Bruce Herndon has just posted the details of the video, “Setting the Record Straight on the Hyper-V Video“. Now I had a lot of comments from people claiming all sorts of wild stuff, this article sets most of these statements straight.

The following bullet points summarize the quoted bits below:

• The bios was up to date
• Supported and standard hardware
• Hardware fully functional during similar or heavier workloads on ESX
• IDE performance is seriously lacking, although Jeff claims differently in his article.
• Under “heavy load” Hyper-V has serious stability issues (VMs crash, Parent parition BSOD, Hyper-v BSOD)
• Hyper-V has scaling issues
• It seems that Hyper-V isn’t performing well compared to ESX (can I get a full VMmark report please?!?)
  100% at 10 tiles(60VM’s) for Hyper-V vs 14 tiles(84 VM’s) for ESX 3.5. It seems like ESX beats Hyper-V by 40%.
• Linux support is still at a bare minimum

1. There were a number of requests for more details on the system shown in the video. Below is a basic summary of the hardware used:
   Dell PowerEdge R905 with 4 x 2.6GHz Quad Core AMD Opteron 8382
   Firmware version 3.0.2 (latest available)
   128GB DDR2 Memory
   2 x Intel E1000 dual-port NIC
   2 x Qlogic 2462 dual-port 4Gb
   2 x EMC CX3-80 Storage Arrays.

   I want to point out that this particular testbed has performed flawlessly under much heavier loads and VM consolidation ratios during an array of testing running similar workloads on ESX. I am confident that the hardware is fully functional. The hypervisor was the fully-patched RTM version of Hyper-V.

2. The crashes shown in the video occurred when running a total of 11 tiles (66 VMs). We saw the full spectrum of crashes: random subsets of VMs would crash, or more disturbingly the parent partition would BSOD, or most disturbingly the hypervisor itself would BSOD. In this blog posting, Jeff Woolsey of Microsoft dredges up the familiar complaints about VMware’s ESX Benchmark EULA. I have to point out the obvious here – there were no benchmark results in the video. It is quite difficult to gather data when the system reliably crashes during the test. However, I am happy to provide more data to help improve the signal-to-noise ratio in this discussion. I also believe that more data will put the crashes shown on the video into the proper context.The figure below shows throughput scaling relative to the throughput of a single tile. I won’t comment too much other than to say that in my experience with this type of workload, the scaling exhibited by Hyper-V is lower than expected. The drop in throughput for the tenth tile was also surprising.The system crashes shown in Scott’s video occurred when we attempted to run an eleventh tile on the system. System stability under these conditions is the hallmark of true enterprise-class software. While things like poor response time are to be expected in this regime, catastrophic failure is never acceptable, including in the event of a sudden unexpected spike in usage.
3. “If you want to run a virtual machine with a single virtual disk just do it. My best guess is this: Hyper-V only boots from virtual IDE, not virtual SCSI, and whoever ran this test thinks that the test must be run from virtual SCSI for the best performance.”I think most folks would be interested to know that the in the course of our extensive research we tested just such a scenario. In this case the system was a Dell 2950 with dual Intel Xeon X5460 (3.16 GHz) and 32GB of RAM. As you can see below, IDE-only exhibited higher utilization (except at saturation as expected) and lower throughput at every data point. Based on these and other results, we standardized on the IDE/SCSI dual-disk solution to give Hyper-V every possible advantage.

I will probably receive a whole bunch of comments on credibility, objectivity and more… before you do comment read my “Will you fight or will you run” article….

I think Microsoft just expects their competitors to run or just join the “dark side”. Well it appears that this is not the route VMware has chosen. Instead of not responding to outrageous claims by Microsoft, VMware have chosen to respond and further to responding, striking back as well. Now in this post MS writes as if VMware started the FUD War: Hyper-V Winning Daily/VMware FUD Reaching New Heights.

Now personally I am not a competitive guy… I am not even a marketing guy… I do not normally post competitive stuff, but after all the claims from MS(Anybody remember their little VMworld, Las Vegas stunt? Or there TCO/ROI posts, Please! There is more to TCO than Licensing). I thought it would be nice to help a bit by spreading the word. I guess my post actually worked after judging by the comments and replies in the blogosphere.

Unfortunately for VMware, Microsoft’s Jeff Woolsey, the Sherlock Holmes he is, has discovered that it was Scott Drummond that published the post offending Hyper-V BSOD post. Now I wonder what actually revealed that it was masterpiece of journalistic investigation, could it be the YouTube nickname “drummonds1974″ or maybe the blog article that Scott posted on the 6th of May. (No Jeff, I don’t think it’s a response to your article, check the dates of both Scott’s and your article and do the math! (Saying that please do not use your TCO/ROI calculator to do the math cause it seems to be a bit off )

As a side note, some people claim I am not “objective”, hell of course I am not. I am a VMware employee. I earn my money by delivering VMware projects, of course I am not objective. That said Do you think I care? That is not what Yellow-Bricks.com is about. I am not a so called “objective” and/or “journalistic” e-magazine some other blogs and or e-magazines claim to be.  (Note I used the word “claim” because I personally do not believe any magazine that is heavily sponsored can be or will be “objective”.) Yellow-bricks is a blog… My personal blog, nothing more and nothing less, and in general it deals about VMware technical issues / tips / tricks.

