VIRTUAL MACHINES

Hyper-V has a microkernelized hypervisor. That means all the device drivers are kept outside the hypervisor within a parent  OS. As a result, the hypervisor is quite small (less than 1MB). In theory that should also make it much faster than other monolithic hypervisors like VMware ESX, but as we will see in a later post that isn’t the case.

Hyper-V R1 is built into Windows Server 2008 while R2 (aslo built into Windows Server 2008 R2) has now been made available as a free stand-alone download.

Both Hyper-V R1 and R2 come with similar management tools. R2 has support for live migration while R1 doesn’t.

Nice feature comparison from InfoWorld

Comparing Microsoft Hyper-V Server R1 to R2 Features

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R1 Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

Physical processor support Up to 4 processors Up to 8 processors

Logical processor support Up to 16 Up to 64

Physical memory support Up to 32GB Up to 1TB

Live migration No Yes

High availablility No Yes

Management options Hyper-V MMC, Windows Server 2008, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Remote Server Administration Tool (free), Windows Server 2008 R2 System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2

Of Note:

* Support for running up to 384 virtual machines with up to 512 virtual processors

* Processor compatibility mode for live migration across different processors from the same vendor

* Hot add/remove of virtual storage

* Networking enhancements: VMQ, Chimney, and support for jumbo frames

* Simplified management using sconfig

* Boot from flash