What’s new in Hyper-V in Windows Server 2016? Microsoft is busy reshaping Windows server for the cloud era, and the Hyper-V hypervisor is changing accordingly. The first release of Hyper-V was with Windows Server 2008. It was a solid and reliable product from the beginning, but with limited features compared to its competition, especially VMware. The technology is …
Of course he did. It's no secret that Hyper-V scales better than Linux hypervisors like KVM - and has a lower TCO - so there is nowhere better to run your legacy *Nix OSs. Hence why Hyper-V has a ~30% market share of hypervisors versus circa 1% for KVM.
Just to mention that all of the improvements mentioned in the article for Hyper-V under Windows Server also apply to Hyper-V Server 2016 - the hypervisor only option - which is also completely free with all features enabled!
Microsoft employee A/C - chill out and get with the times!
In reality the hypervisor is a commodity these days - like the hardware itself, they all work pretty well and it's largely irrelevant which one you use as the applications sitting on top (the part that actually matters) simply don't care. So it's nice to see Hyper-V catching up with its peers - that's just more choice in what is a pretty mature market now.
As for 'nix being legacy? Well in the wild it vastly outnumbers Windows (desktops aside) and even consumer devices running a 'nix (yes OS X, iOS and Android all count) outsell those running Windows nowadays. Windows still has it's place of course, but it takes a serious level of technological ignorance to pretend that it's the be-all and end-all of computing platforms.
I didnt rush out and upgrade our 2k12 nodes to 2k12r2 as i didnt have a use for gen2. I do like the idea of containers though and have looked at docker etc. So it looks like im going to evict a node and get a 2k16 upgrade rolling soon.
As for linux, centos 7 runs nicely and plays well in hyper-v i have 18 vms over 3 nodes with our web servers, filtering and mysql running on centos servers. No issues there for us so im not sure why people are mocking linux on hyperv
There is no such thing as "market share" on FOSS, there is no market for it because it is not being sold, you can have it for free, it is impossible to know how many installations of it are out there since nobody keeps track of it (and nobody but Microsoft cares to do so).
One of our customers is using HyperV (because it's basically free once you've bought Windows). Across two hosts they're running about three Windows VMs, and about four Linux VMs.
The only wrinkle I've found is that Ubuntu Server 14.04 VMs don't always shutdown correctly, one of the VM extensions seems to be hanging. Otherwise they work just as well as on VMWare or Virtualbox as far as I can tell.
"performance has turned out to be poor, because of the bloat of XML libraries invoked to parse the files."
Yep, text based config files are a nasty legacy solution that just doesn't scale well and doesnt have granular auditing or security permission capbilities. I'm glad Microsoft have switched to a configuration database..
Unix/Linux have managed for decades with text based config files without a big problem
As for bloat... Well, any decent XERCES based parser could be offloaded into a separate .exe and called only to parse the files at startup.
As for the config database. Don't MS have one already? Called the Registry?
If there is something that gets bloated it is that abomination. If it didn't then why are there so many registry cleaners available?
At least if a text file si incorrect just the bits that use it will barf (after logging the fact). An issue with the registry as everyone knows can stop the whole system from running.
I' know what I'd rather have thank you.
"If there is something that gets bloated it is that abomination. If it didn't then why are there so many registry cleaners available?"
That's just lazy reasoning. There are plenty of "driver upgrader" software available but it still makes them useless.
Some software may leave useless junk behind when uninstalled, just like uninstalling software may leave configuration files and user settings files in their home directories - even in Linux/OSX etc. The existence of this information either in the Windows registry or in obsolete files doesn't slow down your computer.
"Unix/Linux have managed for decades with text based config files without a big problem"
It is a massive problem. You can't support granular permissions or granular auditing of individual settings without bodges like version repositories - plus they don't scale well and are computationally expensive to parse. Hence why there is a slow move even in the somewhat dated *NIX world towards database type config stores.
"Don't MS have one already? Called the Registry?"
Yep, and various others including Active Directory - with all the advantages already stated versus flat text files.
"If there is something that gets bloated it is that abomination. If it didn't then why are there so many registry cleaners available?"
15 years ago they might occasionally have been useful, but since Windows XP onwards, they have they not been of any significant benefit. They exist now to scam end users with unnecessary and usually chargeable crapware.
The registry, while having some advantages, is one of the single most ill-conceived ideas that Microsoft vomitted out and embedded into the heart of Windows. I'll admit that some of the plus points such as search are reasonable but compared to the overall inefficiency, instability and unmanageability of the registry pale into comparison.
