Hyper-V R2

I attended a Windows User Group session on Hyper-V R2 this morning. New features include:

Live Migration / Clustered Shared Volumes
Hyper-V leverages MSCS which operates on a shared nothing basis. Clustered Shared Volumes have been introduced to facilitate Live Migrations (only). Dave did a live demo which worked well: he set up a ping -t to the VM for the duration of the Live Migrations, which proved that it worked.

Core Parking
More of a W2k8 feature than Hyper-V per se. Essentially W2k8 can park unneeded CPU cores to reduce power consumption, waking them when they're needed again.

Second-Level Address Translation (SLAT)
SLAT essentially improves VM memory access. It's hardware based. "On Intel-based processors, this is called Extended Page Tables (EPT), and on AMD-based processors, it is called Nested Page Tables (NPT)" Source: What's New in Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2

Dave also touched on booting from VHDs which is pretty cool.

One thing I like about Hyper-V is that VMs are treated as cluster resources. Anyone familiar with MSCS will get their heads around VMs running as a cluster resource in no time.

One point I want to pick Dave up on is his statement that Microsoft "gives" you HA without an additional licence cost, whereas with VMware you have to pay for it. Well, that's not entirely true - HA requires Windows Server Enterprise Edition - which costs more than Standard Edition. In my book, that's not much different than VMware's licensing model i.e. you pay more for HA.

IMHO
The new features in Hyper-V are welcome and Hyper-V is certainly worth considering. However, VMware has the edge over Hyper-V e.g. you don't need a LUN per VM, and vSphere will provide fault tolerance as a feature. Microsoft are catching up on VMware, but they're not quite there yet.

B