets with capabilities specifically targeting virtualization. Continuing with these enhancements, AMD and Intel are adding capabilities to their processors called Nested Page Tables (NPT) and Extended Page tables (EPT) respectively.  These capabilities improve the performance of translation of memory addresses. Without these hardware enhancements each time a guest page faulted, it required a context switch to the hypervisor to handle this page fault. With this capability a guest can handle page faults directly, thereby eliminating the need for a costly context switch to the hypervisor and reducing virtualization overhead for memory translations.

Virtual addition/removal of storage

Virtualization decouples the software running on a system from the hardware and makes it convenient for customers to deploy and manage their IT environments. With this flexibility it is inevitable that customers also seek the ability to expand and reduce storage coupled with virtual machines. With the next generation of the virtualization platform, Microsoft is adding the ability to add and remove virtual disks (VHD’s) and pass through disks in a virtual machine while it is in operation. This capability opens up a range of possibilities for storage solutions for backup etc.

Networking enhancements

Networking vendors have also made enhancements to hardware that benefit virtualized platforms. Three such key technologies are TCP offload engines (Chimney), Virtual machine device queues (VMDq), and Jumbo Frames.

TCP offload engine refers to the offloading of TCP/IP processing to the network interface card (NIC). This technology is not specific to virtualized platforms as non-virtualized operating systems and applications can also benefit by using this technology. A generally well accepted rule of thumb is that 1 Hz of CPU processing is required to send or receive 1 bit of TCP/IP data. For high speed NIC’s the overhead of processing TCP/IP traffic can be substantial. The next generation of the virtualization platform from Microsoft will support offloading the TCP/IP processing from Virtual machines onto NIC’s thereby reducing the overhead for network processing. This frees up the main CPU for additional work.

VMDq is a capability of the NIC wherein the NIC has multiple queues. One or more of these queues can be assigned by the hypervisor to virtual machines. The network card sorts incoming network traffic and places it in the appropriate queues. Since this processing happens in hardware, it reduces the hypervisor overhead in processing networking traffic.

A jumbo frame is an Ethernet frame with 9000 bytes of data payload as opposed to the traditional 1500 bytes. This reduces per byte overhead incurred. Coupled with Large segment offload/large receive offload which is the ability of the OS to transfer large chunks of data to the NIC for it to create Ethernet frames from it in the transmit path and to create a single large data buffer from multiple incoming Ethernet frames this leads to a reduction on the network processing overhead.

Power management enhancements

The hypervisor has enhancements to reduce the power footprint of virtualized workloads. These capabilities include the use of “core parking” wherein the hypervisor proactively consolidates idle workloads to fewer cores, freeing up processor packages which can then be put into a deep sleep state reducing the power consumption of the server. In addition the virtual management infrastructure (System Center Virtual Machine Manager) can aid in optimal workload placement for reducing the overall power consumption of workloads.

VDI Connection Broker

Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta includes a Remote Desktop Connection Broker which creates a unified admin experience for traditional session-based remote desktops (TS) and virtual machine-based remote desktops in a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). The two key deployment scenarios supported by the Remote Desktop Connection Broker are persistent (permanent) VMs and pooled VMs. In the case of a persistent VM, there is a one-to-one mapping of VMs to users; each user is assigned a dedicated VM which can be personalized and customized, and which preserves any changes made by the user. Today, most early adopters of VDI deploy persistent VMs as they provide the greatest flexibility to the end user. In the case of a pooled VM, a single image is replicated as needed for users; user state can be stored via profiles and folder redirection, but will not persist on the VM once the user logs off. In either case, the in-box solution supports storage of the image(s) on the Hyper-V host.

The Remote Desktop Connection Broker has been designed as an extensible platform for partners; it includes extensive APIs for partner value-add around manageability and scalability of the brokering solution. Specifically, extensibility points include the ability for partners to create policy plug-ins (e.g. for determining the appropriate VM or VM pool), filter plug-ins (e.g. for preparing a VM to accept RDP connections) and resource plug-ins (e.g. for placing a VM on the proper host based on the host’s load).

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Beta now available Feed: The World Simplified is a Virtual World Posted

• Anonymous
  January 20, 2009
  Does Hyper-V Server R2 only contain the new features? Does 2008 Server R2 with Hyper-V contain the new features?

• Anonymous
  February 22, 2009
  Hi In the new server 2008 R2 beta there is a new server role service under the newly named RDS(remote desktop services) called RD(Remote Desktop) virtualization. The elaboration is that it enables users to connect to VM to acces Vitual desktops. Till yet there is no info on how to use this feature for the user to access his/her VM automatically via RDS WebAcess portal etc. And where can the RDS connection broker API's be available andy link or so? thanks Samir