Posts by Virtual PC Guy 3 publicly visible posts • joined 25 May 2011
Ben Armstrong, Hyper-V Program Manager, here. Actually, unlike VMware we use the same technology for virtualization on desktop and server. So when the first poster says that we have had 64 vCPU in our desktop virtualization platform since Windows 8 - they are spot on.
Do not get me wrong - there is some cool stuff that VMware does on the desktop - but when it comes to scale and performance, we have a fair head start.
While I do enjoy reading the comments - let me explain a bit of the behind the scenes stuff.
Letting people know that they have the *right* version of the integration components installed inside a virtual machine is quite important. First, it helps users avoid a number of common problems - second, it helps avoid a huge annoyance. That is the annoyance of hitting a problem, calling Microsoft support, and having them say "please update your integration components before we do anything else".
To this end - we have spent a chunk of time trying to make sure we detect when the wrong version of the integration components are present - and do as much as we can to indicate what is happening.
The problem is that all of our systems for doing this are built around the Windows integration components - which ship as part of the host operating system. This means that they are versioned along with the host operating system, and we can just check their versions against the host operating system version. This story is completely different for Linux. The Linux integration components ship as part of Linux. They have a completely different versioning and release system to the Windows integration components.
The unfortunate result is that you can have a Linux guest operating system that has the right components installed, with all the necessary functionality - but Hyper-V is confused about the support stance.
The primary reason why we published the document that is being referred to in this article is so that users would not be "given the run around" if they called up Microsoft support when running a Linux guest with the latest integration components.
Hopefully, this is something that we can handle better in the future.
Cheers,
Ben (Hyper-V Program Manager - A.K.A. Virtual PC Guy)
Disclosure: I work at MSFT on Hyper-V
I spend a lot of time talking to people who are deploying virtualisation for private cloud solutions, and discussing the hardware requirements.
For most people - the presence of modern multi-core processors means that CPU is rarely an issue. In fact, most people have significant excess CPU power even after they have moved to a virtualised environment.
Memory can trip people up - but if you get it wrong it is fairly easy to identify - because VMs will fail to start with big error messages about there not being enough memory.
But storage throughput is the silent performance killer.
People go and put ~50 systems on a storage I/O system that is only twice as powerful as what they used to use for a single system - and then do not understand why performance is awful. There are really two problems here:
1) We (I am using the royal we here and are referring to the makers of virtualisation software) do not alert users that performance issues may be caused by the fact that a given virtual machine seems to only be getting a measly 5mbit storage throughput (and I have seen numbers get that bad on poorly configured systems)
2) System administrators / IT pros are just not used to thinking about the importance of storage bandwidth. For most systems today you just "get a good storage system" and do not take the time to actually think about it and size things out properly.
Cheers,
Ben
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