Hyper-V 2012 | Cloudtidings.com

Hyper-V Windows 2012: Enhanced Storage Capabilities. How does VMware compare

June 16, 2012 Leave a comment

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V introduces a number of enhanced storage capabilities to support the most intensive, mission-critical of workloads:

• Virtual Fiber Channel – Enables virtual machines to integrate directly into Fiber Channel Storage Area Networks (SAN), unlocking scenarios such as fiber channel-based Hyper-V Guest Clusters.

•Support for 4-KB Disk Sectors in Hyper-V Virtual Disks. Support for 4,000-byte (4-KB) disk sectors lets customers take advantage of the emerging innovation in storage hardware that provides increased capacity and reliability.

•New Virtual Hard Disk Format. This new format, called VHDX, is designed to better handle current and future workloads and addresses the technological demands of an enterprise’s evolving needs by increasing storage capacity, protecting data, improving quality performance on 4-KB disks, and providing additional operation-enhancing features. The maximum size of a VHDX file is 64TB.

•Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX). With data transfer support, the Hyper-V host CPU can concentrate on the processing needs of the application and offload storage-related tasks to the SAN, increasing performance.

Hyper-V provides a number of advantages over VmWare, with Hyper-V providing highest levels of availability and performance. Hyper-V also gives you the ability to utilize Device Specific Modules, also known as DSMs, produced by storage vendors, in conjunction with the Multipath I/O framework within Windows Server, ensures that customers run their workloads on an optimized configuration from the start, as the storage vendor intended, providing the highest levels of performance and availability. (Note: Only the Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions of vSphere 5.0, through a feature known as ‘vStorage APIs for Multipathing’, provide this capability, meaning customers have to upgrade to higher, more costly editions in order to unlock the best performance from their storage investments.)

Also, by integrating Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V with an ODX-capable storage array, many of the storage-related tasks that would normally use valuable CPU and network resources on the Hyper-V hosts, are offloaded to the array itself, executing much faster, increasing performance significantly, and unlocking extra resources on the hosts themselves.

How does VMware compare?

Capability	Windows Server 2012 RC Hyper-V	VMware ESXi 5.0	VMware vSphere 5.0 Enterprise Plus
Virtual Fiber Channel	Yes	Yes	Yes
3rd Party Multipathing (MPIO)	Yes	No	Yes (VAMP)
Native 4-KB Disk Support	Yes	No	No
Maximum Virtual Disk Size	64TB VHDX	2TB VMDK	2TB VMDK
Maximum Pass Through Disk Size	Varies	64TB	64TB
Offloaded Data Transfer	Yes	No	Yes (VAAI)

Determine Windows Server 2012 readiness : MAP Toolkit v7.0 Beta now available. Find out about more new features

May 24, 2012 1 comment

Key Features for a detailed insight to address an upgrade, migration, virtualization :

Understand your readiness to deploy Windows in your environment with Windows readiness assessments
Determine Windows Server 2012 Beta readiness
Investigate how Windows Server and System Center can manage your heterogeneous environment through VMware migration and Linux server virtualization assessments
Size your desktop virtualization needs for both Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and session-based virtualization using Remote Desktop Services
Ready your information platform for the cloud with the SQL Server 2012 discovery and migration assessment
Evaluate your licensing needs with usage tracking for Lync 2010, active users and devices, SQL Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 Beta

You can use the MAP Toolkit to accomplish the following tasks:

Desktop and server migration to a Windows Operating System such as Windows 8, Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft Office 365, and Windows Server 2012, Windows 7 and Windows Thin PC.
Assess and identify computers running Windows Server operating systems in your environment.
Assess and identify computers running virtual technologies in your environment.
Discover and report on computers running Microsoft, VMware, HP-UX and Linux platforms, including the Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP) application stacks in your environment.
Assess and identify computers that have outdated or no security-based software (antispyware, antivirus, and firewall products) in your environment.
Discover and report on computers that are virtual machine candidates.
Assess and inventory Microsoft SQL Server® instances, databases, and components in your environment.
Discover MySQL, Oracle, and Sybase databases in your environment and assess the ability to migrate to Microsoft SQL Server.

Installation Prerequisites

Dual-core 1.5GHz processor, 2 GB RAM (Itanium processors are not supported)

Operating system. Any of the following:

Windows Server 2012, W2008R2 SP2, W2008 SP2 (x86 or x64 versions)
Windows 7 SP1 (x86 or x64 versions)
Windows Vista SP2 (x86 or x64 versions)

Software pre-req

Windows Installer 4.5 (download from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=129687)
.NET Framework 3.5SP1 (3.5.30729.01) (download from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=129686)
.NET Framework 4.0 (Full) (download from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=186913)
Update 2 for Microsoft.NET Framework 4.0 (download from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2544514). Full download http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=207290
By default, the MAP Toolkit will install SQL Server 2012 Express LocalDB during setup.
Note: if you create an instance named “MAPS” before running the MAP Toolkit installer, you may also use an existing installation of SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 R2, or SQL Server 2012 . The MAP Toolkit requires the collation order of the database engine to be set to “SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS”.

Recommendations

Do no install on a domain controller.
Close all open applications before running the setup wizard.
If your firewall doesn’t accept listing a service like WMI or Remote Administration, you will also need to open ports 135 and 1024-65535. The reason for this has to do with the way RPC works. WMI uses DCOM to communicate with remote machines, and DCOM uses RPC extensively
If the computer is in a workgroup, you must manually change the “Network access: Sharing and security model for local accounts” policy setting from Guest only to Classic on the local computer
To connect remotely and perform the WMI inventory, you will need to provide accounts that are members of the local Administrators group on the computer being inventoried

Collectors by Inventory Scenario: