Microsoft finally seems to be in mood to get head-on with virtualization leader VMware, with the launch of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Moreover, by bundling newly added live migration and high availability features into the free server it’s hoping to win converts from the VMware camp, although it may not be as simple as that.
Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 is a great choice for customers who want a basic and simplified virtualization solution for consolidating servers as well as for development and test environments. Hyper-V Server 2008 only offers the most basic of virtualization features, making it ideal for:
* Test and Development
* Basic Server Consolidation
* Branch Office Consolidation
* Hosted Desktop Virtualization (VDI)
Customers who require richer and more robust virtualization features, such as Quick Migration, multi-site clustering, large memory support (greater than 32 GB of RAM), and more than four processors on the host server, should use Windows Server 2008.
As per ZDNET, this new version has numerous enhancements. Not least in terms of scalability, with support for up to 64 logical processors in the host processor pool and a maximum 1TB of RAM. Each VM can also be given up to 64GB of memory, plus it’s now possible to expand and add VM storage without having to reboot.
The really big changes, however are the ability to move a VM from one host to another without any downtime (Live Migration) plus high availability features such as automatic migration of VMs when a host server crashes. To support these the Hyper-V Server can be integrated into a failover cluster and use the Cluster Shared Volumes technology, introduced in Server 2008 R2, to enable multiple virtual machines to run from the same LUN.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, in the time it’s taken beef up its hypervisor, VMware and others have moved on and it still doesn’t match what rivals are offering, particularly when it comes to load balancing and resource allocation. More than that, its first attempt had little impact on the virtualization market, despite being given away as part of the Windows Server OS .
Microsoft is hoping that bundling the new live migration and high availability features for free will tip the balance in its favour. However, such features tend to be implemented by large enterprise companies, most of which will have invested heavily in VMware already and are unlikely to switch mission critical production systems to a relatively untried platform simply because it’s free.
There are issues for the SMB market too. Failover clustering is a lot simpler in the R2 release, but the cost of hardware will continue to deter many plus you need the full server OS in order to create a cluster in the first place.