advantages of hyperv over vsphere 5.1

Why Hyper-V?
Competitive Advantages of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V & Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 over the VMware vSphere Hypervisor and vSphere 5.1

Matt McSpirit
Technical Product Marketing Manager
Microsoft Corporation

Microsoft Virtual Academy

Hello and welcome to this session on Why Hyper-V where well look at the competitive advantages of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V server 2012 over the VMware vSphere Hypervisor and vSphere 5.1My names Matt McSpirit, Im a Technical Product Marketing Manager here at Microsoft.

Windows Server Management Marketing

2012 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft, Windows, and other product names are or may be registered trademarks and/or trademarks in the U.S. and/or other countries.The information herein is for informational purposes only and represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation as of the date of this presentation. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information provided after the date of this presentation. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

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Competitive AdvantagesI - Core VirtualizationII - Private CloudAnd this session is part one of a two part series where well look at the competitive advantages focused both on virtualization and in the second part well explore some of those private cloud comparisons between Microsoft and VMware.



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Before Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V

June 2008Hyper-V introduced in
Windows Server 2008

October 2008Hyper-V Server 2008 launched

October 2009Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V & Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 launchedLive MigrationCluster Shared VolumesProcessor CompatibilityHot-Add StoragePerformance & Scalability Improvements

February 2011SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 & Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 launchedDynamic MemoryRemoteFXBefore Hyper-V Server 2012

Hyper-V was first introduced as part of Windows Server 2008, but later that year, in October 2008, a standalone, free edition of Hyper-V, known as Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 was released. This standalone version contained only the core virtualization components and Windows driver model, and as a result, offered a reduced disk footprint, and a reduced number of services running on the host OS.

In October 2009, just 1 year later, both Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 were updated with the R2 release, which introduced a number of compelling capabilities to help organizations reduce costs, whilst increasing agility and flexibility. Key features introduced included:

Live Migration Enabling the movement of virtual machines (VMs) with no interruption or downtimeCluster Shared Volumes Highly scalable and flexible use of shared storage (SAN) for VMsProcessor Compatibility Increase the Flexibility for Live Migration across hosts with differing CPU architecturesHot Add Storage Flexibly add or remove storage to and from VMsImproved Virtual Networking Performance Support for Jumbo Frames and Virtual Machine Queue (VMq)

Finally, in February 2011, With the addition of Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Hyper-V, Microsoft introduced 2 new, key capabilities to help organizations realize even greater value from the platform:

Dynamic Memory More efficient use of memory while maintaining consistent workload performance and scalability.RemoteFX Provides the richest virtualized Windows 7 experience for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployments.

And that brings us to today

TRANSCRIPTION STARTS HEREBut its important before we look at Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V Server 2012 to look at where Hyper-V has come from.Hyper-V was first introduced as part of Windows Server 2008 but later that year in October 2008 a stand alone free edition of Hyper-V known as Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 was released. This stand alone version contained only the core virtualization components and Windows driver models and as a result offered a reduced disk footprint and a reduced number of services running on the host OS. In October 2009 just one year later both Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft Hyper-V server 2008 were updated with the R2 release which introduced a number of compelling capabilities to help organizations reduce cost while increasing agility and flexibility. Key features included; live migration, which enabled the movement of running virtual machines in physical server to physical server with no interruption or downtime, cluster shared volumes, the highly scalable and flexible use of SAN storage, processor compatibility to increase the flexibility for live migration across hosts with differing CPU architectures, hot-added virtual machine storage to flexibly add or remove storage to and from running virtual machines, improved virtual networking performance, support for things like jumbo frames and virtual machine queue and finally in February 2011 with the addition of Service Pack 1 for Hyper-V, Microsoft introduced two new key capabilities to help organizations realize even greater value from the platform. Dynamic memory enables a more efficient use of memory while maintaining consistent workload performance and scalability ultimately helping organizations see a greater level of density on that same sized hardware, and additionally remote FX, which provides the richest virtualized Windows client experience for VDI deployment.



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Why Hyper-V?

Scalability, Performance & Density

Secure Multitenancy

Flexible Infrastructure

High Availability & Resiliency

Virtualization technologies help customers lower costs and deliver greater agility and economies of scale. Either as a stand-alone product or an integrated part of Windows Server, HyperV is the leading virtualization platform for today and the transformational opportunity with cloud computing.

With HyperV, it is now easier than ever for organizations to take advantage of the cost savings of virtualization, and make the optimum use of server hardware investments by consolidating multiple server roles as separate virtual machines that are running on a single physical machine. Customers can use HyperV to efficiently run multiple operating systems, Windows, Linux, and others, in parallel, on a single server. Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V Server 2012 extend this with more features, greater scalability and further inbuilt reliability mechanisms.In the data center, on the desktop, and now in the cloud, the Microsoft virtualization platform, which is led by HyperV and management tools, simply makes more sense and offers better value for money when compared to the competition.

This presentation will focus on comparing Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V & Hyper-V Server 2012, with the VMware vSphere Hypervisor and vSphere 5.1 Enterprise Plus, across 4 key areas:


Secure Multitenancy


High Availability & Resiliency

TRANSCRIPTION STARTS HEREAnd that brings us to today, but why Hyper-V? Well virtualization technologies help customers lower cost and deliver greater agility and economies of scale either as a stand alone product Hyper-V server or an integrated part of Windows Server, Hyper-V is the fastest growing virtualization platform for today. And can help you with your transformational computing as you move towards cloud computing. With Hyper-V its now easier than ever for organizations to take advantage of the cost savings of virtualization and make the optimum use of server hardware investments by consolidating multiple server roles as separate virtual machines that are running on a single physical machine. Customers can use Hyper-V to efficiently run multiple operating systems, Windows, Linux and others in parallel on a single server. With Windows SErver2012 and Hyper-V Server 2012 we extend this capability with more features, greater scale and further in built reliability mechanisms. In the data center, on the desktop, and now in the cloud, the Microsoft virtualization platform which is led by Hyper-V and System Center management tools makes more sense and offers better value for your money when compared to the competitors. This presentation will focus on comparing Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and the free download that is Hyper-V Server 2012 with the VMware Vsphere Hypervisor and vSphere 5.1 enterprise plus. And well focus on four key areas; scalability, performance and density, secure multi-tenancy, a flexible infrastructure, and high availability and resiliency.



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And well start, by looking at the Scalability, Performance and Density comparisons.



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Hyper-V Scalability Improvements

Nothing from Microsoft, and I mean literally nothing has ever been this ambitious Jason Perlow, ZDNetSystemResourceHyper-V(2008 R2)Hyper-V(2012)Improvement Factor

HostLogical Processors643205

Physical Memory1TB4TB4

Virtual CPUs per Host5122,0484

VMVirtual CPUs per VM46416

Memory per VM64GB1TB16

Active VMs per Host3841,0242.7

Guest NUMANoYes-

ClusterMaximum Nodes16644

Maximum VMs1,0008,0008

Now, in the previous releases of both Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, and the Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, we supported configuring virtual machines with a maximum of four virtual processors and up to 64GB of memory. However, IT organizations increasingly want to use virtualization when they deploy missioncritical, tier-1 business applications. Large, demanding workloads such as online transaction processing (OLTP) databases and online transaction analysis (OLTA) solutions typically run on systems with 16 or more then 32 processors actually and demand large amounts of memory. For this class of workloads, more virtual processors and larger amounts of virtual memory are a core requirement.

