Part 1 RI PY R IG HT ED MA TE Chapter 1: Understanding Microsoft’s Hypervisor Chapter 2: Installing, Configuring, and Managing the Hyper-V Host Chapter 3: Creating and Managing Virtual Machines Chapter 4: Storage and Networking for Hyper-V Chapter 5: High Availability and Hyper-V Chapter 6: Planning a Virtual Infrastructure with Hyper-V CO ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ AL Hyper-V
Chapter 1 Understanding Microsoft’s Hypervisor Just about every business today is either evaluating or implementing server virtualization, or partitioning a physical computer into multiple virtual computers. With hardware systems becoming so powerful, many applications do not require all the available horsepower that comes on a commodity server today.
CHAPTER 1 UNDERSTANDING MICROSOFT’S HYPERVISOR Virtualization History Today, full server and hypervisor virtualization are being implemented or investigated by nearly every company. Based on this recent interest, you would guess that this is a new technology. But it is not. In the early 1970s, IBM released their first commercial version of full operating system environment virtualization on their IBM System/370 and named it VM/370.
VIRTUALIZATION HISTORY organizations do on IBM mainframe and other minicomputer systems. And, because the x86 architecture systems cost so much less than the mainframe and minicomputers, organizations did not see a major problem with this. As the x86 operating systems and hardware systems became more powerful and robust, organizations wanted to start running more applications on a single host.
CHAPTER 1 UNDERSTANDING MICROSOFT’S HYPERVISOR various implementations of KVM from Red Hat, Novell, Sun, and Oracle. But the combination of Microsoft and VMware comprise over three-fourths of the market. Since Microsoft has entered the marketplace, it is looking more and more like the various server virtualization products will become a commodity market because companies like Microsoft and Citrix do not charge for their hypervisor products.
MICROSOFT’S SERVER VIRTUALIZATION PRODUCTS Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is what is sometimes known as a Type 1 hypervisor because it runs directly on the hosting hardware platform. This helps minimize the virtualization overhead. Though more efficient than a hybrid hypervisor, every form of virtualization has some level of overhead. It is much easier to minimize this in a Type 1 hypervisor because it executes on the hardware instead of being one level removed.
CHAPTER 1 UNDERSTANDING MICROSOFT’S HYPERVISOR During installation, you can choose between two Windows Server 2008 installation options. One option is what everyone is familiar with — the entire operating system with all its capabilities available. A second option is to select a Windows Server Core installation. The Core installation under Windows Server 2008 removes half of the available roles, and it removes the graphical user interface.
HYPER-V ARCHITECTURE Since hybrid and Type 1 hypervisors provide similar capabilities, one operating system environment running one or more additional operating system environments, we need to look a little bit at the different implementations. First, remember that we said IBM’s VM/370 is a full virtualization product. This means that the entire hardware environment is emulated in software. Connectix and VMware built their initial products this way.
CHAPTER 1 UNDERSTANDING MICROSOFT’S HYPERVISOR explained in more detail later in this chapter when the differences between monolithic and microkernelized hypervisors are discussed. Because the parent partition in Hyper-V owns all the hardware resources, it also handles other system functions generally thought as being part of an operating system. These include things like booting the system, creating and managing other partitions, Plug and Play recognition, hardware error reporting, and so on.
HYPER-V ARCHITECTURE Integration Components provide the following capabilities to the supported operating systems: ◆ Synthetic devices (IDE, SCSI, NIC, video, mouse) ◆ OS shutdown ◆ Time synchronization ◆ Data exchange ◆ Heartbeat ◆ Volume Shadow Copy Services Table 1.1 shows the operating systems with varying levels of Integration Component support. This can change, so it always makes sense to check sources at Microsoft.
Yes Yes No Yes Windows Server 2003 SP2 x64 Yes Windows Server 2003 SP2 x86 Yes Windows 2000 Server SP4 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No VSS support Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Windows Server 2008 x86 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Windows Server 2008 x64 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 Yes Heartbeat VSS Support Hyper-V Integration C
Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Windows 7 x64 Windows 7 x86 Windows Vista SP1 x64 Windows Vista SP1 x86 Windows XP Yes SP2/SP3 x86 Windows XP Yes SP2 x64 Yes Yes Yes SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 x86 Client OS Yes Yes SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 x64 Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No
CHAPTER 1 UNDERSTANDING MICROSOFT’S HYPERVISOR Monolithic versus Microkernelized Monolithic and microkernelized are the two primary approaches to creating hypervisors. The difference is in the functions that are considered part of the hypervisor. A monolithic hypervisor contains many more functions than does a microkernelized hypervisor.
