The latest Microsoft server OS uses its virtualization capabilities, its integration with Windows 7 and a multitude of improvements in the administration to deceive. These include reducing operating costs compared to existing versions, simplifying integration with Windows 7 parks, but also provide an effective response to economic and VMware. The stakes are high for Microsoft: 65% of the installed base Windows Server still uses Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003. Windows Server 2008 R2 introduces several enhancements to the Hyper-V, which was expected since its initial release. These updates to the platform of Microsoft virtualization include the availability of VMs and the storage of virtual machines. For Windows users who were waiting for the update to Hyper-V to take the step towards virtualization, Windows 2008 R2 is the answer. The most anticipated new feature in Hyper-V 2.0 is undoubtedly the implementation of the migration of virtual machines, which is replacing the existing system of Quick Migration previously, integrated Hyper-V.
Benefits:
- Today, modern servers are so powerful that a single large server enough to match the performance of multiple autonomous servers.
- Hyper-V is the innovative solution of virtual machines from Microsoft. With Hyper-V, it is easy to group its different physical servers in a single virtualization environment. If we consider the servers currently on the market, it is common to see consolidation ratios of 10 to 1 (1 new physical server hosting virtualized 10 servers).
- The aim is to divide a large physical server into smaller virtual environments: each runs its own instance of the operating system.
- On paper, Hyper-V also improves reliability and performance. But how can we be sure our virtualized applications will perform as well as if they were on a real physical server dedicated.
Some technological advances in the solution:
- An end to end solution, easily integrated into existing architectures as Microsoft Active Directory, SharePoint, System Center and Microsoft Office.
- A quick and cheap: according to recent public benchmark the performance of HPC Server is equal to that of Linux clusters
- An ROI analysis of 5 years also shows that the Microsoft solution is 32% to 51% cheaper than a Linux solution for HPC
- New analysis capabilities and more powerful computing. HPC Services for Excel 2010, Windows HPC Server 2008 R2, reduces drastically the computing time of large Excel spreadsheets
- Support more applications with hundreds of technical computing applications are compatible with Windows HPC Server 2008 R2
Migration
Microsoft had perhaps not wrong to say that most companies do not need the travel hot. But the lack of this feature had become a source of ridicule for many, while XenServer and ESX had in a long time. Microsoft has come to review it. From a technical perspective, the redesign of the architecture required to enable Hyper-V to support live migration has a lot of implications. Hyper-V 1.0 and placed in a VM saved state (basically the VM backup the contents of its memory to disk) before moving to a new server, which then had to reload the state of the disk memory to take over the VM. Hence the time needed several seconds to switch. To eliminate this delay, Microsoft had to develop a kind of pre-copying mechanism that migrates the majority of the state the virtual machine, while allowing it to continue operating normally.
Once this initial copy is complete, Live Migration pauses the source virtual machine, copies the latest changes, and transfers control to the new host that the VM restarts almost instantly. The fact that architecture combines break and involves considerably less copy differential data transfer, resulting in a true live migration, as in other virtualization platforms.
To enable live migration of VMs, Microsoft has also rethink how Windows interacts with Failover Clustering storage resources. As in the original version of Windows Server 2008 and R2, Hyper-V builds on the features of Windows Failover Clustering. In the first version, however, the architecture of Microsoft Failover no provision for storage, which means that the failure of a VM, the functions of the entire cluster failover storage resources on which was shown that VM to another server. Because of this limitation, Microsoft recommended in scenarios of high availability with Hyper-V 1.0 to limit the number of virtual machines to one per system is a real headache for the administration and storage system makers.
Storage Cluster
In Hyper-V 2.0, Microsoft added a new feature called Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV). VSCs are based on NTFS file system and allow multiple hosts to simultaneously access the same disk resource. But as NTFS does not lock mechanism to allow multiple hosts to simultaneously access a volume, an additional layer of management was added to ensure that all nodes in the cluster are aware of who owns - and thus manages and changes - which files and folders. Different cluster nodes (actually host servers virtualized with Hyper-V) interrogate management layer CSV before making any changes to files and folders to a real competitor access by multiple servers to a single NTFS volume.
The immediate benefit is that it is now possible to host multiple virtual machines on a single LUN, which greatly reduces the number of logical units and greatly simplifies administration. The cluster can indeed perform a failover on a single VM without affecting an entire disk resource. It should be noted that the use of cluster services has other advantages including high availability. The solution ensures dynamic redirection of input / output (SAN and LAN) in case of failure of a network link.
Bookmarks