System Requirements - Published: January 2008

Published: January 2008
Scenario: Automate and Consolidate Software Test and Development EnvironmentsHyper-V enables businesses to consolidate their test and development servers and to automate the provisioning of virtual machines. Customers across all business segments are looking for ways to decrease their costs and to accelerate application and infrastructure installations and upgrades, while delivering comprehensive quality assurance. To achieve testing coverage goals prior to going into production, multiple challenges must be overcome: Network operations: A test network that is incorrectly configured could endanger production networks. Developer productivity: Developer productivity should not be wasted on time-consuming administrative tasks, such as configuring test environments and installing operating systems. Server operational and capital costs: High-quality application test coverage requires replicating production computing environments, which in turn need costly hardware and human resources. This extra resource demand can pose risks to budgets and schedules Virtual machine technology was developed more than 30 years ago to address some of the challenges first encountered during the mainframe era, enabling side-by-side testing and production partitions on the same system. Now, Hyper-V enables better test coverage, developer productivity, and user experience. The memory and processor scalability inherent in Hyper-V 64-bit architecture supports enterprise test scenarios. Developers can also leverage Hyper-V as an efficient tool to simulate distributed applications on a single physical server. Deploying and testing distributed server applications typically requires quantities of available hardware resources and a great deal of time to configure the hardware and software systems in a lab environment, to simulate a desired scenario. Hyper-V is a powerful time- and resource-saving solution that optimizes hardware and human resource utilization in distributed server application development scenarios. Hyper-V enables individual developers to easily deploy and test a distributed server application using multiple virtual machines on one physical server. Combining the robust features in Hyper-V, such as disk hierarchy and virtual networking, with the value of machine consolidation gives developers a powerful and efficient way to simulate complex network environments. The result is a development environment solution that is very time and cost effective because less hardware, less real estate, and less time are required for build-out.
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Feature |
Description |
Broad guest operating system support |
Guest operating systems supported include Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003, and specific Xen-enabled Linux distributions. In addition to supporting the operating systems above with synthetic hardware, VMs in Hyper-V can run many other operating systems with hardware emulation, including all versions of DOS, Windows, and Windows Server. |
Self-service portals |
System Center Virtual Machine Manager enables developers and testers to create and destroy VMs from a configuration library instead of requiring administrator intervention. |
Flexible resource control |
VMs can also take advantage of flexible resource control, enabling testers to assign memory and processor resources that best fit the test or development scenario. |
VM Snapshots |
With the Snapshot feature of Hyper-V, a VM can be reset to a previous state. |
Feature |
Description |
High availability through host and guest clustering |
Hyper-V enables clustering of guest operating systems and host computers, enabling a variety of high-availability scenarios. Clustering host computers offers a cost-effective means of increasing server availability, enabling failover of virtual machines among the Hyper-V hosts in the cluster. Using Hyper-V, organizations can create a high-availability virtual machine environment that can effectively accommodate both planned and unplanned downtime scenarios, without requiring the purchase of additional software tools. For example, IT administrators can effectively anticipate host server restarts if required by system updates. With a properly configured Hyper-V host cluster, running virtual machines can be migrated to another host in the cluster with minimal downtime. In unplanned downtime scenarios, such as hardware failure, the virtual machines running on the host can be automatically migrated to the next available Hyper-V host. Guest clustering allows cluster-aware applications to be clustered within virtual machines across Hyper-V host computers. |
Live backup |
Hyper-V virtual machines and their data can be automatically backed up without experiencing downtime (if the guest OS supports Volume Shadow Copy Service). If a server stops responding, its VMs can be restored and started on any other host server, minimizing service interruptions. Tape backup processes take advantage of virtual tape drive functionality in Hyper-V. For example, if a server incorporates a script to automatically back up its data to a tape drive, that process can still be used when the server is converted to a virtual machine. |
Health monitoring |
Hyper-V leverages comprehensive integration with monitoring tools, like Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), to spot and respond to issues before they become larger problems. |
Quick Migration |
Quick Migration enables VMs to be moved to other servers, automatically or manually, with minimal downtime. Note: Quick Migration is available only in the Enterprise and Datacenter editions of Windows Server 2008. When monitoring tools like SCOM identify important but non-urgent problems with servers—a system reaching its maximum capacity, for example—integrated management tools can automatically move that server to another physical computer, even at another location. |
Windows Server Core option |
Hyper-V is available as a Windows Server 2008 Server Core role. Windows Server Core as a guest OS helps facilitate high availability for core infrastructure roles. The reduced disk and memory footprint of Windows Server Core will facilitate faster Quick Migrations and faster cluster failovers of VMs based on Windows Server Core. |
Core features, such as dynamic hardware management, Quick Migration of running VMs with minimal downtime, and 64-bit, multi-processor support, enable data centers to rely on virtual machines for even the most resource-intensive workloads.
Hyper-V helps realize the dynamic data center vision of providing self-managing dynamic systems and operational agility. Combining business processes with System Center Virtual Machine Manager enables a data center to rapidly provision new applications and dynamically load balance virtual workloads across different physical machines in their infrastructure and to progress toward self-managing dynamic systems.
Microsoft System Center Integration and the Dynamic Systems Initiative
Hyper-V integrates with Microsoft System Center (MSC), a new generation of dynamic management tools designed to support the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI). MSC provides IT Professionals with the tools and knowledge to help manage their IT infrastructure, embedding operational knowledge in the management tools, and enabling the system to manage and even heal itself.
The essence of Microsoft DSI strategy is to develop and deliver technologies that enable businesses and people be more productive, and to better adapt to dynamic business demands. There are three architectural elements of the dynamic systems technology strategy:
For more information about DSI, see: www.microsoft.com/dsi.
Feature |
Description |
Broad guest operating system support |
Guest operating systems supported include Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003, and specific Xen-enabled Linux distributions. In addition to supporting the operating systems above with synthetic hardware, VMs in Hyper-V can run many other operating systems with hardware emulation, including all versions of DOS, Windows, and Windows Server. |
Automated VM reconfiguration |
The VM configuration capabilities in Hyper-V enable advanced management tools to reconfigure VMs with additional storage, memory, processor cores, and networking (minimal downtime required to restart the VM). A dynamic data center uses this technology not only to respond to problems, but also to anticipate increased demands. The dynamic data center can give a Web server additional processing power in anticipation of a Web-based promotion, for example. If the payroll system always slows down during the last few days of the month, the system can automatically add capacity for that period and free up those resources for other VMs after payroll processing is done. |
Quick Migration |
The Hyper-V Quick Migration feature enables running VMs to be moved to other servers, with minimal downtime. Dynamic data centers leverage Quick Migration to move workloads to servers with applicable capabilities for their current needs. A server providing application updates, for example, could migrate to a more powerful server in anticipation of a company-wide software update. |
Utilization counters |
Hyper-V utilization counters provide server administrators with detailed server load and performance information to facilitate planning and analysis, as well as charge-back metrics. |
The move by Microsoft to hypervisor-based, hardware-assisted virtualization vastly improves reliability and scalability for virtual servers, enabling even the most demanding workloads to be run in dynamic virtual machines.
The industry-standard management tools in Hyper-V enable system administrators to manage virtual servers and physical servers in the same familiar, widely supported interface.
IT departments use Hyper-V to:
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