HyperV in Windows Server2012, and Hyper-V Server 2012 greatly expands support for host processors and memory. New features include support for up to 64 virtual processors and TB of memory for HyperV guests, a new VHDX virtual hard disk format with larger disk capacity of up to 64 TB, and additional resiliency. These features help to ensure that the virtualization infrastructure can support the configuration of large, high-performance virtual machines to support workloads that might need to scale up significantly.

Significant improvements have also been made across the board, with Hyper-V now supporting increased cluster sizes, from 16 nodes, up to 64 nodes in size, supporting up to 8,000 VMs per cluster. Hyper-V now supports a significantly higher number of active virtual machines per host, and additionally, more advanced performance features such as in-guest Non-Uniform Memory Access or (NUMA). This ensures customers can achieve the highest levels of scalability, performance and density for their mission-critical workloads.



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VMware Comparison

Only Hyper-V allows the creation of VMs with up to 64 vCPUs
& 1TB RAM,
in all editionsSystemResourceHyper-V(2012)vSphere HypervisorvSphere 5.1 Enterprise Plus

HostLogical Processors320160160

Physical Memory4TB32GB12TB

Virtual CPUs per Host2,0482,0482,048

VMVirtual CPUs per VM648642

Memory per VM1TB32GB11TB

Active VMs per Host1,024512512

Guest NUMAYesYesYes

ClusterMaximum Nodes64N/A332

Maximum VMs8,000N/A34,000

1 Host physical memory is capped at 32GB thus maximum VM memory is also restricted to 32GB usage.2 vSphere 5.1 Enterprise Plus is the only vSphere edition that supports 64 vCPUs.
Enterprise edition supports 32 vCPU per VM with all other editions supporting 8 vCPUs per VM3 For clustering/high availability, customers must purchase vSpherevSphere Hypervisor / vSphere 5.x Ent+ Information: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere5/r51/vsphere-51-configuration-maximums.pdf, https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/Whats-New-VMware-vSphere-51-Platform-Technical-Whitepaper.pdf and http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/faq.html In terms of comparison, the table shows that Hyper-V offers significantly greater scale across Host, VM and Cluster when compared with both the VMware vSphere Hypervisor and vSphere plus. VMware positions this vSphere Hypervisor as a simple, entry-level solution designed to allow users to experience the benefits of Vmwares virtualization technology, however on closer examination, certain restrictions are imposed which prevent customers utilizing the solution at scale, meaning customers have to purchase, at significant cost, one of the more advanced vSphere editions. An examples of this includes the capping of physical memory on the vSphere Hypervisor to 32GB, limiting scalability, and subsequently maximum virtual machine memory size as a result.

Since the launch of vSphere 5.0, back in 2011, VMware has regularly discussed the inclusion of 32 virtual processors within a virtual machine, yet this was exclusive, at the time, to the Enterprise Plus edition of vSphere, and not for the vSphere Hypervisor, vSphere 5.0 Essentials, Essentials Plus, Standard, and Enterprise editions, which were all capped at 8 virtual processors per virtual machine. With vSphere 5.1 however, the Enterprise edition can now deliver VMs with up to 32 vCPUs, and the Enterprise Plus edition 64 vCPUs. Compare this with Hyper-V in both Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V Server 2012, and customers not only receive up to 64 virtual processors per VM, but this comes with no SKU-specific restrictions. Customers are free to run the most demanding of their workloads on Hyper-V, without additional costs or expensive additional upgrades.

The table also shows that both Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, along with Hyper-V Server 2012, and vSphere 5.1 Enterprise Plus deliver up to a TB of memory to an individual virtual machine

Whilst virtualization itself is an incredibly important aspect within the datacenter, resiliency and high availability of workloads is of equal importance. The inclusion of Failover Clustering in Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V Server 2012 enables customers to achieve massive scale with an unparalleled number of nodes within a cluster, and virtual machines per cluster. Unfortunately, the free vSphere Hypervisor alone doesnt provide any high availability, or resiliency features, and customers must purchase vSphere 5.1 to unlock these features, and even then, cluster sizes are restricted to 32 nodes, and VMs per cluster, which is considerably smaller than the 64 nodes, and 8000 VMs supported by Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2012.



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Enhanced Storage Capabilities

Virtual Fibre ChannelConnect a VM directly to FC SAN without sacrificing features

Native 4K Disk SupportTake advantage of enhanced density and reliability

64TB Virtual Hard DisksIncreased capacity, protection & alignment optimization

Now both Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V & Hyper-V Server 2012 also introduce a number of enhanced storage capabilities to support the most intensive, mission-critical of workloads. These capabilities include: Virtual Fibre Channel which enables virtual machines to integrate directly into Fiber Channel Storage Area Networks (SAN), unlocking scenarios such as fiber channel-based Hyper-V Guest Clusters or increased performance for storage intensive workloads running in a virtual environment.

Support for 4-KB Disk in HyperV, so support for the new advanced format drives 4,000-byte (4KB) disk that lets customers take advantage of the emerging innovation in storage hardware for increased capacity and reliability. Hyper-V supports this from the word Go.

And finally as we touched on earlier, the New Virtual Hard Disk Format. This new format, called VHDX, is designed to better handle current and future workloads and addresses the technological demands of an enterprises evolving needs by increasing storage capacity, protecting data, improving quality performance on 4-KB disks especially , and providing additional operation-enhancing features. The maximum size of a VHDX file is 64TB compared with just 2TB in the previous release.



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Enhanced Storage Capabilities

Boot fromUSB DiskFlexible deployment option for diskless servers
(Hyper-V Server 2012)

Offloaded Data TransferOffloads storage-intensive tasks to the SAN

Storage
SpacesStorage resiliency and availability with commodity hardware

Storage Spaces transforms SAS & SATA disks into storage pools, from which logical disks, or storage spaces, can then be provisioned. These spaces can be given different levels of resiliency and performance, can be thinly or fully provisioned, and support advanced features such as trim provisioning. Storage Spaces enable you to deliver a new category of highly capable storage solutions to all Windows customer segments at a dramatically lower price point. At the same time, you can maximize operations by leveraging commodity storage to supply high-performance and feature-rich storage to servers, clusters, and applications alike.With offloaded data transfer support, the Hyper-V host can concentrate on the processing needs of the application and workload and offload any storage-related tasks to the SAN, increasing performance all around the complete solution. And finally with its reduced footprint, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 supports installation to USB media, providing more deployment flexibility, especially in scenarios such as diskless servers. This is specific to Hyper-V Server 2012.



