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» VIEW ALL POSTS Dec 13 2007   12:28PM GMT

VMware competition nears; Microsoft ships Hyper-V beta



Posted by: Alex Barrett
Microsoft, Virtualization

VMware, are you listening? Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor, formerly known as Viridian, is available for public beta, the company announced today. It can be obtained by downloading Windows Server 2008 RC1 Enterprise from http://www.microsoft.com/ws08eval.

The beta is shipping ahead of schedule, with Microsoft previously promising it for the first quarter of 2008.

This is not the first glimpse the public has had of Hyper-V; Microsoft released a Community Technology Preview (CTP) release of Hyper-V in September. With this release, Microsoft is demonstrating additional features, notably Quick Migration, high availability, Server Core role and Server Manager integration. The final release of Hyper-V is still scheduled for release within 180 days of “release to manufacturing” (RTM) of Windows Server 2008, currently scheduled for Feb. 27, 2008.

Writing on the Windows Server Division Weblog, Mike Neil, GM of virtualization strategy, also revealed that Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition will also grant one virtual instance of the OS — which is not the case with WS 2K3 Standard edition, he pointed out.

According to the post, specific new features of Hyper-V include the following:

  • Quick Migration and cluster high availability
  • Default integration with Windows Server management;
  • Support for running Hyper-V with Server Core in the parent partition;
  • Volume Shadow Copy Service, or VSS, support;
  • VHD tools support (compaction, expansion and inspection);
  • Hyper-V Microsoft Management Console (MMC)-only installation. The Hyper-V MMC can be installed on Windows Server 2008 without installing the complete Hyper-V role enabling remote management of Hyper-V servers;
  • Support for up to four virtual SCSI controllers per VM, with 255 VHDs per controller;
  • Support for multiple network adapters per VM;
  • Support for up to 64 GB of memory per VM; and
  • Guest support for Windows 2003 x86/x64 and Windows 2008 x86/x64 (support for other guest OS platforms will arrive before the Hyper-V RTM).

A webcast detailing the new Hyper-V beta is scheduled for next week, on Tuesday, Dec. 18, at 12:30 PST; interested parties can register here.

More to come.

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Kevin  |   Dec 14, 2007  11:34 AM (GMT)

Compe…..what? Please. Still not competitive even if they hadn’t dropped some of the features to bring them into competition with VMware. And it remains to be see whether there is any significant reduction in the need to reboot the “hypervisor only” server for patching in the real world. Minus a feature like vMotion, this is pretty crippling in itself.


 

Hany  |   Dec 15, 2007  3:36 AM (GMT)

It seems that it can be only installed on x64 platforms, you can’t insall it on normall x86 platforms ..


 

BKosh  |   Jan 2, 2008  11:01 AM (GMT)

Perhaps the addition of Sanbolic makes Hyper-V a bit more competitive? See story below.

Wednesday, January 02, 2008 | 07:55AM PST
From:
Redmond Channel Partner

Sanbolic Brings Clustered File System, Volume Management To Hyper-V

December 20, 2007

by Barbara Darrow

Sanbolic will soon announce support for Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization product.

The Watertown, Mass., company offers volume management software and a clustered file system — both of which complement Microsoft’s Windows Server and upcoming virtualization stack, says Bill Stevenson, executive chairman of the company.

Sanbolic’s special sauce is that its software lets servers see and access disks at the same time.

“Any type of application using Microsoft servers or workstations can benefit from that shared access to SAN data,” Stevenson said.

“For many applications, like Web servers where you have active content from multiple sources and traffic variations, we can provide a single pool of active content. All content and Web servers can access the data concurrently so there’s no need for replication across the various devices . You can add capacity immediately by adding Web servers,” he noted.

The tandem of Sanbolic’s LaScala volume management and Melio, the clustered file system, are usually both installed in cases where you’re looking for shared file access, says Mark Crescenzi, CEO of Prismworks Technology, Inc., a Hummelstown, Penn.-based solution provider.

“Traditionally you have disks presented and even in a clustered environment usually one node accesses [the disks] at a time. Even in an active-active environment, one node is primary and fails over to a secondary. What Sanbolic does is allow multiple nodes to access files at the same time; it really puts the network in the storage area network.”

Microsoft’s Hyper-V will be available with several Windows Server 2008 SKUs and as a standalone server. Windows Server 2008 is due early next year and the finished version of Hyper-V within 180 days of that. A week ago, Microsoft launched the first public beta of Hyper-V.

Barbara Darrow is Industry Editor for Redmond Developer News, Redmond magazine and Redmond Channel Partner. She has covered technology and business issues for 20 years.

PRINT THIS PAGE NOW


 

NK  |   Jan 10, 2008  10:28 AM (GMT)

I had started out using VMware for virtual conversions however found the MS products to be much easier to manage and maintain. Hyper-v is extremely fast and right up to par with Physical machines. I have no doubt MS will be the major up and coming VM platform and as usual there support is far above what VMware provides.