Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Hyper-V

Train Signal virt CBTs still 25% reduction

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Train Signal, the post included a reduction coupon, YELLOWBRICKS. This coupon gives you 25% reduction on the Train Signal virtualization CBTs. Train Signal was so kind to also provide me with an additional coupon that gives you free shipping:

All you need to do is head over to Train Signal and enter the following coupon code “YELLOWBRICKS” and “FREESHIP”. By buying a CBT you also support Yellow-Bricks.com! Both coupon codes are valid till the end of the month, just two weeks left…

Train Signal

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Almost a year ago I wrote an article on a CBT by Train Signal. I really enjoyed watching the CBT and that says a lot coming from someone that never used to be a CBT fan. In the end the ease of learning when and wherever you want is what convinced me. Another reason to use a CBT instead of a classroom training is costs, which is most definitely a valid reason in these times of financial crisis.

If you’re not familiar with CBT’s check out this example:

I managed to get a discount for my readers, buy one of the virtualization related(VMware ESX, Server, Workstation etc) CBT’s and get a 25% reduction! All you need to do is head over to Train Signal and enter the following coupon code “YELLOWBRICKS”. And by buying a CBT you also support Yellow-Bricks.com!

Gabes Virtual World coverage on Hyper-v vs ESX

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Gabe from “Gabes Virtual World” is on a roll lately. He wrote three great articles which describe why he wouldn’t want to use Hyper-V in his Datacenter at this moment. I linked to his blog articles and grabbed a quote from each article that sets the tone in my opinion:

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!

Hyper-V vs ESX performance

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There has been a lot of talk on Hyper-V vs ESX performance. I can imagine that no one believes performance statements coming from either VMware or Microsoft. Kenon Owens from VMware posted a blog article on this topic. Yes Kenon is from VMware but the performance tests has been done by an independent company.

The complete performance test has been captured in one graph:

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

So what if I would have $ 50.000

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Sometimes you wished you hadn’t invested all of your 50.000 dollars on an employee who will be doing “migrations” for you. So what am I talking about? Well imagine yourself in a 24×7 environment, or anyother environment for that matter and you just received an email about this patch. Yeah this patch NEEDS to be applied a.s.a.p. cause it’s a major vulnerability. So in other words, patch your Hyper-V. This means either a quick migration or shutdown the vm’s in any environment that would cause downtime either way. I think your $ 50.000(which probably isn’t the correct amount anyway) is well spend within matter of days.

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…