Improving Linux Performance on Hyper-V

This was a very busy week for my team and I as we were working with Microsoft to develop a video documenting our work and successes with Microsoft Virtualization. I had the pleasure of working with some very hardworking, dedicated folks and you really have to see them in action to appreciate all they give day after day. Part of this process involved a number of interviews outlining our work and experience with Hyper-V, Management Tools, Etc.

Later that evening, the team and I headed to dinner and found ourselves discussing the performance of Linux on Hyper-V. It appeared that most of the team wasn't aware that there was a recent update to the Linux Integration Components. At the end of last month, Microsoft released updated components known as the "Linux Integration Components Version 2" for use with all versions of Hyper-V. After learning my team wasn't aware, I started reaching out to others that I network with and realized that there wasn't as much awareness as expected and felt it was appropriate to post about it in detail.

The updated components are supported on all x64 versions of Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Supported Linux Guest are SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2 (x86 and x64), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (x86 and x64) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4 (x86 and x64), but these guest are only supported when configured with 1 virtual CPU. The updated components provide support for synthetic storage and network drivers allowing them to take advantage of the very fast VMBus. The components also allow the guest to leverage Fastpath boot support, allowing boot devices to leverage the storage VSC (Virtualization Service Client) for enhanced performance. However, the update still doesn't provide mouse support directly and you must leverage a driver made available as part of the Citrix Project Satori.

The certification efforts leading to the development of these components has allowed me to change my thinking from if, to when I will start migrating my production Linux environments to Hyper-V. Every test scenario I have implemented has resulted in a stable well performed virtualized Linux guest which is what every admin strives for.

For more information or to download the Linux Integration Components v2, then please visit the link below.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c299d675-bb9f-41cf-b5eb-74d0595ccc5c&displaylang=en

Destination.......Microsoft Tech-Ed North America 2010

One of the things that I look forward to every year is attending Microsoft's annual meeting of Tech-Ed North America. Every year I wait in anticipation of the announcement of location and open registration like an eight year old boy on Christmas morning waiting to see if he got the Red Ryder BB gun he wanted. I love this conference because its the only venue like it where I can get information on all of the latest Microsoft and partner solutions, speak with engineers and meet with other folks like myself and see how others are implementing Microsoft solutions in their environments.

This year is a going to be a little different for me as not only will I be attending, but I have been invited to participate as a speaker as well. I will be presenting on vSphere vs. Hyper-V, giving a real world approach to migrating a data center from VMWare to Microsoft. Using my own data center as an example, I will show how we completed this transition successfully and achieved greater VM density then VMWare states is possible and few data centers are achieving. I always look forward to meeting my readers and fellow Hyper-V users, so please reach out to me if you are attending.

I mentioned before that Tech-Ed is also a great forum for meeting the excellent Microsoft partners out there. Some would say that Microsoft make the products, but partners make them work. Now, that is up for interpretation, but you get the point. I posted a blog a little over a week ago about a new Microsoft partner, Virsto Software, that was developing a product to compliment Hyper-V virtualization by significantly improving server provisioning time, I/O performance and managing VM sprawl. Well they have arrived and today they officially announced the launch of their new solution Virsto One. Starting today you can obtain lots of great product information on the Virsto website and even request a 30-day evaluation copy of their software, so you can test it for yourself.

Virsto will be attending and demonstrating their product at many of this years technical shows to include Microsoft Tech-Ed, Microsoft Management Summit and EMC World, so stop by and check these guys out. I would love hear about others experience with the new Virsto One solution, so please let me know what you think.

If you are interested in an eval copy of the Virsto One solution or want more information on any of the conferences I mentioned, then visit the links below.

http://www.virsto.com/

http://www.microsoft.com/events/techednorthamerica/

http://www.mms-2010.com/public/home.aspx

http://www.emcworld.com

Hyper-V Denial of Service Vulnerability Discovered

For those of us managing IT infrastructure, we have adapted to the constant surprises that Murphy's Law imposes on us. But, the one thing that we can always count on is a security announcement from Microsoft on the second Tuesday of every month also known as "Patch Tuesday".

However, this month we were informed of a new vulnerability (977894) discovered in Hyper-V that could cause a denial of service if an authenticated user were to run a sequence of malformed machine instruction from within a virtual guest. This vulnerability can only be exploited if a user has valid logon credentials and logs on locally to the virtual guest and can not be exploited remotely or by anonymous users. This security update applies to all x64-based editions of Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V Server 2008 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. The security bulletin doesn't make it clear that this update applies to versions of Hyper-V Server, but is buried within the FAQ. This update is to be installed on the host only and not on the virtual guest. Environments that are configured with Automatic Updates enabled will apply this update automatically.

For more information on this security bulletin or to download the security update, then please visit the link below.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS10-010.mspx

Overcoming the VM I/O Blender?

Last week I was invited to come out and visit with a new company in

the virtualization space called Virsto Software. Virsto is based out

of Sunnyvale, CA and they have developed a new software solution

that will solve a lot of the inefficiencies known to virtualization.

When considering virtualization in the data center a couple of goals

that come to mind are reducing physical footprint, gaining higher CPU

utilization and reduced provisioning time. Hyper-V has provided

affordable options to address these requirements, but limiting factors

still exist. One of the biggest problems that we are faced with as we

start loading up VM's on the host is the I/O blender effect. When you

have a single OS to disk relationship the I/O is smooth, but as you

add additional VM's the hypervizor has to manage all these different

I/O loads and this causes the streams to not flow smoothly anymore and degrades I/O performance. Then there is VM Snapshots that so severely degrade I/O that most data centers have a policy against using them in production.

Virsto's new solution has answers to all these problems and more.

Their solution is also vendor-agnostic, so its works with any storage

solution. Virsto has integrated their software into the native Hyper-V

Manager snap-in, so the footprint is very small on the Host. This

integration allows an administrator to manage their VM deployment,

Snapshots, golden VHD's and Clones all from a single pane of glass.

They have even built their solution to be cluster aware giving data

centers options to improve performance and managements of all their Hyper-V environments.

To address the I/O blender effect they have incorporated a new file

structure that presents Hyper-V disk files as native VHD's to the VM,

but are stored on disk in a format they call vDisk. This newly

developed file structure allows I/O to remain smooth as VM density is

increased and regains a lot of the lost I/O performance from VM's hosted on native file systems. In my own testing I was able to show I/O performance gains between 20-30% over native Microsoft VHD's when benchmarking 1 -25 VM's. But, the biggest improvement was post snapshot with I/O performance with Virsto being as great as a 50% improvement in cases up to 25 VM's. This results in greater VM density and greater storage savings.

Virsto has also addressed concerns with storage sprawl and cloning. In most production environments we work with a number of golden fixed VHD's, many of which may not be used and take up valuable space. Provisioning is time consuming since its based on a file copy process. Virsto implements fixed VHD's same as Hyper-V, but the Virsto provisioning solution commits only the required disk space without having to fully expand the VHD, saving valuable disk space. This same concept applies to provisioning clones from Virsto's built-in cloning feature. When compared to Hyper-V native provisioning of a 70GB fixed VHD this process could take between 5-15 minutes, but in every cloning test case I performed I was able to create the clone and have the VHD ready for boot in just seconds, a tremendous time savings.

Given the potential for drastic storage savings and provisioning improvements, I believe Virsto is a solution that Hyper-V administrators will be adding to their host deployment checklist.

If you would like to learn more about Virsto Software, then check out the link below.

http://www.virsto.com/