Somethings You Need To Know About Hyper-V
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@scottalanmiller said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
@WingCreative said:
It sounds like it might be feasible to run a free Hyper-V host without any sort of Windows VM involved... As I am a fan of irony, I may just have to try it and see what I can do with ManageEngine's Hyper-V configuration tool (the best free option Google has found for me so far).
It would be an odd & rare choice though, if you're only going to use linux. You'd likely get better preformance out of other hypervisors and better management.
It sounds more odd than it is. Yes, Xen will beat anyone at that workload. But SMBs just don't have a need for performance. They all think that that matters, but it doesn't. Losing 1% to overhead is not noticeable to 99.99% of SMBs. And even fewer of the ones using only one server. And if that really is a factor, you can overcome it with a few dollars of additional hardware on that one server.
What HyperV brings to the table that XenServer lacks is free backup utilities that are end user friendly like Unitrends and Veeam. These are lacking on XenServer. Nearly everyone needs backup, almost no one needs the extra performance. So in those rare cases where you are an SMB, have only one server and need everything to be Linux, there is actually a reasonable chance that HyperV might make more sense.
Of course, XenServer should be more stable there, a tiny bit faster, easier to manage and if you are 100% Linux you can probably figure out backups on your own since XS supports that. But it stills leaves space for HyperV to play nicely.
This is pretty much my reasoning @thecreativeone91 - I'm tired of checking out things like Veeam B&R and realizing that I can't use it on my current hypervisor of choice because they only support "all major hypervisors"... AKA VMware and Hyper-V.
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@WingCreative said:
I'm tired of checking out things like Veeam B&R and realizing that I can't use it on my current hypervisor of choice because they only support "all major hypervisors"... AKA VMware and Hyper-V.
This is a difference in ecosystem mentality. If you use XenServer, don't get third party tools, use what is provided for you. If you use HyperV or VMware, assume you need third party tools to do the job.
XS doesn't need a backup utility, backups are baked in, but they are more limited. It's not that needing Unitrends (which doesn't work on ESXi Free either!!) or Veeam isn't okay, it's just that you need to go into XS assuming the product is the product and that the VMware mentality of the application just being the first piece isn't going to work. Can you get third party tools for XS? Yes, of course. But don't go into it thinking that way. All the basics are there, if they are what you need, done. If not, it's probably the wrong tool set.
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Makes sense - Mainly for now I just want the ability to tell potential clients that it's not just me and my configurations making sure their data is backed up automatically, and I really like the idea of my backup application testing itself regularly. I will probably have both hypervisors running once I can snag another test server and do some side-by-side feature comparisons.
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@WingCreative said:
Makes sense - Mainly for now I just want the ability to tell potential clients that it's not just me and my configurations making sure their data is backed up automatically....
It's always like that. At the end of the day, whether you are configuring built in backups or third party ones, it is you and your config that they have to trust.
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I personally love Hyper-V - I started using it on Server 2008, and it was ...ok at that time, but it ran. Now, when Server 2008 R2 came out, Hyper-V introduced High Availability and volume shared clustering, and it worked splendidly for us. Unfortunately, I never got the opportunity to work with this on any automated level, but it was fantastic when we had planned building outages and needed to migrate our servers to our secondary server node.
It's always been easy to set up - my only beef with it is the built-in GUI management tools. You can manage Hyper-V Server 2008 & 2008 R2 from a Windows 7/2008 box, but if you want to manage 2012, you need Windows 8/2012. There are other tools available (5nine Hyper-V Manager works great) - - but, it's annoying.
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Seems like an appropriate thread to throw out this question: Has anyone here used Hyper V Replica? We're currently in the process of moving all of our production web sites and apps to a new Hyper V server and are considering
- Using Hyper V Replica to back up our production VMs to a 2nd server
or - Using Hyper V Replica to back up to Azure, which runs $54 a month per VM.
Curious to know what the popular opinion is. Being able to click a few times on a production VM and have it replicate only the changes ( deltas ), asynchronously, well it just sounds like God's gift to server newbs like me.
Our database component ( MySQL ) is independent and run off of the Amazon cloud, so the 30 second delay between delta sends shouldn't be an issue because both the main and replicated VMs will be connecting to the same external datasources.
- Using Hyper V Replica to back up our production VMs to a 2nd server
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@GregoryHall works with this. I'll ping him.
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I have a client that is using Veeam to create replicas. I do not know anyone using the built in functionality.
Most of my clients do not have the need for this type of setup.
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I just want to confirm that this Microsoft rep is misinformed. He claims that shutting off the Hyper V service ( say on a laptop in Windows 8 ) will make the host OS's performance identical to if Hyper V wasn't even installed, which flies in the face of the conversion-to-VM process that happens according to the discussions here on Mango.
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@creayt said:
I just want to confirm that this Microsoft rep is misinformed. He claims that shutting off the Hyper V service ( say on a laptop in Windows 8 ) will make the host OS's performance identical to if Hyper V wasn't even installed, which flies in the face of the conversion-to-VM process that happens according to the discussions here on Mango.
He is crazy and that's not how it works. It's not a service at all, its a hypervisor. How could it be a service? That's not even possible. And this is just a community, he's denying Microsoft's own documentation, it's not like he's staff. There is a service, but the service isn't the hypervisor. He's providing a placebo and trying to blow the OP off assuming that he will never notice.
What CAN happen is that you can remove the role and launch with the OS on bare metal then reinstall. You could, in theory, make a dual boot system that boots HyperV or the OS directly depending on what you want to do but I don't know specifically how that would be done but technically the possibility is there.
Looping in the actually MS rep @gregoryhall
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@scottalanmiller said:
He is crazy and that's not how it works.
Ah, I see. I presumed based on that Microsoft label thingee he was official. Sorry for the waste of time.
Guessing he was referring to the "Hyper V Virtual Machine Management" service in this screen grab I just did from a running 2012 R2, which is probably just the GUI to manage the VMs and not the virtualization itself ( agreeing w/ your post
But I get what you're saying and it sounds right ( unless of course MS has invented some new implementation of hypervisage that somehow secretly works differently than traditional type 1s, kidding ).
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@scottalanmiller said:
It's not a service at all, its a hypervisor. How could it be a service?
I can confirm, was able to shut down the service and the VM stayed up, and the GUI puttered out w/ a message that the service was offline.
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So the service is nothing but the GUI, as expected.
Thanks for verifying. Nice to know for sure I'm not crazy from time to time.
