Hyper-V Performance And Disaster Recovery

Microsoft has improved Hyper-V performance in a number of ways and the virtualization platform's hypervisor’s Replica feature enables admins to place a copy of a VM onto another Hyper-V server for duplication purposes.

Performance

Performance enhancements are not limited to the network in Hyper-V.  The Hyper-ODX engine in Windows Server “8” is designed to offload data transfers between virtual machines without impacting the CPU.

I saw a demonstration of the CPU load on a VM using Hyper-ODX versus one using Windows’ native capability.  The amount of CPU usage in the Hyper-ODX transfer was about a tenth of the load running on the Windows native VM.   This would be great for VMs that run heavy copy jobs at night, or even better, during the day as the data transfer would minimally impact the workload on the virtual machine it’s running on.

Another CPU related feature in Hyper-V is the ability to map a virtual machine to specific cores of a CPU, providing persistent resource allocation to certain VMs that need dedicated horsepower. 

Disaster Recovery

What about disaster recovery?

Hyper-V Replica is a replication feature that lets the administrator put a copy of a VM onto another Hyper-V server.  By enabling replication on the source VM, you can create a duplicate on a remote server.  The replicated pair is synchronized using compression and encryption. The pair can be placed in active/active, active/passive or bi-directional mode (where the VMs replicate off of each other).

If, for whatever reason, the primary virtual machine goes down, the second machine will be ready to go with the latest changes applied to it.  You just need to start the second VM up and you’re good to go.

With all the new and updated features in Windows Server “8,” it’s pretty clear that Microsoft is trying very hard to incorporate all it can to make the new OS a one stop shop.  Small and medium businesses will appreciate the new Hyper-V as it gives them the chance to try technologies that may not have been in their financial grasp when Hyper-V was a separate product, and enterprise businesses will appreciate Microsoft’s improved hypervisor as it’s designed to be easily incorporated into their current and future infrastructure.