Deep, deep dive: Hyper-V

Next week, on the 17th May at 11am, we will show you how to take advantage of the improvements and new features of virtual machine migration with Hyper-V 3.0 and Windows Server 2012. Our award-winning Regcasts crew is teaming up with training provider QA to do the deepest of deep dives for you. And you can join in, for free …

[John Sanders]

Does MS support the installation....

If you use NIC teaming/bonding?

Last time I had to deploy HYPE-V there was some small print about MS not giving you any support if you choosed to enable NIC teaming on the HYPE-V hosts.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Does MS support the installation....

Yes, it's built in to Server 2012. You can team across cards of different vendors if you like. Supports LACP, or switch independent modes.

[John Sanders]

Re: Does MS support the installation....

I'm not asking if it can do it, Windows 2008/R2 can do it too, but Microsoft does not support the set-up.

Meaning that if you have an issue in the Win2008/R2 Hyper-V production environment and have NIC bonding enabled Microsoft can/will refuse to give you support even if the problem has nothing to do with NIC bonding.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would I want Hyper-V,

when I can have KVM or Xen?

A bit like asking; Why would I want a Trabant, when I can have a Volkswagen*?

*Insert preferred marque of choice.

[RonWheeler]

Re: Why would I want Hyper-V,

If you're a Microsoft shop, it is great. Especially if you get charity/gvt/edu pricing. Can only directly compare to VMware, so

Management tools a joy to use compared to VMware's

Manage (backup/copy) your .vhd files using Windows explorer rather than needing VMFS tools

Inject changes directly into virtual machine targets from Server 2012

VSS integration is strong

It is reliable and stable

In real world usage I've seen CPU usage from 16 core host to socket capped virtual servers such as MS SQL Std,scale much better than in equivalent VMware. Won't pretend to understand how it distributes load so well from one to many, but anecdotally from me it does. On the downside it fares less well with virtual machines running many hundreds of small services/applications running concurrently (like terminal server)

It is a LOT cheaper than VMware for in most SMB scenarions, possibly for the big boys too depending on density..

[Velv]

Re: Why would I want Hyper-V,

Money.

Running virtualisation software is not just about the cost of the virtualisation software, it's about Total Cost of Ownership. If you're runnning a proper Enterprise you'll need to add a support contract to your "free" hypervisor, which pretty much brings the playing field level (VMWare excluded).

Remember, if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer - you're the product being sold!!!

(here, have this free bag of cocaine)

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would I believe you, you said the same hyperbole about hyper-v in w2k8r2 which is shite, esp with egg shell fragility of cluster shard volumes.

[fiddley]

"The system uptime is 21072953 seconds."

Latest EventID 6013 from the system log of one of my machines running on cluster 'shard' volumes. It would be more but I decided to change it to dynamic RAM all those months ago which necessitated a reboot.

(Don't panic, it's on a private network so patching isn't an issue!)

[John Sanders]

For a few HOST and about a dozen VMs...

Hype-V 2008/R2 is fine, add than a dozen more on clustered storage and buy some popcorn.

When the weird stuff begin happening, MS's support will blame it on the SAN, the hardware, the weather... you know the rest.

[MMull]

Podcast?

Will there be a podcast for download afterwards?