Hyper-V has been available for several weeks now and I had expected quite a lot of this virtualization technology by Microsoft. As a long-time user of VMWare Server I assumed that Hyper-V was at least able to compete against the current V1.x by VMWare Server and that it would set the a benchmark concerning Performance. In the following I will describe my first experiences with Hyper-V.
What I already knew before the practical experience explained here is that Hyper-V wouldn’t have any USB support. If I remember correctly, VMWare offered this support / feature for quite a while. Microsoft – why aren’t you able to do this?
The attempt to convert my existing VMWare Machines into Hyper-V was a miserable failure. By using a Freeware Tool I could pleasingly convert the VMDK files into VHD files, but that was it – the virtual machine wasn’t able to boot. Reason: Hyper-V can only boot from virtual IDE hard disks, not from SCSI disks. I simply can’t understand why Microsoft ignores this feature and generally I consider this very negligent (not to say stupid) of Microsoft. I am also wondering why there is no provided tool to convert VMWare Machines into Hyper-V Machines – Mircrosoft doesn’t seem to expect someone having this idea. Unfortunately, the findings, which I am going to describe in a moment, seem to confirm this theory.
To continue with the topic of virtual hard disks: it really bothers me that Hyper-V, unlike VMWare, cannot split the virtual hard disks into 2GB files. In the past I had often problems handling big files – this is why I generally split virtual hard disks in VMWare.
After the first few failures in converting VMWare into Hyper-V machines, the only remaining option was to reinstall new machines. “Well, if my virtual machine also runs on Windows Server 2008 that would also be an improvement”, I thought. All in all, Windows Server 2008 runs on a very high performance on my physical machines. However, when installing Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V I was faced with another disillusion – the I/O with the virtual (IDE*;_)*) hard disks doesn’t seem to perform well. The “expansion” of the files within the Windows Server 2008 installation in Hyper-V takes a lot lot lot longer than installing the physical machine.
Not sitting in front of the Server (does anyone do that at all nowadays?), but working via a RDP terminal goes without saying. Here, I was disappointed again – operating the virtual machine with the mouse via a Hyper-V console during a RDP session is not possible. In order to do this, the “Integration Services” have to be installed onto the virtual machine. Unfortunately this is clearly not possible as long as the installation hasn’t been finished, so that operating the machine during the installation via RDP is only possible by using the keyboard. Very annoying. There aren’t any problems with VMWare concerning this issue. Again I am wondering about a software constellation in which everything comes from Microsoft. By the way, why does Microsoft call the VM driver package “Integration Services”? When I read in the help for the first time (yes, I really opened the help – window) it was quite confusing, because as a software developer I understand something completely different by the term “Integration Services”. Wouldn’t something like VM Additions have been more self-explaining? Hm, still wondering…
After the Setup (without mouse support via RDP) I was finally able to use the virtual machine and I had to discover that there wasn’t any network interference card available. Well, I had to shut down the virtual machine again, look into the Hyper-V configuration in order to find out how to connect the network card. But to say something nice about the whole thing – the user/operator interface for the configuration of Hyper-V is really self-explaining and easily operated.
After several mouse clicks I was about to connect the network interference card to the virtual machine – remember that I was still working via RDP – when a warning popped up that the network on the physical server might collapse and therefore might have to be reconfigured. I thought: “Well, then I’ll reconnect with RDP again afterwards when the network is established”, and went on…. Well - going somewhere - namely by car straight to the office where the server on which I had been working is located- was really necessary then. The physical machine was like a total mess, jammed and had to be reset. To cut a long story short, administration of virtual network cards and bindings works perfectly fine with VMWare via RDP. Therefore, no-one can say that my expectations were too high!
After many hours (yes, I was spoiled by VMWare) I was finally able to install the software onto the virtual machine. I didn’t have to wait long for the next unexpected problem of Hyper-V to appear – the processor’s efficiency in the Task Manager on the physical machine was basically nothing – no matter how busy the virtual machine was. Of course there’s an explanation for this - Hyper-V is integrated in the operating system and runs relatively near to the hardware – but when working with it, it is very annoying. With the network traffic, for example, it is the same as it can’t be measured on the physical machine anymore, too.
In a nutshell, the current version of Hyper-V unfortunately isn’t of any use to me and cannot compete against VMWare Server (V1.x) by far (for me), apart from supporting operating systems. But VMWare Server 2.x is now available as RC and will bridge this gap soon. My advice for anyone intending to use Hyper-V is using a dedicated server which is only used for virtual machines and for nothing else and plan to (physically) sit in front of this machine for a while ;-)
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