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DemoNow weve talked about a number of those capabilities there but I think its important to take a quick look at some of those capabilities in action and show how theyre set up and configured, so without further ado lets duck into a demo. Okay, so here we are in our demo infrastructure where weve got four physical Hyper-V hosts all running Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 and the first three here, so node 2,3 and 4 are configured in a cluster. Now all three of these hosts in a cluster are also configured to support fiber channel and if we look at node 4 specifically we go over to our virtual SAN manager here, now Hyper-V allows you to define virtual SANs on the host to accommodate scenarios where a single Hyper-V host is connected to different SANs through multiple fiber channel ports. And a virtual SAN defines a named group of physical fiber channel ports from the host that are connected to the same physical SAN. For example assume that a Hyper-V host is connected to two SANs, production and a test SAN. The host is connected to each SAN through two physical fiber channel ports so in this example you might configure two virtual SANs, one named production, that has two physical fiber channel ports connected and one named Test SAN, which has the two remaining physical fiber channel ports connected. Now you can configure as many as four fiber channel adaptors to a virtual machine and associate each one with a virtual SAN, so that means a single VM could be actually attached to four SANs. So when we connect, when we create a virtual fiber channel SAN were literally just ticking the boxes to represent the physical HBAs in the host that are going to allow our virtual machines to ultimately connect through to that SAN. So well cancel out of there and well look at a virtual machine settings that weve already configured here.So Ill look at the settings of this virtual machine, and well see that this particular VM already has two fiber channel adaptors here and if you want to add more well use the add hardware but I cant add a fiber channel adaptor while a VM is running its something I need to do when its off. In this particular virtual machine what youll notice is in this particular fiber channel adaptor is that its got two sets of addresses; address set A, and address set B. now to support live migration of VMs across Hyper-V hosts while maintaining fiber channel connectivity two worldwide names are configured for each fiber channel adaptor, set A and set B. And Hyper-V automatically alternates between the set A and set V worldwide node addresses during a live migration. So this ensures that all nodes are available on the destination host before the migration and that no downtime occurs during the migration. But when youre masking and zoning your LUNs on your fiber channel storage you take both of these addresses into account and thats the address set for this particular fiber channel adaptor and the other one. But what does this look like inside the virtual machine? Well lets take a quick lookSo Im going to double click on demo 6 and go into that virtual machine, have that connection open already and if we look inside Device Manager of this virtual machine youll see down here on the storage controls Hyper-V fiber channel HBA, the representation of that HBA but also youll see here that because Ive got two fiber channel adaptors Ive actually enabled MP IO inside the virtual machine or Multi-pathing, Ive done that through the same configuration wizard as I would do if this was a physical host so Ive got that consistency. And what weve seen by importing the relevant HP drivers, Ive been able to see the actual HP Multi-path device that is in my environment. So consistency, a consistent user experience. Now, let me come out of there and let me show you this particular disk and youll see that its a fiber channel disk, its 50 GB in size and were consuming around about 4 GB maybe just less, on this drive, but if we double down into that drive youll see that actually on this drive Ive got about 126 GB worth of content or in this case virtual hard disk files. So Ive got 126 gigs worth of stuff on the drive yet Im only consuming around about 3,4 GB. Whats going on there?Well one of the new storage features within Windows Server 2012 is an inbox deduplication, so if we go to the local server and I look at file and storage services and volumes, what youll see is for this fiber channel disk which Ive turned on deduplication Im at a deduplication rate of 97% so weve deduplicated more than what a single virtual hard disk file would consume on its own, were down to around 3 to 4 GBs, thats a huge savings, saving 123 gig versus what we would need to have in place if we didnt have deduplication. Thats phenomenal saving, thats a great example of using technology thats built into Windows Server 2012 to help us be more efficient and effective. Now, what youll also find is that we have a new capability within Windows Server 2012 that I highlighted in the slides earlier on called storage spaces. And if I go to the storage pools section here youll see that Ive got actually a storage space not created this is just a default to show me my physical disks down here and what youll notice is this particular machine has got three physical disks attached to it, each with 64 TB in size, thats huge, thats a huge amount of storage space that Ive got available for each virtual machine. But these are just regular disks at this point, theyre not a storage space, so I want to go to create a new storage space or pool, well go next, Im going to give it a name so well call it space 1 for now and its going to look at the disks that are available in the primordial pool there to use as part of this space. So well go next, well select these physical disks and notice I can change the allocation as well do I want a particular disk to be a hot spare or part of the pool automatically, well go next and youll see Im going to have 192 TB of capacity which is great, well go next, and well go create. Its updating, its finishing the process and thats great and notice Ive got this opportunity to create a virtual disk when this wizard closes. So well go ahead and well create that virtual disk, so well go close, so now Im creating a virtual disk, from a storage pool and this virtual disk could be used by something else, now its important to not think of necessarily a virtual disk like a virtual hard disk, this is a virtual disk that could have a volume on it that could be used for a file share or some other workload. So well go next, well choose the space that Ive created, Space 1, well go next, well give this a name, Disk 1, well go next, now do I want this to be simple, so datas going to be striped across all three of these disks, giving me maximum capacity and throughput but theres no resiliency. And mirror would enable me to duplicate data across two or three physical disks increasing reliability but I might sacrifice a little bit of capacity. However parity is striped across physical disks, increasing reliability, though somewhat reducing capacity, Im going to go with parity on this one. Now, do I want to provision this data? Fixed so use the complete space straight away, or thin provision, Im going to go thin provision, go next, size, Im going to choose a virtual disk size of lets say 100 TB, then well go next, then well go create. So its creating all of those elements and now the final step of the wizard is creating a volume, because what weve got at the moment presents to Windows as a blank 100 TB disk now thats part of a pool of 192 TB maximum capacity, weve not got a volume which we can actually store data on, so well go close and well make sure that weve got that tick box ticked, well go next, which particular machine am I going to provision this to on which disk, so youll see its 100 TB this virtual disk that we just created is Disk 1, the disk Im creating is going to be called Disk 5. go next, what volume size, lets make it the full amount, drive letter, yes lets leave it as the default, file system, volume label, HugeDrive, NTFS, all that can be left as default, do you want to enable dedups as part of the wizard that is engrained within Windows Server, well go next and well go create. So very quickly weve taken three effectively blank disks, weve transformed them into a storage space, weve provisioned a virtual disk on that storage space and from there weve now created a volume of 100TB, do we actually have physically 100TB in my infrastructure to use? No, but this has all been thin provisioned, Im going to close that out and youll see now that weve got our storage space and you can see that weve got a thin disk provisioned and its currently allocated 2GB of the 192 maximum and thats been used, if we look at the volume view here, theres our F drive, hugedrive 100 TB, it knows its thin provisioned so its aware of this kind of stuff. And if I go to Windows now, theres our huge drive, 100TB in space, its consuming minimal amounts at this point in time but as we copy data to it, well see more. But what can we do to expand the infrastructure, what if we want to add another 64 TB disk? Well, if I want to do that I can minimize this particular VM, Im going to go over to cluster manager because this virtual machine is a clustered machine I should be doing everything really from here from an administrator perspective, Ill go to settings of the VM and youll see its already got 3 64 TB disks attached to this VM those are the three disks we saw earlier but Im going to go to SCSI controller, hard drive, add, remember this virtual machine is running at this point in time, well call it Disk 4, in fact well go no, next, VHDX, Dynamic, so Ill make it small to begin with and grow, well call this Disk 4, its a VHDX file which allows us to have that increased capacity Im going to choose where Im going to store this, so Im going to store this with my other virtual disks in that folder there, Ill go next, what size, 65 or 64 TB and well go finish. Well go apply, and if I go back to that virtual machine now and we do a scan for disks, there, we found our remaining 64 TB disk that weve just created, what can I do with that? Well, I can go to my storage pools I can select space 1, I can add an extra physical disk to it, tick, okay, and just like that weve increased the capacity of our storage pool to 256 TB and if I scroll down to our virtual disk I could now go ahead and extend this virtual disk to something even greater and then subsequently increase the size of the volume as well. Youll notice I could also if I wanted to remove a disk. So well go yep, were going to rebuild everything on the fly, well go yes, ok, so very quickly weve added a disk to a storage space, weve removed a disk from a storage space, incredibly easy, simple and effective.

