Hyper-V 3.0 – What’s New in Windows Server 2012?

Brien Poseyhttp://www.backupacademy.com

Twitter: @BckpAcademy

About Me

Freelance technical author and industry analyst

9 time Microsoft MVP for File Systems / Storage, Exchange Server, Windows Server, and IIS

Formerly a CIO for a national chain of hospitals and healthcare facilities

Network engineer for the Department of Defense at Fort Knox

Network administrator for some of the nation’s largest insurance companies

Agenda

A Brief History of Hyper-V What’s New in Hyper-V 3.0

Hyper-V Release History

Windows Server 2008 – Hyper-V 1.0

● Basic functionality only

Windows Server 2008 R2 – Hyper-V 2.0

● Live migration

● Memory over commitment

Windows Server 2012 – Hyper-V 3.0

● Hundreds of new features

● The hypervisor becomes enterprise class

Standalone / Service

Hyper-V is offered as a free, standalone product OR as a service that runs on Windows Server

This presentation will focus solely on Hyper-V as a service

Microsoft Finally Got it Right!

Enterprise class features that are comparable to VMware vSphere 5

The same simple interface

Hyper-V 2.0

Hyper-V 3.0

PowerShell Management

Memory Ballooning

Hyper-V 2.0 introduced memory over commitment

Memory over commitment increases virtual machine density

Minimum memory and startup memory were the same things in Hyper-V 2.0. A VM always started with the minimum memory

An idle VM may use less memory than is required at startup

Hyper-V 3.0 differentiates between minimum memory and startup memory

Memory Ballooning

Hyper-V 3.0Hyper-V 2.0

Live Migration

Live migration was first introduced in Hyper-V 2.0

Live migration allowed a running virtual machine to be moved to another host without being taken off line

In Hyper-V 2.0, live migration was a serial operation. Only one VM could be live migrated

In Hyper-V 3.0 multiple virtual machines can be live migrated simultaneously

The administrator sets the concurrent live migration threshold based on the available bandwidth, but Hyper-V 3.0 supports an unlimited number of concurrent live migrations

Live Migrations

Live Migrations Beyond the Cluster

Previously it was only possible to live migrate a VM to a cluster node

Hyper-V 3.0 makes it possible to live migrate a VM to a host that exists outside of the cluster. This is called Shared Nothing Live Migration

Shared Nothing Live Migration should not be used as a long term replacement for traditional failover clustering

Shared Nothing Live Migration

Requirements:

● At least 2 Hyper-V 3.0 hosts

● Each server requires adequate storage (local or remote SMB)

● Hosts must have the same family or type of processor if you are using the processor compatibility feature

● Hosts must exist in the same AD domain

● The hosts must be connected by a gigabit or faster network link

● Hosts must have Client for Microsoft Networks and File and Print Sharing for Microsoft Networks enabled

● Pass through storage cannot be used

● The same virtual switch configuration must exist on each host

No Shared Storage Requirement

Live Migration in Hyper-V 2.0 required the use of shared storage

Shared storage is recommended, but not required in Hyper-V 3.0

SharedStorage

VM VM

Host 1 Host 2

VM

Failover Clustering

Microsoft has made numerous changes to failover clustering in Hyper-V

The most significant change is the ability to create clusters without shared storage

Microsoft has also made scalability improvements (which will be discussed later)

Storage Migrations

Live storage migration replaces Hyper-V 2.0 Quick Storage Migration

Storage migration is different from live migration. It is designed to move a virtual machine from one storage location to another, not from one host to another

In Hyper-V 2.0 there was a brief outage that occurred at the end of a storage migration

In Hyper-V 3.0 storage migrations occur without down time

Hyper-V Replica

Replicate a running virtual machine to an alternate host

Replication can occur near real time with an adjustable schedule

The Replica feature works well in high latency environments or in environments where connectivity is not always reliable

Hyper-V replica is not a fail over clustering solution. It is a disaster recovery solution

Virtual Fibre Channel

Virtual Fibre Channel allows VMs to connect directly to Fibre Channel storage through a virtual SAN

Virtual Fibre Channel is based on N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) mapping

Physical Host Bus Adapters must support NPIV and must be connected to an NPIV enabled SAN

Each Host Bus Adapter must be assigned two World Wide Names in order to facilitate Live Migration

Scalability Improvements

Hyper-V 3.0 is far more scalable than Hyper-V 2.0

Hyper-V 2.0 Hyper-V 3.0

Maximum Virtual CPUs per VM 4 32

Maximum memory per VM 64 GB 512 GB

Maximum Virtual Hard Disk Size 2 TB 16 TB with VHDX

Cluster Scalability

There are also numerous improvements to cluster scalability

Hyper-V 2.0 Hyper-V 3.0

The maximum number of virtual machines per host that can be powered on at any given time

384 1024

Maximum number of virtual machines in a cluster 1000 4000

Maximum number of hosts per cluster 16 64

Maximum RAM per host server 1 TB 2 TB

Snapshots

Hyper-V has had snapshot capabilities since the first version

Accumulating snapshots can impact read performance and can complicate backup / restoration operations

In previous versions of Hyper-V, VMs had to be shut down to remove snapshots that were no longer needed

Hyper-V 3.0 can perform snapshot merges while the VM is running

Hot Adding Resources

Hot resource allocation is new to Hyper-V 3.0

It allows additional hardware resources to be allocated to a VM while it is running

Hot resource allocation is available for memory and disks

CPU cores cannot be hot allocated

NIC Teaming

Hyper-V 2.0 supported NIC teaming only at the hardware level (Intel and Broadcom only)

Hyper-V 3.0 has native support for NIC teaming at the software level. This allows commodity NICs to be teamed

NIC teaming allows for high bandwidth and fault tolerant connections

Teams can include NICs from multiple vendors

Deduplication

Deduplication is actually a Windows Server 2012 feature, not a Hyper-V feature

It is possible to deduplicate VHD libraries, ISOs, and live VHD volumes

Deduplication reduces physical storage requirements and can make using solid state storage more practical

SMB Support

VMs can now be stored on SMB shares

SMB storage is easier to configure than Fibre Channel or iSCSI, but there are limits

● Legacy SMB is not supported

● Scaling is bandwidth dependent

● SMB storage is intended primarily for smaller environments, although it will support larger workloads with the use of high end hardware

Affinity and Anti-Affinity Rules

Affinity and anti-affinity rules control virtual machine failover

Affinity rules can be used to ensure that certain virtual machines always failover together

Anti-affinity rules can prevent certain VMs from ever failing over to a common host

VM prioritization will prioritize VM startup when a failover occurs to an overloaded host

Offload Data Transfer

Virtual machine copy operations can be resource intensive

In SAN environments Hyper-V 3.0 will support Offload Data Transfer (ODX)

This will allow the storage hardware to do the heavy lifting

ODX support is built in. There is no “enable ODX” button

Extensible Virtual Switch

In previous versions of Hyper-V the virtual switch was nearly impossible to monitor or manage

Management software saw the virtual switch as a black box

Vendors can extend the Hyper-V virtual switch to work with their wares

Conclusion

With version 3.0 Hyper-V has finally arrived!

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