HYPER-V ARCHITECTURE partition. With Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the parent partition runs the Windows Server 2008 operating system. This is how Microsoft gets Hyper-V to support all the systems and hardware devices that are supported by the Windows operating system. Figure 1.
CHAPTER 1 UNDERSTANDING MICROSOFT’S HYPERVISOR while multiple operating systems are running on a single physical server, the control should be placed at Ring 0, the highest privilege level on the CPU. However, all of today’s operating systems are written to have their kernels run at Ring 0. It is possible for software solutions to mitigate this.
HYPER-V ARCHITECTURE The microkernelized architecture helps achieve three goals: Isolation and Security Hyper-V provides a high degree of isolation between partitions. Data that is in one partition cannot be viewed or manipulated by any other process except through well-defined communication paths, such as TCP/IP. In the next section on the parent partition, you will learn how the VMBus provides a path between the parent and child partitions.
CHAPTER 1 UNDERSTANDING MICROSOFT’S HYPERVISOR Figure 1.7 PARENT PARTITION Parent partition Virtualization Stack User Mode WMIProvider VM Service VM Worker Process Windows Server 2008 Windows Kernel Kernel Mode VSP VMBus Windows Hypervisor “Designed for Windows” Server Hardware AMD-V intel VT Chipset You will notice that there are now quite a few new pieces in the picture. Let’s again start at the bottom and work our way up.
HYPER-V ARCHITECTURE Windows Server 2008 Kernel The beauty of the microkernelized hypervisor is that the operating system kernel remains unchanged. The kernel, VMBus, device drivers, and VSP run in Ring 0 in the same manner on the hardware that the kernel and device drivers run in a nonvirtualized environment. VM Worker Process A VM worker process is created for each child partition that is created.
CHAPTER 1 UNDERSTANDING MICROSOFT’S HYPERVISOR components in the parent partition. Let’s start at the bottom here and work our way up again, just as we did for the parent partition. Figure 1.
HYPER-V ARCHITECTURE One of the primary reasons for the lack of support of some of these types of devices is that when Microsoft was architecting this environment, they were looking at it from the standpoint of what a server environment needs. When you look at specialized devices such as a dongle, those are primarily used on desktop applications. Other devices, such as fax boards, are not supported because they are installed on such a small percentage of servers.
CHAPTER 1 UNDERSTANDING MICROSOFT’S HYPERVISOR environment, an equivalent package of tools needs to be built that talk to the defined interfaces of the API. The hypercall adapter is that section of code for use by our partners to enable non-Windows child partitions to access the hypervisor.
HYPER-V TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS will likely see systems operating at a lower level of performance than their brothers and sisters running with Integration Components. Hyper-V Technical Specifications One of the beauties of making Hyper-V a role of the Windows Server 2008 operating system is that it can make use of all the hardware and software innovations that are continually being developed for the host platform.
CHAPTER 1 UNDERSTANDING MICROSOFT’S HYPERVISOR www.intel.com/technology/virtualization. AMD’s implementation is called AMD-V (for Virtualization); see www.amd.com/us-en/0,,3715 15781 15785,00.html. Hyper-V requires either an Intel-VT or AMD-V chip. Several years ago Intel and HP developed another 64-bit chip called Itanium, and its architecture is often referred to as IA64. Hyper-V is not supported on IA64 platforms. It is only for the x64 platform.
HYPER-V TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V ◆ Designed for Windows x64 host ◆ AMD-V or Intel-VT hardware virtualization in the chip ◆ Data Execution Prevention ◆ Recommended processor speed: 2 GHz or faster ◆ Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise, or Datacenter Edition ◆ Up to 16 processors or cores ◆ KB956710 increases this to 24 cores only for those systems that have Intel’s 6-core chip.
CHAPTER 1 UNDERSTANDING MICROSOFT’S HYPERVISOR ◆ A host with up to 32 GB of physical memory ◆ A host with up to four physical processors (maximum of 24 logical processors) ◆ Guest with a maximum of 31 GB of memory Because this is not a Windows operating system (it is just the Windows kernel), it does not support features of the operating system such as failover clustering.
HYPER-V TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS ◆ ◆ Always check www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/hyperv-supported -guest-os.aspx for the latest details. This list will change as more operating system environments are tested and added. Nonsupported operating system environments ◆ Hyper-V has the ability to run other x64 and x86 operating system environments.
CHAPTER 1 UNDERSTANDING MICROSOFT’S HYPERVISOR ◆ Virtual CD/DVD drive ◆ A virtual machine has one virtual CD/DVD by default. ◆ Virtual machines can be configured with up to three CD/DVD drives, connected to IDE controllers. (Virtual machines support up to four IDE devices, but one device must be the startup disk.) ◆ A virtual CD/DVD drive can access CD or DVD physical media or ISO files.