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VMware Comparison

Hyper-V allows the creation of virtual disks that are 32 times the size of those created on vSphere 5.1CapabilityHyper-V
(2012)vSphere HypervisorvSphere 5.1 Enterprise Plus

Virtual Fiber ChannelYesYesYes

3rd Party Multipathing (MPIO)YesNoYes (VAMP)1

Native 4-KB Disk SupportYesNoNo

Maximum Virtual Disk Size64TB VHDX2TB VMDK2TB VMDK

Maximum Pass Through Disk Size256TB+264TB64TB

Offloaded Data TransferYesNoYes (VAAI)3

Boot from USB DiskYes4YesYes

Storage PoolingYesNoNo

1 vStorage API for Multipathing (VAMP) is only available in Enterprise & Enterprise Plus editions of vSphere 5.12 The maximum size of a physical disk attached to a virtual machine is determined by the guest operating system and
the chosen file system within the guest. More recent Windows Server operating systems support disks in excess of
256TB in size3 vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) is only available in Enterprise & Enterprise Plus editions of vSphere 5.14 Hyper-V Server 2012 OnlyvSphere Hypervisor / vSphere 5.x Ent+ Information: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere5/r51/vsphere-51-configuration-maximums.pdf and http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/buy/editions_comparison.html Welcome back and I hope you found the demo useful. But how does VMware compare with some of those things we talked about earlier on?Well, as shown in the table, both Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and the free Hyper-V Server 2012 provide a significant number of advantages over both the vSphere Hypervisor and vSphere 5.1 Enterprise Plus. Customers building virtualized infrastructures today require the highest levels of availability and performance, and wish to maximize the investment in their chosen technologies to help drive their business forward. With Microsoft, the ability to utilize Device Specific Modules, also known as DSMs, produced by storage vendors, in conjunction with the Multipath I/O framework within Windows Server and Hyper-V Server, ensures that customers run their workloads on an optimized configuration from the start, as the storage vendor intended, providing the highest levels of performance and availability. This framework, this NPIO framework is built into the Windows Server platform, at no cost. Unfortunately, the vSphere Hypervisor doesnt provide the ability to utilize these storage vendor specific optimizations, and in fact, only the Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions of vSphere 5.1, through a feature known as the vStorage APIs for Multipathing, provide this capability, meaning customers have to upgrade to higher, more costly editions in order to unlock the best performance from their storage investments.

When implementing a virtualized infrastructure, customers today look to the future to understand new technology trends and innovations that are coming down the line. One of those innovations is the rapidly emerging Advanced Format Drives, that have a 4KB physical sector size. These disks bring an increase in performance, and are natively supported by Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2012, but unfortunately, are not supported with the vSphere Hypervisor and vSphere 5.1, restricting future hardware upgrades.

As customers introduce larger, more powerful workloads into their virtual environments, the amount of data associated with these workloads, over time, will grow. Fortunately, Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2012 support the creation of virtual disks, quickly and efficiently, of up to 64 TB in size, allowing huge databases, file repositories or document archives to be stored within individual disks. Whilst VMwares proprietary file system, VMFS5, supports datastore sizes of 64TB, the Virtual Machine Disk Format (VMDK), is restricted to 2TB, meaning customers have to utilize the less flexible, less portable Raw Device Mappings or (RDMs). If customers do choose to implement RDMs, 64TB is the maximum supported size, however with Microsoft, Hyper-V places no specific maximum on the size of a pass through disk. The maximum size is ultimately determined by what the guest operating system supports. This ensures that the largest data-driven workloads can be virtualized on Hyper-V with ease.

Now, we mentioned earlier a capability known as 3rd Party Multipathing, and how this enables customers to optimize their Host-to-SAN integration and connectivity, maximizing their investment in both of these key elements of the virtualized infrastructure, whilst providing the highest levels of performance and availability for their critical workloads. Offloaded Data Transfer or (ODX), is a key capability of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-Vand Hyper-V server 2012 and is another of those features that enables organizations to maximize their investment in current existing technologies. By integrating Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2012 with an ODX-capable storage array, many of the storage-related tasks that would normally use valuable CPU and network resources on the Hyper-V hosts, are offloaded to the array itself, executing much faster, increasing performance significantly, and unlocking extra resources on the hosts themselves. VMware offer a similar capability, known as the vStorage APIs for Array Integration, VAAI, but unfortunately, this capability is only available in the Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions of vSphere 5.1, meaning customers, again, have to upgrade to higher editions to achieve higher performance from their hardware investments.



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Enhanced Resource Management

Dynamic MemoryIncreased control for greater virtual machine consolidation

Resource MeteringTrack historical data for virtual machine usage

Quality of Service (QoS)Consistent level of performance based on SLAs

Data Center BridgingConverge network traffic to provide enhanced QoS

Now Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2012 also introduce a number of enhanced resource management capabilities that include:Dynamic Memory Improvements which dramatically increase virtual machine consolidation ratios and improve reliability for restart operations that can lead to lower costs, especially in environments, such as VDI, that have many idle or low-load virtual machines.Resource Metering provides the ability to track and report the amount of data that is transferred per IP address or virtual machine to help ensure accurate chargebacks.Quality of Service provides the ability to programmatically adhere to a service level agreement (SLA) by specifying the minimum bandwidth that is available to a virtual machine or a port, prevents latency issues by allocating maximum bandwidth use for a virtual machine or port.And finally Data Center Bridging takes advantage of the latest innovation in hardware and reduces the cost and difficulty to maintain separate network, management, live migration and storage traffic by using a modern, converged infrastructure and hardware.



