Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V vs. VMware vSphere 5.1

Microsoft released some white papers that are being send to the partners and customers, who are interested in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. These technical papers are giving competitive advantages of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V over VMware vSphere 5.1.

The papers give insight into 4 investments areas;
– Scalability, Performance & Density
– Secure Multitenancy
– Flexible Infrastructure
– High Availability & Resiliency Across each of these areas

With features such as Hyper-V Replica, cluster sizes of up to 64 nodes and 8,000 virtual machines, Storage and Shared-Nothing Live Migration, the Hyper-V Extensible Switch, Network Virtualization, and powerful guest clustering capabilities, it’s clear to see that Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V offers the most comprehensive virtualization platform for the next generation of cloud-optimized infrastructures.

“WS 2012 White Paper Hyper-V” can be found here

“Competitive Advantages of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V over VMware vSphere 5.1” can be found here 

Microsoft Virtual Academy: Part1, Part2, Part3 and Part4

Server 2012: Shared Nothing Live Migration

In this blog I would like to talk about the new Hyper-V feature in Windows Server 2012, Shared Nothing Live Migration. With this feature Hyper-V servers can exchange virtual machines, without any downtime, without the need of shared storage. Only requirements are a shared network cable and both Hyper-V Servers need to be part of the same Active Directory (AD) domain.

Shared-nothing live migration is the most extreme type of zero-downtime migration. However, there are other types of zero-downtime migration, such as storing VMs on an SMB file share that both Hyper-V hosts can access. This approach transfers memory and device state over the network, without moving the storage. And there is still live migration within a failover cluster, which can use shared SAN-based storage through the CSV file system (CSVFS).

Check these videos from the Microsoft Acadamy;

Live Migration of Virtual Machines with Nothing Shared

Live Migration of Virtual Machines using SMB File Share to store Virtual Machine Files

Live Migration between Clusters

Of course, even in a shared-nothing scenario, there is still a shared physical network fabric and a dependence on the VM IP configuration during the move. This is where another Server 2012 feature, Network Virtualization, can open up a world in which VMs can be moved between any hosts in different locations without changing the networking configuration of the VM OS.

Troubleshooting Live Migration

The following steps should help you troubleshoot any hiccups that you might experience:

1. Check the Event Viewer (Applications and Services Logs > Microsoft > Windows > Hyper-V-VMMW > Admin) for detailed messages.
2. The servers must be able to communicate. Check network connectivity and the target and source server need to be resolvable by DNS. PING, IPCONFIG can be the tools to check this.
3. Run the following PowerShell command in an elevated session, to show IP addresses that are being used for a server.

gwmi -n root\virtualization\v2 Msvm_VirtualSystemMigrationService | select MigrationServiceListenerIPAddressList

ReFS – New file system in Windows Server 2012

In this blog post I’d like to talk about a new file system for Windows. This file system, which Microsoft calls ReFS (Resilient File System), has been designed from the ground up to meet a broad set of customer requirements, both today’s and tomorrow’s, for all the different ways that Windows is deployed. Although it is designed to be better in many dimensions, resiliency stands out as one of its most prominent features.

NTFS, the New Technology File System, first shipped on Windows NT 3.1 when it was introduced in 1995 but didn’t make its way to the desktop until Microsoft retired the Windows 9x code and shipped Windows XP in 2001.

The key features of ReFS are as follows (note that some of these features are provided in conjunction with Storage Spaces).

– Metadata integrity with checksums
– Integrity streams providing optional user data integrity
– Allocate on write transactional model for robust disk updates
– Large volume, file and directory sizes
– Storage pooling and virtualization makes file system creation and management easy
– Data striping for performance (bandwidth can be managed) and redundancy for fault tolerance
– Disk scrubbing for protection against latent disk errors
– Resiliency to corruptions with “salvage” for maximum volume availability in all cases
– Shared storage pools across machines for additional failure tolerance and load balancing

Windows 8 client is able to access and read ReFS volumes until it’s fully supported in client operating systems in the future, but now:

– You can not convert data between NTFS and ReFS
– You can not boot from ReFS in Windows Server 2102
– ReFS can not be used on removable media or drives
– The NTFS features not supported in ReFS are: named streams, object IDs, short names, compression, file level encryption (EFS), user data transactions, sparse, hard-links, extended attributes, and quotas.

To learn more about ReFS file system, click here.