Is Hyper-V up to the task of production server virtualization?

Microsoft's has a Hyper-V performance document available.

Microsoft's trying to answer their own questiions:

"Is Hyper-V up to the task of production server virtualization?"
"Does Hyper-V have the stability and performance required to meet our needs?"

This paper describes how MSFT is running MSDN and Technet on Hyper-V systems.

Interesting to note that "dynamic disks do not perform quite as well as fixed or physical disk options".

Rob Emanuel from Microsoft.com Operations team also writes it up.

It's all about the ratio.

VKernel is an advocate of running your hardware at high levels of capacity. I know that we would see record-breaking ratios of virtual machines to server hardware.

• A major worldwide financial services organization achieved a 12:1 consolidation ratio and increased its central processing unit utilization by 30 percent.
  
  
• An Indian petroleum refining and distribution company achieved a 17:1 consolidation ratio and expects to increase that to 30:1 with additional CPUs and RAM.
  
  
• One of Italy's largest banks improved its server utilization rates by 100 percent.
  
  
• A leading US faucet manufacturer saved $250,000 in hardware costs by reallocating existing units instead of purchasing new, achieving a 10:1 consolidation ratio.
  
  
• A South American energy company consolidated its servers by a 20:1 ratio.
  
  
• A federation of trade unions in Singapore consolidated its servers by 46:1, achieving a 26 percent savings.
  

Smallest is 10:1 and largest is 46:1.

It's all about the ratio.

I want my Availability

I wanted to do a knock off the Dire Strait's tune - Money for Nothing and then change the "I want my MTV" into "I want my Availability" - VKernel will then hire a Dire Straits cover band to perform it somewhere.

Availability vs. Capacity - is one better than the other?

Are there types of Availability?

Virtual John writes about High Availability (HA) vs. Continuous Availability (CA)

"In plain English this means, if one of your hosts in a cluster of VMWare Servers goes away the VMs will reboot elsewhere. Reboot = downtime, so is this high availability? Or just higher availability than no fault tolerance?"

It could be a important misnomer - the VM's with HA will be expected to not have any interruption of business service (enter VMotion) and voila - "I want my Availability".

Virtualization's Dark Side!?!?!?

Virtualization's Dark Side

Forbes reporting on security risks in virtualization. So expect CEO's and CFO's to kick emails off to CIO's asking them about it. It's Joanna Rutkowski and Jon Uberheide (Wolverines!!).

Joanna is talking "virtual machine escape" or "hyperjacking" and "blue pills" which are basically taking control or injecting a malware hypervisor. Jon thinks its going to be an intercept during a VMotion or a "live-machine migration".

"Rutkowska and Oberheide both say that the attacks they discussed are likely too new to have ever been used by real-world cybercriminals. Security researchers say that virtualization-based attacks aren't likely to be common"

So it's theoretical at this point and that's sort of good news but with Virtualization becoming more common place, the potential exists for security issues.

Forbes cites IDC and says

"Virtualization usage grows--at the breakneck speed of around 40% a year, according to a 2007 report".

I am also interested in what IBM (ISS's X-Force) is doing

"an 18-month-old research initiative called PHANTOM, devoted to protecting virtual machine hypervisors from hackers."

I know they did some R&D on sHype.

How many more VMs can you fit into a Cluster, Resource Pool or Host?

Given the speed at which most admins are adding new VMs to their environment ("vm sprawl"), every admin has to figure out where to deploy the new VMs. Simply guessing about resource availability will lead to performance problems and downtime. What I am proposing here is a simple 4 step process you can use to determine how many more VMs you can fit into a Cluster, Resource Pool or a host. Here it goes

1. Select a cluster, resource pool or a host
2. Get info on available memory, storage, cpu, disk i/o and net i/o
3. Calculate an average VM footprint in the cluster, RP or host in terms memory, cpu, storage, disk i/o
4. Apply average VM footprint to every resource type to see which resource you will run out of first.That’s how many more VMs you can fit into host, cluster or resource pool

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