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DemoAnd its important lets have a look at some of those things through a quick demonstration. So here we are back in the demo environment, this is slightly different one to show some different demonstrations and capabilities. First of all I want to talk about the improvements in Dynamic Memory which as we discussed before help organizations to realize better density and a better return on investment. so what we can see here is one of my VMs here Demo01 has been enabled with Dynamic Memory, its got a minimum and maximum between half and one GB the current assigned memory that Hyper-V has given our VM is half a GB the minimum but the demand inside the guest OS is relatively low, its actually lower than the minimum. But youll notice this new feature, this option weve got within Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V is to specify the startup memory. Because certain VMs start up with more memory to get certain things done initially, certain things started and then once theyre calmed down they can then drop their memory requirement below that startup memory, down towards what the minimum is. Weve kept them as the same for this example but its up to you. What weve got here though is the opportunity to now start to hot add dynamic memory to really make it dynamic and scale up that workload as it grows. So by going into this particular virtual machine here which weve got open here, COM Demo1 and we can run a little application thats going to consume memory, so its going to increase the memory usage of our virtual machine, so if we minimize back out of there well see warning, memory demand is higher than what the maximum is here so maximum 1GB, memory demand is higher, so I can go into the settings of this VM now, this is new in 2012, go to memory and I can adjust the maximum on the fly to something more appropriate, so Ill choose 2 GB, Ill apply, I click ok, and youll see now the assigned memory, Hyper-V starting to give it a little bit more, but its continuing to grow, the demand that little application that s running inside there is continuing to need more and more memory, so we could go ahead and assign more but in fact, Im just going to kill it. And memory demand what youll find now will start to shrink down, so the memory demand has dropped considerably and now the assigned memory, Hyper-V will start to reclaim that even though theres no contention, over time it will start to claim that memory back and give it other virtual machine when they need it. Now we mentioned before resource metering is a way to track the certain metrics associated with virtual machines even if they migrate and float around the infrastructure using some of the migration technologies. So what I want to do is just show you how easy it is to set that up, now in my notepad file here Ive got an example of a script that you would write in PowerShell to set this up. So at first on the host you would enable resource metering so a simple script there, then you would set your interval, so how often youre going to query and check and then finally this final script here enables those, Im just going to copy and bring up PowerShell, this enables us to actually query and product whats been used by the virtual machine. And youll see a number of the virtual machines that have been running that period of time, the average CPU and megahertz, the average memory, the maximum memory and were able to use that particularly in solution search of System Center to build show and charge back models to represent the usage and give the information back to the business. So really easy and obviously with this in PowerShell this can be piped out to other systems as well. So that was a little bit about resource metering and I want to finish on quality of service and show you how easy it is to define quality of service for certain key workloads and applications. Now to do that currently if I look inside this particular virtual machine demo001, Im going to run this little client network application, its going to fire towards a receiver if you will where Ive already set up a certain amount of traffic in a certain amount of time. and youll see in this case in five seconds it was able to send 230 MB of data at a rate of 385 M/sec. Now if I press continue there and close that and I come out of this particular virtual machine and look at the settings on the host of that VM, in the network adaptor here thats connected and we turn on bandwidth management and we set a maximum of say 50 Mbps so were stopping this virtual machine being particularly noisy which could impact other virtual machines. If youre interested in giving a certain VM a certain amount of SLA so a minimum level of bandwidth available you can select and enter information in this minimum column as well. But Ill go ok there, Ill go back to the virtual machine and well run the same test again and youll see this time it didnt take any longer because it was five seconds an interval but youll see the transfer was a lot smaller at a lot lower transfer rate that we were controlling through quality of service. Its a really simple demonstration but very, very powerful stuff available to customers of all shapes and sizes, very, very useful indeed. And with that, well go back to the slides.

04/06/13

VMware Comparison

Hyper-V provides QoS in all editions, unlike VMware, where QoS is only available in the Enterprise Plus edition of vSphere 5.1CapabilityHyper-V
(2012)vSphere HypervisorvSphere 5.1 Enterprise Plus

Dynamic MemoryYesYesYes

Resource MeteringYesYes1Yes

Quality of ServiceYesNoYes2

Data Center Bridging (DCB)YesYesYes

1 Without vCenter, Resource Metering in the vSphere Hypervisor is only available on an individual host by host basis.2 Quality of Service (QoS) is only available in the Enterprise Plus edition of vSphere 5.1vSphere Hypervisor / vSphere 5.x Ent+ Information: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere5/r51/vsphere-51-configuration-maximums.pdf and http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/buy/editions_comparison.html Welcome back, I hope you found the demo useful, but how does VMware compare with some of these capabilities? Well, as shown in the table, when it comes to memory management, Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2012, along with both the VMware vSphere Hypervisor and vSphere 5.1, all provide techniques to better utilize virtual machine memory, increase density and maximize the return on investment, however Microsofts approach to memory management is different to that of VMware. VMware claim, that through their 4 memory management techniques; Ballooning, Transparent Page Sharing, Compression and Swapping, they can provide a virtual machine density greater than that of Hyper-V, yet in reality, this simply isnt true. All 4 of these memory management techniques only operate when the host is under memory pressure, heavily laden, as a reactive measure. With technologies such as Transparent Page Sharing or (TPS), with the majority of hardware platforms now supporting higher performance 2MB Large Page Tables by default (LPT), TPS is unable to deduplicate memory pages as easily as it would, prior to Large Page Tables , thus the capability becomes significantly less useful. Under memory pressure, the ESXi host will break down large memory pages into smaller, 4KB pages, which it can then deduplicate, freeing up memory, but unfortunately, this process doesnt occur without a cost to already limited, host performance of resources. With compression and swapping, whilst both help to keep virtual machines operable, its too little too late, with performance of key workloads at this point, becoming severely degraded.

With Dynamic Memory, Hyper-V works intuitively with the guest OS, delivering, and reclaiming memory from the virtual machine in a way that is optimal for the guest OS, ensuring resources are provided appropriately, and a consistent level of performance is achieved for key workloads, ultimately providing the highest levels of density, and the greatest return on investment.

As we move towards more cloud-oriented infrastructures, especially in multi-tenanted environments, hosting providers and enterprises must be able to measure the amount of data center resources (compute, network, and storage) that are consumed by each workload. These can be used to charge external customers (known as chargeback), or for internal accounting (known as showback) for cross-departmental budget management scenarios of an enterprise. Resource Metering, which is a standard feature of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2012, when combined with new performance counters, exposes a wealth of information from which chargeback and showback models can be built. While the vSphere Hypervisor, and vSphere 5.1 both enable the capturing of information within vCenter, organizations must purchase, at additional cost to vSphere 5.1, vCenter Chargeback Manager in order utilize the information in a meaningful manner.

Whilst chargeback and showback are two important elements for a private cloud, ensuring service levels are met is equally important, whether the primary business is that of a hosting provider, serving external customers, or an enterprise organization, serving internal business units with chargeable resources. Either way, ensuring the highest levels of performance is imperative, and with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2012, Quality of Service (QoS) is a standard feature, enabling organizations to ensure that Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for key workloads are met, and at the same time, intensive, noisy virtual machines dont consume more than their allocated allowance. With VMware however, QoS is only available in the Enterprise Plus edition of vSphere 5.1, so for those customers who wish to implement stringent SLAs, customers must upgrade, at additional cost, to VMwares highest edition.



04/06/13

Secure Multitenancy

Virtualized data centers are becoming more popular and practical every day. IT organizations and hosting providers have begun offering infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which provides more flexible, virtualized infrastructures to customersserver instances ondemand. Because of this trend, IT organizations and hosting providers must offer customers enhanced security and isolation from one another.If a service providers infrastructure is hosting two companies, the IT Admin must help ensure that each company is provided its own privacy and security. Before Windows Server 2012, server virtualization provided isolation between VMs, but the network layer of the data center was still not fully isolated and implied layer-2 connectivity between different workloads that run over the same infrastructure.For the hosting provider, isolation in the virtualized environment must be equal to the isolation in the physical data center, to meet customer expectations and not be a barrier to cloud adoption. Isolation is almost as important in an enterprise environment. Although all internal departments belong to the same organization, certain workloads and environments, such as finance and human resource systems must still be isolated from each other. IT departments that offer private clouds and move to an Infrastructure as a Service model must consider this requirement and provide a way to isolate such highly sensitive workloads.Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2012 contain new security and isolation capabilities through the HyperV Extensible Switch.



