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With the next version of Windows Server operating system, Microsoft has conquered one of the thorniest problems of virtualization: moving a virtual operating machine (VM) across a wide area network (WAN).
Microsoft announced this new feature in Microsoft build conference, held this week in Anaheim, California. Will be available on Microsoft Hyper-V, version 3 hypervisor included in the next Microsoft operating system server, Windows Server 8.
The capacity, but also feasible only in a handful of use cases, however, shows an increasing dominance of Microsoft in virtualization, analysts said.
With live migration, virtual machine job moves from one computer to another without any interruption of services offered by applications within the VM.
Most providers of server virtualization software, including Microsoft, have long offered live migration within a local network. A much more difficult problem has been to offer the ability to move live virtual machine across different subnets, WAN or separate sub-networks. Network latency and network complexity have faced a challenging task.
BUILD's conference, Microsoft program manager Ross Ortega explained that the new technology worked. Essentially, each virtual machine has two IP addresses (Internet Protocol).
An address is the address of the virtual machine itself, which it uses to communicate with the rest of the network or, if publicly accessible Internet. The second IP address will be available for local data center.
"The trick is to keep these assignments between the two address spaces," said Bill Laing, corporate vice president for Microsoft's server division and the cloud, in a later interview.
Microsoft is not alone in offering this capability. VMware, in its bid VXLAN also offers the ability. This solution, however, requires Cisco network equipment transport virtualization overlay (OTV) technology.
Long-distance migration in vivo has been a research topic in the community of virtualization for several years, but only useful in a limited number of situations, said Chris Wolf, Gartner research vice president of virtualization cover.
Replicating a state of virtual memory to long-distance can take a considerable amount of time, Wolf said. It may be useful for emergency situations, as when a data center is threatened by a flood or a hurricane coming, and its contents should be transferred to another facility. However, due to the size of most data-center performance of systems, it is likely that only a handful of virtual machines can be moved in time.
In another presentation at BUILD, Brian Dewey, director of Microsoft Hyper-V group, said a solution to this problem. Administrators could also save virtual machines flash drives or optical disks, and then send them to the new location, where vehicle manufacturers could be progressively updated with the latest changes.
Another possible application of technology would be in permanent migration of systems in a data center to another without incurring any downtime, Wolf said. This type of work projects would be needed in data center consolidation, for example.
Beyond the practical applications, the new capacity has a symbolic importance for the company and said Wolf. This shows that Microsoft is pretty good with this new technology to stay on the border of their developments.
The technology "marks a point where Microsoft will launch the first real challenger to VMware vSphere formidable," said Wolf.
BUILD, Microsoft touted a number of new features to make Windows Hyper-V and more competitive with VMware and servers. The company released the ability to do live migration of virtual hard disk virtual machine. Scalability was also promoted: the new software capable of supporting up to 32 virtual processors for each virtual machine, each VM can now take over 512 GB of memory. A new virtual file system, VHDX can be used to create virtual disk storage to 16 TB in size
Microsoft announced this new feature in Microsoft build conference, held this week in Anaheim, California. Will be available on Microsoft Hyper-V, version 3 hypervisor included in the next Microsoft operating system server, Windows Server 8.
The capacity, but also feasible only in a handful of use cases, however, shows an increasing dominance of Microsoft in virtualization, analysts said.
With live migration, virtual machine job moves from one computer to another without any interruption of services offered by applications within the VM.
Most providers of server virtualization software, including Microsoft, have long offered live migration within a local network. A much more difficult problem has been to offer the ability to move live virtual machine across different subnets, WAN or separate sub-networks. Network latency and network complexity have faced a challenging task.
BUILD's conference, Microsoft program manager Ross Ortega explained that the new technology worked. Essentially, each virtual machine has two IP addresses (Internet Protocol).
An address is the address of the virtual machine itself, which it uses to communicate with the rest of the network or, if publicly accessible Internet. The second IP address will be available for local data center.
"The trick is to keep these assignments between the two address spaces," said Bill Laing, corporate vice president for Microsoft's server division and the cloud, in a later interview.
Microsoft is not alone in offering this capability. VMware, in its bid VXLAN also offers the ability. This solution, however, requires Cisco network equipment transport virtualization overlay (OTV) technology.
Long-distance migration in vivo has been a research topic in the community of virtualization for several years, but only useful in a limited number of situations, said Chris Wolf, Gartner research vice president of virtualization cover.
Replicating a state of virtual memory to long-distance can take a considerable amount of time, Wolf said. It may be useful for emergency situations, as when a data center is threatened by a flood or a hurricane coming, and its contents should be transferred to another facility. However, due to the size of most data-center performance of systems, it is likely that only a handful of virtual machines can be moved in time.
In another presentation at BUILD, Brian Dewey, director of Microsoft Hyper-V group, said a solution to this problem. Administrators could also save virtual machines flash drives or optical disks, and then send them to the new location, where vehicle manufacturers could be progressively updated with the latest changes.
Another possible application of technology would be in permanent migration of systems in a data center to another without incurring any downtime, Wolf said. This type of work projects would be needed in data center consolidation, for example.
Beyond the practical applications, the new capacity has a symbolic importance for the company and said Wolf. This shows that Microsoft is pretty good with this new technology to stay on the border of their developments.
The technology "marks a point where Microsoft will launch the first real challenger to VMware vSphere formidable," said Wolf.
BUILD, Microsoft touted a number of new features to make Windows Hyper-V and more competitive with VMware and servers. The company released the ability to do live migration of virtual hard disk virtual machine. Scalability was also promoted: the new software capable of supporting up to 32 virtual processors for each virtual machine, each VM can now take over 512 GB of memory. A new virtual file system, VHDX can be used to create virtual disk storage to 16 TB in size
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