Since I posted the YouTube video showing Hyper-V blue screens last Friday I've received a lot of comments, questions, compliments and complaints. The video and descriptive text have raised more questions than answers, so here are a few details to help fill out the story.
- The workload was not technically VMmark. There are two reasons for this:
- VMmark's run rules specify that the VMs must be configured with a single virtual disk. Because this configuration can't make use of Hyper-V's paravirtualized SCSI driver, which requires a second virtual disk, the run rules were violated to make Hyper-V produce its best results.
- The vendors that provided requirements for VMmark included use of SMP Linux guests. Hyper-V's lack of support for these configurations means that it is unable to run VMmark according to the rules. Those rules were ignored by the test team and the ESX and Hyper-V tests were run with uniprocessor Linux guests so that Hyper-V was able to produce some number.
- The server ran 15 tiles* when ESX was installed. So, the hardware is good.
- The server successfully ran 10 tiles* when Hyper-V was installed, although at a much higher CPU utilization and lower throughput than ESX. The server seems to run Hyper-V correctly.
- The 11-tile* run was tried many, many times. Hyper-V was unable to run 11 tiles without guest blue screens or the parent partition crashing and bringing down the server.
(*) As detailed in the first bullet, these aren't real "tiles". They have been dumbed down (Linux SMP) and reconfigured (extra virtual disk) to work around Hyper-V limitations.
I'm hoping to convince the people responsible for the test to shed their anonymity and come out with an official paper. I'll provide those details as soon as I can get them.
