Mastering Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V

John Savill

• Publisher: Sybex
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119286202
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Virtualisation
• Index: Computer Science

Build a seamless, flexible, full-service datacenter solution

Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V is the IT administrator's guide to this rising datacenter solution. Hyper-V has already surpassed VMWare in datacenter management, identity service for multiple devices, and more; this book shows you how to harness the power of this hypervisor to simplify the infrastructure, reduce costs, improve productivity, and better manage system resources. From a tour of the technology through architecture, deployment, and integration of System Center, Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft Azure Stack, the discussion illustrates the skills you need to create a complete solution for optimum enterprise management. Coverage includes Windows Azure capabilities for virtual machines, managing a hybrid cloud, IaaS, storage capabilities, PowerShell, and more, with practical real-world guidance from a leading authority in the field.

Hyper-V has recently undergone improvements in scalability and features that have positioned it as an ideal solution in the Small/Medium Business and Enterprise markets. This book shows you how to exploit these new capabilities to build a robust data solution for your organization.

• Discover the capabilities of Microsoft Hyper-V
• Architect a Hyper-V datacenter solution
• Plan and manage a deployment or migration
• Integrate complementary technologies for full scalability

Data is everywhere—on desktops, laptops, phones, and multiple operating systems, accessed through email, text messages, web searches, online services, and more. All of this data must be stored, accessible, updated, backed up, secured, managed, sorted, and analyzed—sometimes instantly. Hyper-V is the rising star in the virtualization space, and Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V shows you how to turn greater capabilities into better datacenter solutions.

Chapter 1
Introduction to Virtualization and Microsoft Solutions

This chapter lays the foundation for the core fabric concepts and technologies discussed throughout not just this first part of this book, but the entire book. Virtualization has radically changed the layout and operation of the datacenter, and this datacenter evolution and its benefits are explored.

Microsoft’s solution for virtualization is its Hyper-V technology, which is a core part of Windows Server, and it is also available in the form of a free, stand-alone hypervisor. The virtualization layer is only part of the solution. Management is just as critical, and in today’s world, the public cloud is also a consideration. Thus a seamless management story with compatibility between your on- and off-premises resources provides the model implementation.

In this chapter, you will learn to:

• Articulate the key value propositions of virtualization.
• Understand the differences in functionality between the various versions of Hyper-V.
• Differentiate between the types of cloud services and when each type is best utilized.

The Evolution of the Datacenter

Many books are available that go into a great amount of detail about the history of datacenters, but that is not the goal of the following sections. Instead, I am going to take you through the key changes that I have seen in my 20 years of working in and consulting about datacenter infrastructure. This brief look at the evolution of datacenters will help you understand the challenges of the past, why virtualization has become such a key component of every modern datacenter, and why there is still room for improvement.

One Box, One Operating System

As recent as 10 years ago, datacenters were all architected in a similar way. These huge rooms with very expensive cabling and air conditioning were home to hundreds, if not thousands, of servers. Some of these servers were mainframes, but the majority were regular servers (although today the difference between a mainframe and a powerful regular server is blurring). Although the processor architecture running in these servers may have been different—for example, some were x86 based, some Alpha, some MIPS, some SPARC—each server ran an operating system (OS) such as Windows, Linux, or OpenVMS. Some OSs supported different processor architectures, while others were limited to a specific architecture. Likewise, some processor architectures would dictate which OS had to be used. The servers themselves may have been freestanding, but as technology advanced, servers got smaller and became rack mountable, enabling greater compression of the datacenter.

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UNDERSTANDING X86

Often, the term x86 is used when talking about processor architecture, but its use has been generalized beyond just the original Intel processors that built on the 8086. x86 does not refer only to Intel processors, but it is used more generally to refer to 32-bit operating systems running on any processor leveraging x86 instruction sets, including processors from AMD. x64 represents a 64-bit instruction set extension processor (primarily from Intel and AMD), although you may also see amd64 to denote 64-bit. What can be confusing is that a 64-bit processor is still technically x86, and it has become more common today simply to use x86 to identify anything based on x86 architecture, which could be 32-bit or 64-bit from other types of processor architecture. Therefore, if you see x86 within this book, or in other media, it does not mean 32-bit only.

