The War on Cost team conducted research in late 2009 and early 2010 to determine the on-going operations and management costs for Hyper-V in comparison with VMware’s ESX and vSphere products. The research intended to answer two questions: which platform is less expensive in IT labor to operate on an on-going basis, and do the…
Year: 2010
Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 5.0 Now Available
The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 5.0 is an agentless tool designed to simplify and streamline the IT infrastructure planning process across multiple scenarios through network-wide automated discovery and assessments. This Solution Accelerator performs an inventory of heterogeneous server environments and provides you with usage information for servers in the Core CAL Suite and…
Hyper-V Component Architecture Poster
Similar to the Windows Server 2008 R2 feature component poster, the Hyper-V poster is a great visual tool to help in the understanding of the key features and components. It highlights key Hyper-V components including: Architecture Virtual Networking Virtual Machine Snapshots Live Migration Storage Interfaces Storage Types Storage Location and Paths Import and Export This…
How many VM’s in a Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 cluster? - Update
Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clustering, which is a standard component of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, is changing the support statement for the maximum number of Virtual Machines (VM’s) that can be hosted on a failover cluster. Originally it supported a maximum of 64 VM’s per node. As of June 8th 2010 we changed this…
Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions, 2nd Edition
This is a free 450-page downloadable e-book offering from MS Press. The new version includes updates for Windows Server 2008 R2, Cloud Infrastructure, and more content around Desktop Virtualization. We’ve also added the best practice guidance for virtualizing Microsoft workloads – SQL, SharePoint and Exchange. A new edition of this FREE ebook is now…
Project Virtual Reality Check publishes second phase of results
In case you missed it last year, PQR and Login Consultants published test results of running Terminal Server workloads on the three major hypervisor platforms: Hyper-V, XenServer and ESX. This week, on Tuesday, they published the second phase of the test results. Again they ran their tests on the latest hardware and latest hypervisors being…
Increase VMBus buffer sizes to increase network throughput to guest VMs
Under load, the default buffer size used the by the virtual switch may provide inadequate buffer and result in packet loss. We recommend increasing the VM bus receive buffer from 1Mb to 2Mb. Read full article here.
Microsoft Hyper-V VM State to Memory Dump Converter
In development environments or when debugging a customer issue, it is usually a pain to get a crash dump of an existing VM state. Anton Naumovich from Hyper-V team recently released a tool which can convert a VM saved state to a full memory dump file. This tool enables easier debugging of issues in the…