Today I installed Windows 2008 Server Enterprise for x64. The reason for doing it was that I’m curious about Hyper-V which requires the Windows 2008 Server. It also requires a 64bit CPU with virtualization technology. The Dell PE R200 satisfies both demands and the install went well. Here are some quick thoughts:

1. Installation: It takes forever. The installation isn’t only limited to the virtualization technology. The installation is either the full version or the core version. The full version installs almost everything (you have to activate the services you want later) while the core version only installs the core services and no GUI. But, as the full server OS is quite large, the installation takes forever. The ESXi installation is done quickly, the ESX installation takes a bit more time, but the Windows 2008 takes forever. There are probably some ways of installing the Win2008 remotely and unattended, but installation is a dreadful task even if it’s automated.
2. Patching: As the server OS consists of a huge amount of services and applications, the patching also takes forever. Even though they have moved away from the Windows Update web page to a simple client, it still takes time to patch the server. You might be able to do this automaticly too, but it still takes a considerable amount of time. VMware have the VirtualCenter to do all the patching, and it does it well. And, since the footprint is really small in ESXi’ case, there aren’t really many patches to be applied.
3. Adding or modifying a network to Hyper-V could disconnect the machine from the network for a short period of time….
4. No mouse in remote desktop sessions before I install integrated services?! I have to be locally connected to install operating systems?
5. The installation of Windows 2003 Enterprise seems a bit slower than with ESX(i) even though I’m installing on a local disk drive from a local image.
6. No network card drivers installed automatically when Win2003 R2 is installed. This in addition to the mouse problem makes it hard to get Win2003 to work. The Integrated services setup requires “a newer version of Windows”…. To install Win2003 you have to manually add the “legacy network adapter” to get a network connection without the “integrated services”.
7. Really bad unix support, at least the fully supported ones. I’ll try Ubuntu and OpenSolaris later on to see if it works or not.
8. The Microsoft System Center Virtual Machines Manager 2007 download is nearly 1.7 Gigabytes. And i thought VirtualCenter was huge… Even better, the 2008 beta is close to 2.7GiB, I’m impressed :-)

To sum up my first impressions on Hyper-V: Why should I select Hyper-V instead of ESX(i) + VirtualCenter or Xen? The list of annoying things are already quite large and I expect it to be even larger when I try some of the more advanced benefits of virtualization, namly HA and live migration. In these first attempts, I haven’t found a single feature which is a real killer for the other virtualization solutions. The close connection to the Windows 2008 operating system makes it more of a competitor for VMWare Server, not ESX. And, the VMWare server is, as we already know, supported on both WIndows and Linux. And, it comes for free.

Another problem with a generalized OS as the resource manager is that it is tuned to give a good performance to all the tasks running. It might prioritize an internal operating system process before the virtual machines, giving the virtual machines less CPU time or memory even though these machines might be more critical than the host. This isn’t just a problem with Hyper-V, but with all the virtualization solutions that are available at the time. I don’t know how much this affects the virtual machines, and I guess that Microsoft have tuned Win2008 to give Hyper-V some sort of priority when it runs, but this might become an issue. Here, VMware ESX(i) have a huge advantage – the hypervisor controls all the resources.

Well, that my initial thoughts. Let’s see if it sticks after I’ve done some more tests :-)