04/06/13

Hyper-V Extensible Switch

PVLANSARP/ND Poisoning ProtectionDHCP Guard ProtectionVirtual Port ACLsTrunk Mode
to Virtual MachinesMonitoring & Port MirroringWindows PowerShell & WMI Management

The Hyper-V Extensible Switch allows a deeper integration with customers existing network infrastructure, monitoring and security toolsNow with Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V Server 2012, you can configure Hyper-V servers to ensure and enforce network isolation among any set of arbitrary isolation groups, which are typically defined for individual customers or sets of workloads. Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2012 provide the isolation and security capabilities for multitenancy by offering the following features: Virtual machine isolation with PVLANs. VLAN technology is traditionally used to subdivide a network and provide isolation for individual groups that share a single physical infrastructure. Windows Server 2012 introduces support for PVLANs, a technique used with VLANs that can be used to provide isolation between two VMs on the same VLAN. When a VM doesnt need to communicate with other virtual machines, you can use PVLANs to isolate it from other virtual machines in your data center. By assigning each virtual machine in a PVLAN one primary VLAN ID and one or more secondary VLAN IDs, you can put the secondary PVLANs into one of three modes. These PVLAN modes determine which other virtual machines on the PVLAN a virtual machine can talk to. If you want to isolate a virtual machine, put it in isolated mode. Promiscuous ports can exchange packets with any other port on the same primary VLAN ID. And community ports on the same VLAN ID can exchange packets with each other at layer 2. so isolated, promiscuous and community, three choices there. The Hyper-V Extensible Switch provides protection against a malicious virtual machine stealing IP addresses from other virtual machines through ARP spoofing which is also known as ARP poisoning in IPv4. With this type of man-in-the-middle attack, a malicious virtual machine sends a fake ARP message, which associates its own MAC address to an IP address that it doesnt own. Unsuspecting virtual machines send the network traffic targeted to that IP address to the MAC address of the malicious virtual machine instead of the intended destination. For IPv6, Win Server 2012 and Hyper-V Server 2012 provide equivalent protection for ND spoofing or neighbor discover spoofing. DHCP Guard protection which in a DHCP environment, a rogue DHCP server could intercept client DHCP requests and provide incorrect address information. The rogue DHCP server could cause traffic to be routed to a malicious intermediary that sniffs all traffic before forwarding it to the legitimate destination. To protect against this particular man-in-the-middle attack, the Hyper-V administrator can designate which Hyper-V Extensible Switch ports can have DHCP servers connected to them. DHCP server traffic from other Hyper-V Extensible Switch ports is automatically dropped. The Hyper-V Extensible Switch now protects against a rogue DHCP server attempting to provide IP addresses that would cause traffic to be rerouted. Virtual port ACLs for network isolation and metering now Port ACLs provide a mechanism for isolating networks and metering network traffic for a virtual port on the Hyper-V Extensible Switch. By using port ACLs, you can meter the IP addresses or MAC addresses that can or cant communicate with a virtual machine. For example, you can use port ACLs to enforce isolation of a virtual machine by letting it talk only to the Internet or communicate only with a predefined set of addresses. Now by using the metering capability, you can measure network traffic going to or from a specific IP address or MAC address, which lets you report on traffic, sent or received from the Internet or from network storage arrays. You can configure multiple port ACLs for a virtual port. Each port ACL consists of a source or destination network address and a permit to deny or meter action. The metering capability also supplies information about the number of instances where traffic was attempted to or from a virtual machine from a restricted address. Trunk mode to virtual machines is also very, very useful. A VLAN makes a set of host machines or virtual machines appear to be on the same local LAN, independent of their actual physical locations. With the Hyper-V Extensible Switch trunk mode, traffic from multiple VLANs can now be directed to a single network adapter in a virtual machine that could previously receive traffic from only one VLAN. As a result, traffic from different VLANs is consolidated, and a virtual machine can listen in on multiple VLANs. which can help you shape network traffic and enforce multitenant security in your data center. And finally Monitoring, many physical switches can monitor the traffic from specific ports flowing through specific virtual machines on the switch. Hyper-V Extensible Switch also provides this port mirroring. You can designate which virtual ports should be monitored and to which virtual port the monitored traffic should be delivered for further processing. For example, a security monitoring VM that could look for anomalous patterns in the traffic that flows through other specific virtual machines on the switch. In addition, you can diagnose network connectivity issues by monitoring traffic bound for a particular virtual switch port. And all of this is managed through common interfaces.Windows Server 2012 provides Windows PowerShell cmdlets for the Hyper-V Extensible Switch that lets you build command-line tools or automated scripts for setup, configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting. These cmdlets can be run remotely also. now PowerShell also enables third parties to build their own tools to manage the Hyper-V Extensible Switch.



04/06/13

Hyper-V Extensible Switch

Cisco
Nexus 1000V
UCS VM-FEX5nine
Security ManagerNEC
OpenFlowInMon
sFlow Multiple Partner Extensions

Hyper-V Extensible Switch is an open platform that lets multiple vendors provide extensions that are written to standard Windows API frameworksPacket InspectionPacket FilteringNetwork ForwardingIntrusion DetectionNow many enterprises need the ability to extend virtual switch features with their own plug-ins to suit that environment. If youre in charge of making IT purchasing decisions at your company, you want to know that the virtualization platform that you choose wont lock you in to a small set of compatible features, devices, or technologies.Now, in Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V Server 2012, the Hyper V Extensible Switch provides the extensibility our partners are looking for. The Hyper V Extensible Switch in Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V Server 2012 is a layer-2 virtual network switch that provides that programmatical managed and extensible capabilities to connect VMs to the physical network. It is an open platform that lets multiple vendors provide extensions that are written to standard Windows API frameworks. The reliability of extensions is strengthened through the Windows standard framework and reduction of required third-party code for functions and is backed by the Windows Hardware Quality Labs certification program. The IT Admin can manage the Hyper-V Extensible Switch and its extensions using PowerShell, programmatically with WMI or through the Hyper-V Manager user interface.Now there are several partners as you can see on the screen that have already announced extensions for the Hyper-V Extensible Switch, Cisco with its Nexus 1000V & UCS Virtual Machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX), NEC with the OpenFlow technology, 5nine with innovative Security technology, and finally InMon with a monitoring focused sFlow product. These extensions are across Packet Inspection, Packet Filtering, Network Forwarding and Intrusion Detection, ensuring comprehensive levels of granularity and control for specific customer scenarios.



