Webcast: Virtualizing Test and Development Environments (1-21-2009)

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Thank you for attending part 2 of the webcast series, again we had some great questions.  thank you to Keith Combs and Dan Stolts for helping out with the questions.  On a side note I made a comment about not wanting to have virtual disks over 100GB in size.  A great comment from one of the webcast attendees was that I was not thinking about SQL workloads or other database test environments.  This is a good feedback and certainly when you look at those types of workloads the drives would grow very large. My teammates are presenting several other parts but I will see you again at part 10 on 02/13/2009, TechNet Webcast: Using Presentation Virtualization.

BTW Keith promised to virtually slap me on that point, consider me slapped.  :-)

Resources:

Question: How's the performance of the Differencing disk?
Answer: Very good take a look here for more information:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd183729.aspx

Question: When you are adding processors in the virtual system are they 'cores' or physical processors?
Answer: They are cores only; on my laptop I only had one physical processor.

Question: Where can I learn more about licensing of the servers setup in hyper-v?
Answer: See the licensing information at the various areas of Microsoft.com. Specifically for Windows Sever 2008 take a look here:
https://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/licensing.aspx

Question: Can you tell me anything about expected performance improvement in % in Hyper-V versus Virtual Server 2005 R2, especially in network (IIS, SharePoint) and disk (SQL Server 2005)?
Answer: If you are using similar hardware you will find performance improvement. One thing that some people do not realize is the underlying hardware improvements of Hyper-V. Hyper-V only runs on a 64 bit machine with virtualization improvements so usually the underlying hardware is much better than the hardware than Virtual Server 2005 would run. Additionally, the Hypervisor technology is significantly faster than the emulation done by Virtual Server 2005. Also, the Synthetic Drivers are significantly faster than the legacy drivers so some of the performance improvement that you can get is not always obtained. You might want to check other parts of this web series as most of them will talk specifically about different aspects of performance improvements in Hyper-V. Specifically to SharePoint you can even get more capability with Hyper-V servers vs. physical boxes. For example if you wanted a redundant SharePoint environment you would need at least 3 servers (4 depending on how you deploy SQL) just to get started. A Similar solution in Hyper-V would only need 2 physical servers.

Question: Can you use the snapshots as 'clones' for other vms?
Answer: No, you really cannot clone by grabbing the snapshot. You could do an Export to create an image. However, the best way to do what you are looking to do is to use SCVMM and create a template

Question: What is the discount code for TechNet subscriptions and is for new subscriptions?
Answer: Yes the code TMSAM09 is only new subscriptions, you can learn more about the program here:
Save 15% on NEW TechNet Subscriptions with TMSAM09

Question: When you create a snapshot, are any subsequent changes made to the .vhd?
Answer: If you merge the snapshots, they are applied to the .vhd. also if you have to delete a snapshot you will also have to shut down the VM to remove the file from the physical drive.