5 Things You Need To Know About Hyper-V

I was fortunate to receive a Twitter message from the Microsoft virtualization team after writing my blog post A Weekend With Hyper-V. If you aren't familiar with the Windows Virtualization Team Blog, you can find it at http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization. Ronald Beekelaar, Microsoft MVP of Virtual Machine Technology, has an excellent blog post there about the Top 5 Things You Should Know About Hyper-V, which I'm summarizing here (you can read Ronald's post for the full details.) I appreciate Ronald and the other team members putting information like this up on their blog. It helps accelerate learning and sharing info about Hyper-V.

• Optimized synthetic disk and network drivers greatly improve Hyper-V's I/O speed. That's one of the major ways Hyper-V has improved performance over the Virtual PC/Virtual Server technology. It should be noted that the Integration Components have to be installed on the host OS in order to get the new synthetic driver technology. 
• Snapshots now let you save and start at a point-in-time. Sounds like things are much simpler in Hyper-V than they were in Virtual PC/Virtual Server.
• Quick Migration; some features and some limitations. Hyper-V does have some support for fail-over scenarios but it relies on Windows Server clustering to do so. Quick Migration also only recovers the memory state but not the shared storage. I'd guess this is something will be addressed fairly soon so as high availability is a big deal for most production environments.
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager is recommended. Ronald extols the benefits of SCVMM and while it may not be as feature rich as other virtualization management tools that have been in market longer, that doesn't mean you should overlook SCVMM.
• Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 CORE. If you aren't familiar with Windows Server 2008 CORE, it's basically the server OS with everything stripped out of it except the bare essentials. That means faster speeds and not extraneous software hanging around you don't need, assuming your server going to be a dedicated Hyper-V role server. Hyper-V is running as a standalone native hypervisor like VMware ESX but this is the lightest weight way you can run Hyper-V right now. A definite consideration for production environments.

Like this? Here are some of Mitchell's recent posts.
7 Skills For IT Fame & Fortune
iPhone's A Useless Brick With Me (AT&T)
A Weekend With Hyper-V
Limitations Won't Dampen Hyper-V
Citrix CTO Simon Crosby Scheduled for Podcast Interview
Citrix Virtualization CTO Disputes Red Hat Hypervisor Strategy

Product Reviews:
Microsoft Live Mesh Google App Engine LiveNewsCameras.com Xobni Outlook plugin

Rock Star jobs in SaaS: SaaS Jobs

Recent Converging Network Blog Posts:
Get Ready For XaaS Everywhere Unbelievably Bad Web Password Security Back From Hiatus, Saved by Web 2.0 Technology It Takes a Village.. ah, actually, being there first and tons of hard work

Favorite Book Recommendations: The Big Switch Zero Day Attack Clear Blogging

Check out Mitchell's Converging On Microsoft Podcast. Current Podcast Episode: Security Mike Gets Serious About Security

Also visit Mitchell's personal blog The Converging Network and SSAATY Security Podcast.

Visit Microsoft Subnet for more news, blogs, opinion from around the Web.

Sign up for the bi-weekly Microsoft newsletter. (Click on News/Microsoft News Alert.)