Can you imagine the deployment and management pain if IIS web applications stored their configuration in the registry instead of files such as web.config? Suddenly you move from files that can be version controlled and managed to storage in an amorphous blob registry file that when the operating system fails you can't (easily) recover from - and it's often a fair bet that when a system really goes down that something upleasant will have happened to the registry database file, if not the file structure itself but what passes for referential integrity.
"Can you imagine the deployment and management pain if IIS web applications stored their configuration in the registry instead of files such as web.config? "
That's a .Net limitation. IIS has a "metabase" registry type store that would be a far better place for this type of data. However. .Net runs in many more places than an IIS stack...
"A configuration database that is constantly attacked by viruses, malware and is a single point of failure for the whole system."
If you say so, but how come internet facing Linux servers are over 4 times more likely to be hacked than Windows Server based systems (allowing for relative market share)?
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=hyperv+Discrete+Device+Assignment - Yes.
BTW, Used it for years on VMware. I have an eight port MPEG decoder for security cameras to a ZoneMinder VM at work. It looks like an orange octopus with really thin arms is climbing out of the expansion slots. On my home system I have several DVBS2 decoders for my virty MythTV backend and a Sangoma POTS card for my FreePBX VM (as you do.)
Thanks for the reply, I had in fact Googled it, however that blog is for TP4. I was wondering if it's definitely officially in the release. I suppose the fact that it's still in TP4 means it's definitely in.
Your setups sound very interesting, as they both seem like quite unusual scenarios for passthrough. I wanted to run a Windows virtual machine and passthrough the GPU; I even bought specific hardware (I know GPU support is restricted by nVidia etc.), but there's a list of supported cards on the Xen wiki for example. Ultimately, I was frustrated and could never get it to work, using either Xen/Qemu or KVM, so I was hoping Microsoft had made a more thorough effort on this front. This paragraph on the GPU focused TechNet blog stood out:
We’re working with the GPU vendors to see if they want to support specific GPUs, and they may decide to do that. It’s really their call, and they’re unlikely to make a support statement on more than the few GPUs that are sold into the server market. If they do, they’ll supply driver packages which convert them from being considered “use at your own risk” within Hyper-V to the supported category. When those driver packages are installed, the error and warning messages that appear when you try to dismount the GPU will disappear.
I guess it's time to grab TP4 and try!
I believe GPU passthrough is only available in VMWare as a paid for option? What version of VMWare are you using and were you able to pass through your devices without paying extra?
I've used Hyper-V since the very early days and still do.. I've used it in anger and it's been ok, reliable infact and I like it. I've also built and run large scale Xen / KVM and VMware platforms, though not for a couple of years now, thankfully (life is now far less stressful hehe). But Microsoft... this is 2016... why is there no native built in REST API? Why the bejeezus do they still force people to administer it from the GUI or from that godawful piece of crud Powershell? Spit spit spit.
Someone needs to take that company by the scruff of the neck and modernise them.
Have I missed something? Whilst it is fairly obvious that one can encrypt files and then physical access to the media doesn't help, it is much less obvious that one can encrypt computation. If you cannot encrypt computation, then everything your shielded VM does must actually happen on the physical CPU. An attacker with physical access to that CPU wouldn't need much in the way of snooping tools to duplicate that and turn it into a "live show" (fully decrypted) of your VM. Since *you* have no physical access to the machine, you have no way of knowing that they aren't doing this.
(Edit: Also, once they've got that, all your encryption keys are presumably in plain text at some point during the boot process, so they only need to do it the hard way once.)
So let me get this straight: Microsoft is supplying a product to allow multiple copies of Windows to run to provide some sort of isolation because a single instance of Windows doesn't work properly or doesn't scale, or doesn't isolate processes properly. Brilliant. Why don't they just fix Windows instead? Who in their right mind would want to run more layers of Microsoft nonsense?
Presumably they've sorted it out so that only one of the VMs scans all of your drives for 'user experience telemetry' or do they simply filter out the duplicates in Redmond?
Seriously: why is anyone using Windows now?
"So let me get this straight: Microsoft is supplying a product to allow multiple copies of Windows to run to provide some sort of isolation"
Yep.
"because a single instance of Windows doesn't work properly or doesn't scale"
Nope. This is for specific security requirements. (Windows scales better in this regard via Hyper-V than commonly used Linux based solutions like KVM.)
"why is anyone using Windows now"
For us? On the server side, better security (lower risk of successful attack, fewer vulnerabilities that are on average patched faster than enterprise Linux), a lower TCO, and wider support than any competing option.
Does anyone know if these new features are going to be asked about in MCSA exams? I've been studying using this Android app -
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.abians.exam70_410&referrer=utm_source%3D19
and I think I have the Hyper-V topic down, but I'm not sure how much time I should spend studying the 2016 features
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