Now I would like to ask Microsoft, or should I say Jeff Woolsey, to actually watch these videos (and read both responses or any of the comments on these videos) and before talking about credibility, just ask yourself if you should be the one judging other people on credibility:

• Top 10 VMWare myths video
• Microsoft Virtualization – Virtualization without Taxation
• response: When myth busting goes wrong and becomes a myth to bust it self
• response: Microsoft Myths and Realities…

Or what about these:

• Extra layer extra cost…
  I do agree it’s an entertaining topic, extra layer… just wonder do your VMs run directly on Hardware?
• Hyper-V Quick migration vs VMware Live Migrations
  Just wondering, if nobody uses it anyway… why are you hyping Hyper-V R2 with live migration? (By the way, it’s still not the same as VMware VMotion.)

Further, while we are on the topic of credibility, moderating blog comments that don’t meet your “requirements” or offer criticsm for your position is not going to increase your credibility in any way. I will not and do not moderate comments, excepting for spam of course, so if you would like to discuss anything related to this topic go ahead… even Microsoft guys are welcome to join in on the fun.

A professional associate of mine shared screen captures of a variety of Hyper-V failures. My associate was evaluating the performance of a server running Hyper-V. The test was a workload derived from VMmark. When he repeatedly saw VMs blue-screening in Hyper-V during the test, he started capturing video of the events. Apparently the publicly available version of Hyper-V is unable to run VMs reliably. Is this why TechNet and MSDN went down on 4/30/09?

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Part 1 Hardware:

In fact, I think you will come up with a smaller number of supported nics for Hyper-V, because ESX does the VLAN trunking and teaming independent of any drivers. In ESX you can easily create a virtual switch that has an HP, Intel, Broadcom and whatever nic combined and still do VLAN trunking and teaming. Have a look at the VMware I/O HCL and learn which nics are supported. Please try to find as many nics for Hyper-V.

Part 2 Guest OS and memory Overcommit:

Looking at this environment, there is quite a number of systems that would not be supported on Hyper-V. Big deal you say? Actually, yes it is a big deal. Wasn’t cost saving by getting rid of a lot of physical hardware one of the main drivers to go virtual? Leaving a bunch of servers (around 130 in our case) run physical is quite a lot, especially because these will probably be somewhat older servers that are getting more expensive in their support contract and more vulnerable to failure.

Part 3 Motions and Storage:

While searching for more info on Hyper-V QuickMigration, I found a rather disturbing video by VMware. Now, it is fair to say that VMware which is the biggest competitor of Hyper-V, but somehow I do believe the video is 100% accurate. Should it not be, please let me know. The video shows then when a QuickMigration is performed between hosts with different CPU features, Hyper-V does not check the compatibility between these features. The implications here is that you could have applications crash because the application is using CPU features on host-A that are not available when running on host-B.

I think Gabe did an excellent job on these blog posts. Not only did he take time to actually discover what is and what isn’t possible he also questions himself on objectivity.

For me personally Hyper-V isn’t an enterprise solution like ESX/Virtual Infrastructure is. But I also have the feeling that Microsoft isn’t after the Enterprise market at this point in time. They try to win the SMB market and than climb their way up. Just like they tried with for instance MS SQL vs Oracle. I said tried cause I still don’t think they succeeded and probably never will.

If you want to know why I don’t think that Hyper-V is an Enterprise Solution, just read Gabrie’s blogs. Especially the section on Storage, Motions, Hardware(Nic teaming) and memory overcommitment should give you an idea why.

Great job Gabe, and keep them coming!

The complete performance test has been captured in one graph:

Read Kenon’s blog for more info. Great article,

Thanks for making our arguments valid.

By the way, make sure to patch your systems asap cause a new worm virus can be expected that takes advantage of this feature(;)) soon…

Thanks Thomas, for pointing me out! And great work by Dennis!

We’ve drilled into these scenarios further and asked customers, who have currently have Live Migration capabilities, if they have changed their servicing process. In particular, when do they perform their hardware servicing. Is it during business hours 9-5? The overwhelming answer is, “No, we still schedule server downtime and notify folks of the scheduled downtime.”

Even customers with Live Migration still wait until off hours to service the hardware.

So if the customers are waiting until off hours, thus not needing this feature… why the hell spend all that precious time till 2010 to get this in 2008 R2!?! Why not spend your time useful and INNOVATE for a change? Come up with a feature that shocks the world.

Well let’s end this blog possitive, great idea to give away a stripped down standalone Hyper-V version away for free! Well it might sound asif I’m not serious, but I’m really curious how stripped down it is. What I understood is that it’s just Windows 2008 Core with Hyper-V preinstalled and all the other roles left out. Well we’ll just have to wait and see.