Barney Is Back
When this newsletter started some four years ago, I wrote every issue. Fortunately,
back then, it came out only once a week. Then it doubled, tripled and finally
quadrupled to four times a week.
I loved the interaction with you, the reader. Your e-mails have driven (I'd
guess) 75 percent of Redmond Report's content. In one day, I can find out what
IT pros think about Windows security, Bill Gates' wardrobe or Vista (that one
brings boatloads of mail!).
Well, I've decided to get back into the Redmond Report saddle full-time --
which means you'll get me four times a week. And for my parents, it means they
have to read all the week's issues, not just the Monday edition (Mom, Dad, I'll
try to keep it interesting).
My Take on Hyper-V
Microsoft did the near unthinkable last week: It shipped a major product --
early!
Yup, Hyper-V
is in manufacturing, two months earlier than we expected. (Truth be told,
we usually expect these products to slip several times, so August to us would've
been early.)
This is an industry-changing event. Microsoft is unequalled in building third-party
communities, and I expect VMware vendors to add Hyper-V -- and for more traditional
Windows third parties to jump in, as well.
There are plenty of gaps to fill, as Hyper-V is a first-generation product
and doesn't sport the maturity of a VMware. Among the missing features is NIC
bonding -- which helps ensure the network connections stay up even if one NIC
fails -- and live migration.
Here's what astute reader Mark had to say:
"Hyper-V is still in beta, has no live migration, has no farm concept
with automatic load balancing and HA, no over-committing of resources (this
one is huge as I ran out of memory on an 8G system with just six VMs; I usually
get 12 on this same hardware using the same VM configurations), requires an
installation of at least Server 2008 Core Edition (OK, not bad, but there's
still a lot running in the root domain), has restricted x86/x64 OSes, and
is dependent on specific CPUs (which places you at the mercy of the chip manufacturers).
Then there's the inability to throttle or isolate the root domain from
VMs. I'm able to kill all running VMs by eating up memory in the root domain
and chewing up the CPUs; other than live migration, I consider this to be
the No. 1 problem. You shouldn't be able to bring down your VMs by runaway
processes in the root or console OS.
And, to top it off, it's basically a Xen knock-off (in fact, it's so similar
(with similar problems), that I wonder how much open source code crept into
this closed source product.
It amazes me, the giddiness with which people are approaching this pre-1.0
product and clearly inferior technology. The Microsoft Machine with its adherents
are at work here, but this certainly is not amazing technology at all. Maybe
one day, a few years from now."
Have you tried Hyper-V? Do you agree with Mark? Any deployment plans? Let us
know by writing [email protected].
About the Author
Doug Barney is editor in chief of Redmond magazine and the VP, editorial director of Redmond Media Group.