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Even with all this variation in types of server and operating systems, there was something they had in common. Each server ran a single OS, and that OS interacted directly with the hardware in the server and had to use hardware-specific drivers to utilize the available capabilities. In the rest of this book, I focus primarily on x86 Windows; however, many of the challenges and solutions apply to other OSs as well.

Every server comprises a number of resources, including processor, memory, network, and storage (although some modern servers do not have local storage such as blade systems, and instead rely completely on external storage subsystems). The amount of each resource can vary drastically, as shown in the following sections.

PROCESSOR

A server can have one or more processors, and it’s common to see servers with two, four, or eight processors (although it is certainly possible to have servers with more). Modern processors use a core architecture that allows a single processor to have multiple cores. Each core consists of a discrete central processing unit (CPU) and L1 cache (very fast memory used for temporary storage of information related to computations) able to perform its own computations. Those multiple cores can then share a common L2 cache (bigger but not as fast as L1) and bus interface. This allows a single physical processor to perform multiple parallel computations and actually act like many separate processors. The first multicore processors had two cores (dual-core), and this continues to increase with eight-core (octo-core) processors available and a new “many-core” generation on the horizon, which will have tens of processor cores. It is common to see a physical processor referred to as a socket, and each processor core referred to as a logical processor. For example, a dual-socket system with quad-core processors would have eight logical processors (four on each physical processor, and there are two processors). In addition to the number of sockets and cores, variations exist in the speed of the processors and the exact instruction sets supported. (It is because of limitations in the continued increase of clock speed that moving to multicore became the best way to improve overall computational performance, especially as modern operating systems are multithreaded and can take advantage of parallel computation.) Some processors also support hyperthreading, which is a means to split certain parts of a processor core into two parallel computational streams to avoid wasted processing. Hyperthreading does not double computational capability, but it generally gives a 10 to 15 percent performance boost. Typically with hyperthreading, this would therefore double the number of logical processors in a system. However, for virtualization, I prefer not to do this doubling, but this does not mean that I turn off hyperthreading. Hyperthreading may sometimes help, but it certainly won’t hurt.

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IS THERE A BIG AND A LITTLE THREAD WITH HYPERTHREADING?

Hyperthreading enables two streams of execution on a single processor core, and you often hear numbers such as a 15 percent performance improvement. This leads to the belief that there is the main thread on the core and then a little “mini-me” thread that has a smaller capability. This is not true. With hyperthreading, a single core has some components duplicated, enabling two sets of logical state per core. Typically, during a thread of execution, the core is not fully utilized for various reasons, such as when a particular instruction stream uses only specific types of ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit), leaving others unused, and more commonly when a cache miss occurs that causes the thread execution to stall while data is fetched. With hyperthreading and the two sets of logical state, if one thread is stalled because of a cache miss, the chances are good that the other thread can execute. This, therefore, keeps the core better utilized and improves the overall performance, and this is where the 15 percent performance gain comes from. Notice that both threads are equal and which one does more work just depends on how busy they are kept, the type of computations, the frequency of cache misses, and so on.

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Earlier versions of Windows supported different processor architectures, including MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, and more recently Itanium. However, as of Windows Server 2012, the only supported processor architecture is x86 and specifically only 64-bit from Windows Server 2008 R2 and above. (There are still 32-bit versions of the Windows 8/8.1 client operating system.)

Prior to Windows Server 2008, there were separate versions of the hardware abstraction layer (HAL), depending on whether you had a uniprocessor or multiprocessor system. However, given the negligible performance savings on modern, faster processors that were specific to the uniprocessor HAL on single-processor systems (synchronization code for multiple processors was not present in the uniprocessor HAL), this was removed, enabling a single unified HAL that eases some of the pain caused by moving from uni- to multiprocessor systems.

MEMORY

The memory resource is generally far simpler, with fewer variations. Some memory supports error-correcting code (ECC), which provides resiliency against the most common types of internal corruption, and memory has di...