VCritical » live migration

Hyper-V More Stable, Just as Mature as VMware vSphere?

Eric Gray — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:29:13 +0000

I just read a fascinating article on the Microsoft Virtualization blog from a special guest poster responding to the recent InformationWeek article that cited 9 reasons Hyper-V is not ready for the Enterprise.

The author worked extra hard to refute all 9 points — but I do admit being somewhat distracted by the gratuitous use of VMWare throughout. Evidently, proofreading — unlike immeasurable technology and services discounts — is not one of the benefits extended to guest posters these days, which is a shame.

The Microsoft Virtualization MVP tries to use most of the pages from the playbook, such as memory overcommit FUD:

Relying on a host to overcommit memory to support failover hosts is potentially dangerous and incorrect oversubscription leads to all VMs suffering from performance.

Have you ever had a VM suffer from performance? I have, and believe me — it’s not pleasant.

But here is a familiar line:

… I would never over commit my VM hosts in production.

Where have we heard that before? I almost forgot to mention that this guest poster is none other than Chris Steffen — the star of that now-infamous CIO Magazine article who once called VMotion a “gimmick” and said:

I don’t know what kind of environment other than QA or development, or in a staging environment you’d want to do [live migration], but it’s not going to be in any production environment I’m responsible for; it’s not going to be any environment dependent on any kind of SLA or performance requirements. The justification for the inherent risk just isn’t there.

But what does Mr. Steffen say now that Hyper-V has Live Migration? About what you’d expect — and more:

Also keep in mind that using the System Center suite, the Microsoft solution can Live Migrate VMs to other hosts due to situations that VMware servers cannot even monitor, such as CPU Power, Power Supply Failures, and Fibre Channel congestion.

There are a number of other gems in this convincing piece. Did you know:

Hyper-V is more stable than and at least as secure as VMWare [sic]
vSphere is just as new as Hyper-V

Yep, there is a full-day supply of Kool-Aid in that guest post.

Nice work, Microsoft Virtualization team. I’m not so sure this sort of thing helps your cause — please keep it up.

SCVMM/PRO Complexity: High

Eric Gray — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:10:53 +0000

About a year ago, I wrote about the complex requirements for enabling PRO Tips in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (SCVMM). That was the previous release — what has changed now that SCVMM 2008 R2 is available?

Not much.

First Things First

Before you can use PRO to Live Migrate virtual machines between hosts (which is sort of the whole point), you need to first configure Hyper-V, failover clustering, and Cluster Shared Volumes — something eWeek found to be significantly more complicated than VMware ESX.

After Hyper-V and Live Migration are up and running, the next step is to install SCVMM 2008 R2 so you can integrate it with your System Center Operations Manager 2007 (SCOM) environment.

What’s that? You don’t have SCOM deployed? Go ahead and set it up. Come back in a few days when you’re ready to go to the next step.

Integration Time

After your environment has both SCVMM and SCOM up and running, it’s integration time! If you have ever thought that the next-next-finish Microsoft wizards were boring, then this is the task for you. You’ll get a chance to make configuration changes to various systems and possibly even Active Directory — haven’t you always wanted to learn about the SetSPN utility anyway?

But don’t let me spoil the excitement by giving away the ending — pick up your own copy of the 34-page integration guide and experience the thrill for yourself.

Second Opinion

Some of you are probably thinking that this is an exaggeration, it can’t be all that bad. Let’s take a look from another perspective, presented in the Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) guide for SCVMM 2008 R2:

As you can see from the above excerpt, integrating SCVMM with SCOM clearly increases the time, effort, and complexity of your virtualization deployment. And don’t forget that SCOM is required for monitoring your Hyper-V infrastructure, too.

Unlike the Microsoft virtualization conglomeration, VMware DRS is an integral part of vCenter Server — purpose-built for virtualization. Talk about additional layers…

Live Migration “significantly more complicated”

Eric Gray — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:40:08 +0000

It can be difficult to set up a complete Hyper-V environment. There are a lot of user interfaces needed to perform the various configuration tasks — especially during initial deployment. It’s great to see that the mainstream technology media has arrived at the same conclusion.

Jason Brooks, Executive Editor at eWeek, recently reviewed Windows Server 2008 R2 and had the following to say about Live Migration and Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV):

Live Migration was very easy to use, but I found the process of configuring and using Live Migration in Windows Server 2008 R2 significantly more complicated than with VMware ESX server and VirtualCenter. In contrast to VMware’s product, where all tasks are gathered together in a purpose-built interface, the tasks required to configure Cluster Shared Volumes in Windows Server involve visits to various existing and new Windows utilities.

It’s true. The Microsoft virtualization solution is a conglomeration, and configuring all of the various layers, roles, and features on top of the general-purpose Windows OS is complicated.

You may need Windows to run parts of your business, but that doesn’t mean you need Hyper-V. Take control of Windows — by running it on rock-solid, purpose-built, enterprise-class VMware vSphere — before it takes control of you.

Simplify, don’t complexify.

Hyper-V Console Disconnects During Live Migration

Eric Gray — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:53:16 +0000

Previously I showed how the architecture behind VMware vSphere clustering is so robust that even a remote virtual machine console remains connected as a VM migrates with VMotion from one host to another. VMware vSphere is designed from the ground up as an integrated virtualization solution — cleanly abstracting virtual machine operations from the underlying aggregate pool of physical hardware.

Microsoft Hyper-V R2 derives HA clustering capabilities and Live Migration from the additional Windows Failover Clustering layer that can be added to the hypervisor. With all that integration, you might think a remote console connection would seamlessly fail over along with the VM during a Live Migration.

Sorry, not in this release. Is it an omission, or just a bug? Time will tell.

Now that System Center Virtual Machine Manger 2008 R2 (SCVMM) PRO tips can be used to automate Live Migration — if it is integrated with System Center Operations Manger 2007 (SCOM), that is — administrators connected to a remote VM console may find themselves suddenly cut off.

See it in action in this short video:

Oh, sure it’s not hard to go back into SCVMM, find the VM, and reconnect — but should you have to do that manually? VM remote consoles may not be needed for day-to-day administrative tasks, but is that reasonable justification to ignore usability and integration?

Because the Microsoft Virtualization solution is a conglomeration of various components — Windows Server, hypervisor role, Failover Clustering, SCVMM, SCOM, etc. — it is much more difficult to provide a seamless experience. This remote console issue is really just an indicator.