Kung Fu Hyper-V needs Shifu
August 4th, 2008 | 
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Chris Wolf‘s Virtualization Review and Redmondmag.com featured article Kung Fu Hypervisor compares Microsoft’s Hyper-V to the character Po in the movie Kung Fu Panda. If you’ve been reading VM /ETC for a while then you know I can’t resist a good movie reference, and Chris’ article doesn’t disappoint, but allow me to expand on the reference a little bit more and add some of my own thoughts to Chris’ points.
“It’s too fat.
It’s too slow.
It can’t do most of our moves.
Defeat us? Ha, ha, ha!Hyper-V has finally arrived on the virtualization scene. The response from Microsoft’s competitors has been eerily similar to the response that Po, the kung fu panda, received when he was selected as the dragon warrior. Even if you haven’t seen the movie, it’s easy to grasp the plot. How can an overweight, slow panda defend a village, let alone master the martial arts?”
Well, hopefully this is a not a plot spoiler for those that haven’t seen the movie (if you have kids I’m sure you have), but Po didn’t have a chance to defend the village without the teachings of his master, Shifu. Furthermore, Shifu didn’t think Po deserved to be chosen as the Dragon Master, did not approve of the choice, was determined to make him fail and run him off, but eventually realizes an alternative way to teach Po in order to save the village. Therefore, if Hyper-V is Po then VMware and Xen both could be considered Shifu. You can guess who “the village” could be.
Getting back to the Virtualization Review / Redmond Magazine article, Chris does a great job explaining the good and the bad about Hyper-V’s initial release. Read the whole article, but the following is a summary of the areas where Chris points out that Hyper-V falls short today, and like Po learned from Shifu in Kung Fu Panda, Microsoft still needs to master.
Performance
“Hyper-V performed reasonably well in my lab tests, especially once I installed the Hyper-V integration services following a virtual machine (VM) guest OS installation. Prior to installing the integration services, routine tasks like formatting a hard disk took considerably longer than I’m used to in virtual environments. For example, formatting a 40GB virtual hard disk took about four minutes to complete. A similar task in the same environment with VMware ESX Server 3.5 took about four seconds.”
I just commented on another post reporting Hyper-V’s poor performance with normal administrative tasks, but, like Chris’ conclusions, once the Integration Services are running in Hyper-V VMs the performance is acceptable.
Memory Sharing and Live Migration
“Most notably lacking from Hyper-V’s bag of tricks are live migration and memory over-commit support. Live migration — such as that found in VMotion and XenMotion — lets you move a VM from one physical host to another in the same physical cluster without having to take a VM offline. This has changed the quality of life for many IT folks, because they can now perform routine hardware maintenance tasks during normal business hours in the middle of the week instead of at some obscure hour over the weekend. Once you have live migration, you find yourself wondering how you ever got by without it.”
[omitted]
“Memory over-commit is another core feature that Hyper-V will desperately need in order to compete with the likes of VMware Inc. Basically, with memory over-commit, the amount of memory allocated to all VMs on a given physical host can exceed the amount of physical memory on the host. This is important because VMs rarely need all of their physical memory at the same time.”
Network Monitoring and NIC Teaming
“One missing option is the ability to connect any type of network monitor — such as an intrusion-detection system — to a Hyper-V virtual switch. In order to do this, you need to be able to configure a one-way mirror in the virtual switch, allowing one switch port to see the traffic of all other ports on the virtual switch. This level of integration is very easy to configure on both VMware ESX and Citrix XenServer.”
[omitted]
“Hyper-V can’t bind to all teamed NIC drivers, so it’s important to validate teaming and Hyper-V support with the NIC vendor before making a purchasing decision. Ideally, I’d love to see the day when Microsoft offers NIC teaming as part of the OS or Hyper-V configuration — something that’s unsupported today.”
It is my understanding that NIC teaming can only be configured within Server 2008, and that the Hyper-V role is not integrated, aware of, or use this configuration today.
Chris’ Virtual Bottom Line
“Like kung fu, virtualization takes years to master. Hyper-V may look like a cute, cuddly panda today, but I have no doubt that, within a few years, the panda will fully morph into a tiger.”
Be sure to read the entire article at either of links above as there are many more positive points that Chris makes for Hyper-V.
Maybe Hyper-V will someday rise to the occasion in it’s own style like Po in the movie:
Tai Lung: The Wuxi finger hold!
Po: Oh, you know this hold?
Tai Lung: You’re bluffing. You’re bluffing! Shifu didn’t teach you that.
Po: Nope. I figured it out. Skadoosh!
BTW, even if you don’t have kids Kung Fu Panda is worth seeing!
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