Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2

The Windows Server 2008 R2 beta is here! (keep an eye here for details on how to get it)  This is a significant release for Hyper-V and this beta contains a number of new features and capabilities.

First and foremost – Live Migration is here!  You can now move virtual machines inside a cluster without experiencing any downtime or connectivity loss.  Along with Live Migration we also have the Clustered Shared Volumes (CSV) feature – that allows you to store multiple virtual machines on a single storage device.

Other changes include:

• Support for 32 core physical computers
• Support for CPU Core Parking
  • Core Parking allows Windows and Hyper-V to consolidate processing onto the fewest number of possible processor cores, and suspends inactive processor cores.
• Support for Second Level Address Translation (SLAT) in CPUs
  • On Intel processors this is called “EPT” while AMD calls it “NPT”. SLAT adds a second level of paging below the architectural x86/x64 paging tables in x86/x64 processors, providing an indirection layer from virtual machine memory access to the physical memory access.  In many virtualization scenarios, hardware based SLAT support can offer performance improvements.
• Support for Jumbo Frames on networking
• The ability to hot add / remove SCSI virtual hard disks

So please get involved in the beta and let us know what you think of it.

Cheers,

Ben

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 08, 2009
  Is there an official position on whether Hyper-V will find its way into Windows 7 pre or post RTM or is the current position that desktop based virtualisation will continue to be provided by Virtual PC 2007 SP1 only?

• Anonymous
  January 08, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 08, 2009
  I was about to ask the same question as Simon. Ben, is that a "no, there won't be any Hyper-V on Windows 7", at least by now? Thanks.

• Anonymous
  January 09, 2009
  Love the new option in networking to choose to allow mgmt OS to use an external virtual switch.  The new virtual nic showing up in the parent partition was confusing for admins.  Also, potentially you could get dhcp addresses assigned to 2 different nics (the real one, and the virtual one) I was advising folks to unbind IP from the physical nic. Also like that during the install wizard for hyper-v (server manager) that it forces you to leave a nic available for the mgmt OS.   at any rate - looks great so far.

• Anonymous
  January 09, 2009
  Simon & oreidomar - Correct, no Hyper-V in Windows 7 client. Ray Aslin - Thanks for the feedback! Cheers, Ben

• Anonymous
  January 10, 2009
  Hey Ben, it appears that the use of NTFS compressed VHDs is now blocked. Can you comment on this. To me, this is a huge issue.

• Anonymous
  January 12, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 12, 2009
  Ray, sorry but I've actually benchmarked this and you can get a perf increase, in addition to the saved disk space, my using NTFS compression on VHDs.