04/06/13

VMware Comparison

The Hyper-V Extensible Switch is open and extensible, unlike VMwares vSwitch, which is closed, and replaceableCapabilityHyper-V
(2012)vSphere
HypervisorvSphere 5.1
Enterprise Plus

Extensible vSwitchYesNoReplaceable1

Confirmed Partner Extensions5No2

Private Virtual LAN (PVLAN)YesNoYes1

ARP Spoofing ProtectionYesNovCNS/Partner2

DHCP Snooping ProtectionYesNovCNS/Partner2

Virtual Port ACLsYesNovCNS/Partner2

Trunk Mode to Virtual MachinesYesNoYes3

Port MonitoringYesPer Port GroupYes3

Port MirroringYesPer Port GroupYes3

1 The vSphere Distributed Switch (required for PVLAN capability) is available only in the Enterprise Plus edition of
vSphere 5.1 and is replaceable (By Partners such as Cisco/IBM) rather than extensible.2 ARP Spoofing, DHCP Snooping Protection & Virtual Port ACLs require the App component of VMware vCloud
Network & Security (vCNS) product or a Partner solution, all of which are additional purchases3 Trunking VLANs to individual vNICs, Port Monitoring and Mirroring at a granular level requires vSphere Distributed
Switch, which is available in the Enterprise Plus edition of vSphere 5.1vSphere Hypervisor / vSphere 5.x Ent+ Information: http://www.vmware.com/products/cisco-nexus-1000V/overview.html, http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/networking/switches/virtual/dvs5000v/, http://www.vmware.com/technical-resources/virtualization-topics/virtual-networking/distributed-virtual-switches.html, http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/Whats-New-VMware-vSphere-51-Network-Technical-Whitepaper.pdf, http://www.vmware.com/products/vshield-app/features.html and http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/switches/ps9441/ps9902/data_sheet_c78-492971.html But what about VMware? Whilst VMware offer an advanced distributed network switch, unfortunately, it is only available in the Enterprise Plus edition of vSphere 5.1, thus customers wishing to take advantage of the increased granularity, management capability and control, have to upgrade to the highest edition, at substantial cost. The VMware vSphere Hypervisor unfortunately doesnt provide this capability. A key point to note however, is that the vSphere vSwitch, isnt open and extensible, but instead, closed and replaceable. Up until recently, Cisco were the only vendor to offer an alternative to the VMware vSphere Distributed Switch. Now IBM have recently released an alternative to this, however with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2012, there is already commitment from 4 Partners; to deliver extended functionality across a variety of different extension types, from packet inspection and filtering through to forwarding and intrusion detection, offering customers a greater set of choice for their specific environment. Its also important to note that so far, the approach from VMwares Partners has been more about replacement than integration, with the Cisco Nexus 1000V and the IBM System Networking Distributed Virtual Switch 5000V both effectively replacing the inbox vSphere Distributed Switch.Now many of the more advanced networking capabilities within Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2012 are unfortunately not present within the free vSphere Hypervisor, and even with vSphere 5.1 enterprise plus, key security protection capabilities such as ARP and ND Spoofing Protection, DHCP Snooping Protection and DHCP Guard, along with Virtual Port Access Control Lists are only available through the purchase of additional technologies on top of vSphere 5.1; either the App component of the vCloud Networking & Security product or within the network switch technologies from vendors such as Cisco. This means that again, customers have to add additional, costly technology in order to provide protection from these threats.Now with the Hyper-V Extensible Switch trunk mode, traffic from multiple VLANs can now be directed to a single network adapter this capability also applies in the vSphere enterprise plus edition however isnt available in the free vSphere hypervisor. And finally, the Extensible Switch in the Hyper-Vprovides organizations with the ability to not only monitor individual ports within a vSwitch, but also mirror the traffic that is passing, to an alternative location for further analysis. With VMware vSphere Hypervisor however, all traffic on a particular Port Group or vSwitch, on which Promiscuous Mode is enabled, is exposed, posing a potential risk to the security of that network. That lack of granularity restricts its usage in real world environments, and means that customers who require that next level of protection have to upgrade to vSphere 5.1 Enterprise Plus, which has the Distributed Switch technology to provide the capability through features such as NetFlow and Port Mirroring.



04/06/13

Networking Performance

Dynamic
VMqIPsec Task OffloadSR-IOV Support

The Hyper-V Extensible Switch takes advantage of hardware innovation to drive the highest levels of networking performance within virtual machinesDynamically span multiple CPUs when processing
virtual machine network trafficOffload IPsec processing from within virtual machine,
to physical network adaptor, enhancing performance Map virtual function of an SR-IOV capable physical network adaptor, directly to a virtual machineWindows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2012 also include a number of performance enhancements within the networking stack to help customers virtualize their most intensive workloads. Virtual Machine Queue, introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, enables, when combined with VMq-capable network hardware, a more streamlined and efficient delivery of packets from the external network to the virtual machine, reducing the overhead on the host operating system. In Windows Server 2012 however, this has been streamlined and improved considerably, with Dynamic Virtual Machine Queue spreading the processing of the network traffic more intelligently across CPUs and cores in the host, resulting in higher networking performance.When it comes to security, many customers are familiar with IPsec. IPsec protects network communications by authenticating and encrypting some, or all of the contents of network packets. IPsec Task Offload in Windows Server 2012, leverages the hardware capabilities of server NICs to offload IPsec processing of traffic. This reduces the CPU overhead of IPsec encryption and decryption significantly. In Win Server 2012, its extended to VMs as well. Customers using VMs who want to protect their network traffic with IPsec can take advantage of the IPsec hardware offload capability, thus freeing up CPU cycles to perform more application-level work and leaving the per packet encryption/decryption to hardware.And finally, when it comes to virtual networking, a primary goal is native I/O throughput. Now WinServer 2012 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2012 add the ability to assign SR-IOV functionality from physical devices directly through to virtual machines. This gives VMs the ability to bypass the software-based Hyper-V Virtual Switch and network data, and directly address the NIC. As a result, CPU overhead and latency is reduced, with a corresponding rise in throughput. This is all available, without sacrificing key Hyper-V features such as virtual machine Live Migration.



04/06/13

Physical Security

BitLocker ensures your data stays secure, even when your Hyper-V hosts, clusters, and storage reside in less-physically-secure locationsLocal DiskTraditional Cluster DiskCSV 2.0 BitLocker

And when it comes to deployment of virtualization technologies, many are within secure datacenter environments, but what about those that arent? Satellite offices, remote sites, home offices and retail stores are all examples of environments that may not have the same levels of physical security as the enterprise datacenter, yet may still have physical servers, with virtualization technologies present. If the physical hosts were compromised, there could be very serious repercussions for the business.Well with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2012, BitLocker Drive Encryption is included to solve that very problem, by allowing customers to encrypt all data stored on the host operating system volume and configured data volumes, along with any Failover Cluster disks, Cluster Shared Volumes and so on, ensuring that environments, large and small, that are implemented in less physically secure locations, can have the highest levels of data protection and compliance for their key workloads, at no additional cost



04/06/13

VMware Comparison

Unlike VMware, Hyper-Vs SR-IOV support ensures the highest performance without sacrificing key features such as Live MigrationCapabilityHyper-V
(2012)vSphere
HypervisorvSphere 5.1
Enterprise Plus

Dynamic Virtual Machine QueueYesNetQueue1NetQueue1

IPsec Task OffloadYesNoNo

SR-IOV with Live MigrationYesNo2No2

Storage EncryptionYesNoNo

1 VMware vSphere and the vSphere Hypervisor support VMq only (NetQueue)2 VMwares SR-IOV implementation does not support vMotion, HA or Fault Tolerance. DirectPath I/O, whilst not
identical to SR-IOV, aims to provide virtual machines with more direct access to hardware devices, with
network cards being a good example. Whilst on the surface, this will boost VM networking performance, and
reduce the burden on host CPU cycles, in reality, there are a number of caveats in using DirectPath I/O:

Very small Hardware Compatibility List

No Memory Overcommit

No vMotion (unless running certain configurations of Cisco UCS)

No Fault Tolerance

No Network I/O Control

No VM Snapshots (unless running certain configurations of Cisco UCS)

