Tips for evaluating Microsoft Hyper-V

It is essential to understand how to meet high-availability requirements when it comes to your hypervisor. Organizations thinking about implementing Microsoft Hyper-V need to keep in mind how this technology will perform in their existing virtual environments. This expert e-guide from amc explores the benefits of installing Hyper-V on Server Core, including using fewer resources. Learn about a four-phased approach and key tips for successfully employing Hyper-V in your organization.

Should you install Microsoft Hyper-V on Server Core?

Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtualization and Server Core are two features that are supposed to go great together. The Server Core installation option is the slimmed down commandline-only interface for Windows Server 2008 R2, with no GUI available. To manage the operating system you can connect to the command-line interface or use Windows 2008's Server Manager Tools. When considering an all-virtual machine environment, this is a great option since you don't have to eat up resources supporting a GUI for a host you'll hardly ever use. Keeping the host thin provides the opportunity to give more resources to your virtual machines. If you look at Server Core's requirements, it only needs 512 MB of RAM to operate. Contrast that with the normal 2 GB or 4 GB reserved for the host operating system in a typical full installation of Windows Server. This means you can gain RAM, disk space and processor cycles back from the host, while also reducing the attack surface of the operating system by keeping installed bits to a minimum. Another option is Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, which is a standalone product that only contains the bits necessary to run a Hyper-V environment within a Server Core installation. Similar to a VMware installation, it has a singular purpose. From a licensing aspect, it is free, so depending on your licensing structure this could save you some cash. Just note that Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 does not include guest virtualization rights like Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, which offers four Windows Server guest licenses.

Where Hyper-V on Server Core fits

Server Core seems like the perfect fit to use with a Hyper-V environment, and technically it is. But just because the technology is there doesn't mean it's necessarily the best fit for your organization, and there are some situations where it may not be appropriate. In order to understand how Hyper-V on Server Core can impact your support organization, let's run through a few scenarios. Today, when you perform a traditional Hyper-V installation, you can RDP directly to the server, fire up Hyper-V Manager, and graphically start up a new virtual machine using the New Virtual Machine Wizard. Naturally this process is different with a Server Core installation. Sure, the command line is scriptable, automatable, and essentially just a learning curve for your system administrators, but can your organization handle that learning curve? Command-line finesse continues to fade as a lost art, even though it continues to be applicable and helps support great automation options. Still, with Hyper-V on Server Core, not everyone has to be a command-line expert, just like a support person doesn't need to be an IOS expert in order to check port status on

a Cisco router. A few commands or specific documentation can often provide support for most cases where the command line is required -- but the requirement is still there. If you have a staff that is used to supporting the environment via the GUI, it may be cheaper to account for a couple extra gigabytes of RAM in each server than to explain to your manager why you need to add to the skill sets of your support administrators.

Putting the GUI back in Server Core

Also consider that once Server Core is set up, you can manage those servers using remote tools much like you can with a full installation. Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 provide a GUI frontend to all of the typical areas of interest on your server. It's not necessary to know how to browse the event logs from a command prompt during normal operations. You will, however, have to drop to the command line to get set up and do things such as join the computer to the domain, enable Windows updates, and modify the Firewall settings to allow for RDP -- but even all of that can be scripted to integrate into an automated installation. If you are familiar with the remote tools, you should be able to do the bulk of the work needed via these remote interfaces. For example, when you want to spin up a Server Core Hyper-V virtual machine, just run the Hyper-V Manager from a different machine. It's still the same interface, and you still have the GUI. Another approach is to keep your skilled virtualization experts locked away in a tower of specific technology. This is how many VMware shops support their virtualization; by having a specific group that deals with the virtualization platform. This makes sense in a sizable organization since you won't just be dealing with the hypervisor on servers, but also the management of the entire virtualized environment, including toolsets such as System Centre Virtual Machine Manager. You can allow your general Windows administrators access to the guest servers, but not to the parent host, leaving that to the specialists. All of this depends on the size and scope of your IT organization. Specialization is typical in a large company, but if you are working in a smaller environment, having the ability to support Server Core as well as the guests may be a necessity.

Can Microsoft Hyper-V meet high availability requirements?

The buzz in the industry right now is all about virtualization. Virtualization vendors are jockeying for position and each one touts the features the others are not supposed to have. One of these is a feature every hypervisor should have and one that Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V seems to be without in this version: live virtual machine (VM) migration. Live migration in a virtual environment does not mean migration from one state to another, such as migrating a physical machine to a virtual state. It means moving a VM from one host server to another while the VM is running and delivering service to end users without interrupting the service. In order to move virtual machines in this manner, you need to make sure that each host server has access to the files that make it up. When you move a VM through live migration, you don't want to have to move the files that make it up since those can be considerable in size. Instead, you want to move only the in-memory contents of the virtual machine contents that are stored within the host server's memory. Both VMware ESXi and Citrix XenServer have the ability to do this, and both use the same strategy. Generally, host servers are linked together in high-availability clusters or resource pools. The servers tie into the same shared storage container and because of this, they have immediate access to the files that make up the VM during such a move. This is the first rule of host servers:

They must be configured to tie into shared storage in order to provide high availability for the virtual machines they host (see Figure 1).

Microsoft's Hyper-V does not support live migration. Instead it supports Quick Migration a feature that saves the state of a VM and moves it to another host. Because the state of the virtual machine is saved, there is an interruption in service, even though in some host server configurations this interruption can be as minimal as four seconds. Hyper-V provides this feature through Windows Server 2008's Failover Clustering service, where host server nodes are linked together into a failover cluster. These clusters can provide host server redundancy at the site level when two or more nodes -- Windows Server 2008 can create clusters of up to 16 nodes -- are linked to shared storage, or at the multisite level when two or more nodes are joined through WAN links to provide redundant services should damage occur at the site level (see Figure 2).

If you are running Windows workloads in virtual machines and you want to make sure those workloads are always highly available no matter which hypervisor you use, you can and should configure them to use either Windows Failover Clustering or Network Load Balancing. In addition, you can configure non-affinity policies to make sure that each node of a cluster does not reside on the same host server. Then, if a failure occurs either at the VM or the host level, your workloads is automatically failed over without any service interruption to end users (see Figure 3). So, is it essential for Microsoft Hyper-V to have live migration? The answer is no, not at this time. Most organizations running Hyper-V as a hypervisor will also run Windows workloads in their virtual machines. By relying on Windows Server 2008's own internal features, it's easy for administrators to make sure there are no service interruptions to end users, no matter what happens to the host server. It doesn't work for every Windows workload, but it does for most of them, and as a proven technology, it works really well.

The bottom line on Microsoft Hyper-V

As a version 1 product, Microsoft Hyper-V does not include some of the advanced features you'll find in its competitors' products, but it does support all of the basic functions you would expect in a hypervisor. For example, you can run virtual machines on Hyper-V in production environments, something few if any administrators did with Microsoft Virtual Server. You can also create powerful host servers that will manage multiple virtual machines (VMs), and run as many VMs on a host as the host's resources will allow -- the usual hard limit is the amount of RAM on the host. In order to access all of the features you require for a host, such as high availability and virtual machine failover, organizations moving to Hyper-V should install it on top of the Server Core version of Windows Server 2008. In test environments, you can even run the free Hyper-V Server, but you'll want to keep it in the lab for several reasons. First, Hyper-V Server does not include the high availability features that Windows Server 2008 with Hyper- V does. In addition, when you buy a license for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, you automatically get some free virtual machine licenses for the same operating system. This includes one for the Standard Edition, four for the Enterprise Edition and an unlimited number of VMs for the Data centre Edition.