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Friday, July 10, 2009

Hyper V vs Hyper V R2

Microsoft has released Hyper V R2 RC,next generation of Hypervisor based virtualization technology. You may wonder what's the similarity and differential between Hyper V and Hyper V R2.

Similarity between both products are:-
-FREE
-Need separate license for guest operating system
-Server Core. No GUI.

Differential between
a) Hyper V

- Based on Standard Edition.
-Do not perform high availability feature.
-Limited with 32GB RAM




b) Hyper V R2

-Based on Enterprise Edition
-Failover clustering is included
-support up to 1TB of RAM
-support up to 8 processor socket


Installation is quite easy for both versions and you just need to select the number to perform some setting configuration. For more detail, please refer to above diagram.

I've tested and added Hyper V R2 RC into the existing cluster. It is working fine between Server Core-Hyper V R2, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper V RC and Hyper V R2 RC.
The new version of failover clustering allow us to perform Live migration and Quick Migration. (Pls refer to the below diagram for the snapshot)



So what is the different between Quick migration vs Live Migration?
Quick migration simply saves the state of a running virtual machine (memory to disk), moves the storage connectivity from one physical server to another and then restores the virtual machine (disk to memory). This will involve few second down times.

Meanwhile,Live migration is the movement of a virtual machine from a physical host to another while continuosly powered up. This is similar with Vmware Vmotion.

With the new feature, Microsoft will be able compete with Vmware and hope can regain virtualization market share.