No Suspend/Resume (unless running certain configurations of Cisco UCS)

No VMsafe/Endpoint Security support

SR-IOV also requires the vSphere Distributed Switch, meaning customers have to upgrade to the highest
vSphere edition to take advantage of this capability. No such restrictions are imposed when using SR-IOV in
Hyper-V, ensuring customers can combine the highest levels of performance with the flexibility they need for
an agile infrastructure.vSphere Hypervisor / vSphere 5.x Ent+ Information: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere5.1.pdf Now, whilst VMware provide a capability known as NetQueue, in VMwares own documentation, entitled the Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 5.1, it is noted that On some 10 Gigabit Ethernet hardware network adapters, ESXi supports NetQueue, a technology that significantly improves performance of 10 Gigabit Ethernet network adapters in virtualized environments. What does this mean for customers who have servers that dont have 10 GigE? With Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2012, and Dynamic-VMq, customers with existing 1 gigabit and 10 gigabit Ethernet adaptors can flexibly utilize these advanced capabilities to improve performance and throughput, whilst reducing the CPU burden on their Hyper-V hosts.When it comes to network security, specifically IPsec, VMware offers no offloading capabilities from the virtual machine through to the physical network interface, thus in a densely populated environment, valuable host CPU cycles will be lost to maintain the desired security level. With Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, the IPsec Task Offload capability will move that workload to a dedicated processor on the network adaptor, enabling customers to make dramatically better use of the resources and bandwidth that is available.Now as stated earlier, when it comes to virtual networking, a primary goal is native I/O. With SR-IOV, customers have the ability to directly address the physical NIC from within the virtual machine, reducing CPU overhead and latency whilst increasing throughput. In vSphere 5.1, VMware have introduced SR-IOV support, however it requires the vSphere Distributed Switch a feature only found in the highest vSphere edition, meaning customers have to upgrade to take advantage of the higher levels of performance. And also, VMwares implementation of SR-IOV unfortunately doesnt support other features such as vMotion, High Availability and Fault Tolerance, meaning customers who wish to take advantage of higher levels of performance, must sacrifice agility and resiliency. Prior to vSphere 5.1, VMware provided a feature that offered a similar capability to SR-IOV, and continues to offer this in 5.1. DirectPath I/O, a technology which binds a physical NIC up to a virtual machine, offers that same enhancement, to near native performance, however, unlike SR-IOV in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2012, a VM with DirectPath I/O enabled is restricted to that particular host, unless the customer is running a certain configuration of Cisco UCS. And theres lots of other caveats, no Memory Overcommit, no vMotion , no Fault Tolerance, no Network I/O Control, No VM Snapshots.Now whilst DirectPath I/O may be attractive to customers from a performance perspective, VMware ask customers to sacrifice agility, losing vMotion in most cases, and scale, having to disable memory overcommit, along with a number of other vSphere features. No such restrictions are imposed when using SR-IOV with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, ensuring customers can combine the highest levels of performance with the flexibility they need for an agile, scalable infrastructure.Finally, when it comes to physical security, VMware has no capability within the vSphere Hypervisor or vSphere 5.1 that can enable the encryption of either VMFS, or the VMDK files themselves, and instead rely on hardware-based, or in-guest alternatives, which add cost, management overhead, and additional resource usage.



04/06/13


In this penultimate section, well take a look at the key capabilities within Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2012, that enable organizations to be flexible, and agile.



04/06/13

Virtual Machine Mobility

Live
MigrationFaster, unrestricted, simultaneous VM live migrations between cluster nodes with no downtime

Live Storage
MigrationMove the virtual hard disks of running virtual machines to a different storage location with no downtime

Shared-Nothing Live MigrationMove Virtual Machines between Hyper-V hosts with nothing but a network cable

Now to maintain optimal use of physical resources and to be able to easily add new virtual machines, IT must be able to move virtual machines whenever necessary without disrupting the business. The ability to move virtual machines across HyperV hosts is available in Windows Server 2008 R2, with a feature known as Live Migration. But Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2012 build on that feature and enhance the ability to migrate virtual machines with support for simultaneous live migrations - the ability to move several virtual machines at the same time, enabling a more agile, responsive infrastructure and at the same time a more optimal usage of network bandwidth during the migration process.In addition, Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2012, introduce Live Storage Migration, which lets the IT Admin move virtual hard disks that are attached to a running virtual machine. Through this feature, IT can transfer virtual hard disks, with no downtime, to a new location for upgrading or migrating storage, performing backend storage maintenance, or redistributing the storage load. The IT Admin can perform this operation by using a new wizard in HyperV Manager or the new HyperV cmdlets for Windows PowerShell. Live storage migration is available for both storage area network and file-based storage.And finally with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server 2012, live migrations are no longer limited to a cluster and virtual machines can be migrated across cluster boundaries. With Shared-Nothing Live Migration, we can move a running virtual machine and its disk from physical server to physical server with nothing but an ethernet cable. An example of this could be a developer working on a virtualized web server on his local Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V workstation. And once testings complete this workload could be migrated live with no interruption from the local host system where the virtual machine resides on locally attached storage across the production cluster or the VM will reside at a high performance SAN storage. With Shared-Nothing live migration this migration is seamless with no interruption or downtime.



04/06/13

DemoAnd I want to take a moment to show you these capabilities in action so lets take a look. So here we are again in my demo environment and Im going to bring up failover cluster here and you can see that Ive selected a number of machines that are currently running on our cluster its a three node cluster remember, all three running Hyper-V Server 2012 and these four virtual machines that Ive selected Im going to right click, move, live migrate, and now notice whats new in Windows Server 2012 its almost this guidance of where were going to distribute the virtual machines to. Youll notice all the virtual machines are currently on node 4 and if I selected best possible node Hyper-V and the clustering management tools are going to move the virtual machines and distribute them a little more evenly. But Im going to choose to select to move them all to a single node and Im going to choose node number 2, and well go ok. And youll see that all of those virtual machines are migrating simultaneously, as quickly as possible utilizing that network bandwidth as much as possible, final virtual machine going across there, notice this final virtual machine is actually one thats got our virtual fiber channel adaptors attached to it as well, so that should have been moved across. Youll notice that ones got a little bit more memory than the others and therefore it took a little bit longer but that was a very easy and simple demonstration showcasing multiple, simultaneous virtual machine live migration.What I want to do now is select a slightly different VM Demo number 5 and Im going to choose move again but this time Im going to choose virtual machine storage, so Im going to do a live storage migration. And well click virtual machine storage, notice Ive got all of the things that make up a virtual machine so the disk, snapshot, configuration files and so on, and I want to choose where I want to drop them. Currently its located on volume 1, but Im going to choose to just click and drag and move to volume 3. so well go start, and off it goes so were starting that virtual machine storage migration and thats going to take a little time to complete, its a decent size due to the amount of storage there to move and if I go over to Hyper-V Manager here, we can see as it stands on #2 there migrating storage, 17, 18% and its synchronizing, its shifting those virtual machine files around to a different location, in this case a different LUN on the same SAN. Now, one thing I also want to show, the final area of migration is the shared nothing live migration. Because what weve shown initially is how we can move a multiple virtual machine, multiple running virtual machines between cluster nodes, weve also shown the movement of the d

advantages of hyperv over vsphere 5.1

Career