MS Hypervisor versus Vmware Hypervisor

[meistermn]

From Mike Neil Blogs "Viridian and Virtual Server Timing Updates"

at http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/ following statements he made:

1.)"Windows Server virtualization is being designed to scale across a much broader range of systems than the competition"

If this only means windows os has more drivers, than it is worthless, because most end users have to buy new serves with CPU'S with AMD-V or Intel VT .

2.)"We’re designing Windows Server virtualization to scale up to 64 processors, which I’m proud to say is something no other vendor’s product supports"

What does 64 processors mean? 64 sockets or 64 cores.

64 sockets is not available. IBM has a 32 socket system (8 x 4 Sockets)

http://www.dailytech.com/IBMReadiesX4ChipsetforIntelTigerton/article6860.htm

With tigerton you have 128 Cores with IBM X4 Chipsets with 8 x replaced IBM System x3850

3.)We are also providing a much more dynamic VM environment with hot-add of processors, memory, disk and networking as well a greater scalability with more SMP support and memory.

This is only true for the os longhorn or although for othe os. If the api

is available in beta 3 , vmware can althouth provide paravirtualized windows longhorn in their next release.

4.)We’ve made numerous enhancements with Virtual Server R2 SP1 that allow it to scale (64 VMs on 32-bit Windows Server hosts

512 VMs on x64 Windows Server hosts) on systems with more memory (up to 256 GB) and more cores.

How will this scale on a hosted product like Virtual Server R2 SP1 is?

6.) In his post this morning, Microsoft's Neil said one of his team's goals for R2 SP1 is to enable a simultaneous 512-virtual machine implementation when hosted in 64-bit Windows.

http://www.betanews.com/article/Microsoft_Delays_Virtualization_Tools_Rollouts/1176392986

7.)MS Microsoft Virtualization Overview March 2007

http://www.vmware-training.ch/virtualday2007/praesentationen/Microsoft_Walter_Pitrof_Windows%20Virtu...

Interesting Hot Add of Memory for the os dos. Look at side 23 with 16 Mb memory, which changed to 96 Mb on slide 24. Maybe answer to point 3

above.

[meistermn]

On the following URL is said:

http://www.itjungle.com/two/two041807-story01.html

This appears to be the first time Microsoft has committed to completely virtualizing big 64-way X64 machines

Which vendor has got a 64 way X64 maschine? It is not IBM.

[mreferre]

I believe (hope) they are considering 64-cores and not 64-sockets for their sake.

On top of that consider that 99% of the people on this forum would think that it doesn't make sense to go beyond 4 sockets (for the records I fall into the 1%) and I am not sure that supporting 64-socket systems would make them be any better Vs ESX or Vs Xen. 64-cores at 4-cores per socket would be 16-socket which is reasonable enough. 64-sockets at 4 cores per socket would be 256 cores ...... which, although I am a scale-up guy, I find a bit extreme.

Massimo.