After a few relatively small changes and not-so-earth-shattering features, the Windows 8 blog has now unveiled something many of you will surely appreciate: Hyper-V, Microsoft’s hypervisor-based virtualisation software, will be integrated into the client releases of Windows 8 – not just the server releases.
It should be pretty clear by now what Hyper-V allows you to do. It allows you to virtualise several operating system instances, both 32bit and 64bit, on top of Windows. The technology is 64bit-only; you can only run it on 64bit Windows. Hyper-V has dynamic memory (memory is shared between VMs), and the most powerful VM you can configure has 32 processors and 512GB of RAM.
On top of requiring a 64bit processor, the Hyper-V implementation in Windows 8 also requires Second Level Address Translation, a processor feature which only more recent processors support. Intel calls it Extended Page Table, and it’s supported on Core i3, i5 and i7 processors as well as on Pentium G6950 and modern Xeons. AMD, on the other hand, calls it Rapid Virtualization Indexing, and it’s supported on AMD 10h processors.
A piece of good news regarding Hyper-V in windows 8 comes from the comments, where Microsoft confirmed that unlike Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008, it won’t disable the sleep feature. “No, you will not lose the ability to put the physical machine to sleep when the Windows Hypervisor is running in Windows 8,” Microsoft wrote, “This is a significant change we did to enable bringing Hyper-V to the client. Virtual machines which are running will be put into a saved state, and resumed when the machine wakes.”
No word yet on which edition of Windows 8 will actually support Hyper-V, but knowing Microsoft, you’re probably going to need one of the more expensive editions.
Im was very happy to hear this news, I’ve always been puzzled with the virtualisation platform from Microsoft ever since they let Virtual PC 2007 die a slow death. I used to like VPC as it was quick, no frills and just got on with the job, It wasn’t great with anything but Windows, but for a lot of development and testing this was fine.
When however the path stopped dead i was forced to look for something else. I do like VMWare as it’s solid and works well with their enterprise products however my decision came down to future proofing and with VirtualBox i knew i would upgrades and features for life.
However i do run a Hyper-V 2008R2 shop, again because it was cheap (we had the windows licences so the hyper-v was free), we have windows servers and Hyper-V supports it well. SP1 add some much needed features such as better memory and VM support, however the missing link has always been on the client side, with very hard and unstable paths for testing the VHD’s and VM’;s away from Hyper-V Server.
Im really looking forward to being able to run a Windows client with native Hyper-V support this is going to help my testing and development environment no end. Which leads me to my post title, I’m glad to see microsoft are being a little controlled and not going for every feature on the planet, they need to refine windows 7 to make windows 8. Windows 7 is rock solid, is very productive and works well, they don’t need the revolutionary, just slowly but securely add controlled features.
Although this is not to say ill be giving up VirtualBox, it’s a excellent Virtualisation platform for the client and i really love the powerful features, making it on par and in some places beating vmware.
Really nice for us techies for testing, developing etc.
But another thought: Couldn’t this be used to get all those underutilized corporate desktops to handle some server tasks on the side? Imagine thousands of desktops idling 90 % of the time. If utilization of the desktop VM increases, the server task could be live-migrated somewhere else.
“us techies”?
us techies use xen or/and kvm :p
I never install windows as anything but virtual machines, there you can sort of cope with all the limitations crap put in by MS.. Luckily I never need windows.
Think of it..;
“Ok guys, just passed an Windows Genuine Advantage Validation “upgrade”, yay, going down for a reboot. And then the real upgrades, yay, and then another reboot, and possibly some more upgrades and reboots after that, and then some defragging and a virus scan, it will just take a moment” :p
Well, I know its not that bad, but its still bad.
Uh, I am a techie, and I use Hyper-v, and Virtualbox, and Vmware, depending on where and what I am doing.
A real techie uses the best tool for the job at hand.
No, “we” use whatever works best in a given situation.
Yes we do, and part of what ‘we’ decide is working out how much it’s going to cost us.
This will not work with every processor. Not even those with the virtualization extensions. There are apparently new virtualization extensions that it requires.
You didn’t read the article?
.
Yes, I did which mentioned it. I thought it was worth bringing up as a discussion point. If Microsoft enabled virtualization on all windows 8 installations that could be huge. This sounds like its going to be much more limited in scope.
He read the article and a little bit more.
Yep, it requires Enhanced Page Tables (EPT) (Intel) resp. Nested Page Tables (NPT) (AMD).
Check with ‘Coreinfo.exe -v’
d/l at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/cc835722
Hyper-V requires … …(SLAT).
SLAT is a feature present in the current generation of 64-bit processors by Intel & AMD.
You can run it if you have a current cpu and a supported board.
The only good part is it comes with this ability. Sure I like the dynamic memory allocation but other features of Hyper-V are not that much better to an average geek.
We’ll see how good it works when available.
Still sore that I spend $150 on VirtualPC a long time ago. MS, can I have my money back?
It was worth it when you bought it. Do you want your money back from mcdonalds after you eat it and aren’t hungry anymore?
VirtualPC is not something you eat and use once….. That’s kind of the point.
Number 1 issue with running in a virtual machine/Hypervisor. Video darn card. How well is that supported.
Number 2 is it going to be like Windows 2008 were you can run as many instances as you like as long as it only 1 machine.
Number 2 can be kinda important to MS bottom line. Hmm lets by 1 machine and share it between 10 people.
There is a number 3. Will the Windows 8 hyper-v drivers work with KVM. If so Windows 8 will be the most Linux friendly Windows to date. Particularly if it has the instance allowance.
I’ve been waiting for years for VMware or VirtualBox to release a virtualization platform for Windows.
Thank you, Microsoft!
The number one use case I have for virtualization is to run a VPN client without loosing access to the local network, or to use multiple VPNs simultaneously.
Does anybody know of other ways to sandbox a VPN on Windows? The virtualization approach feels sort of heavy weight for this.
Is there a problem on Windows to run multiple VPNs simultaneously? I usually telecommute in most business days but I’m currently temporarily assigned to another project/customer at the company I work for in addition to my regular duties and to access their AIX systems, I have to connect through yet another VPN client, Cisco AnyConnect VPN client or some such.
Granted, I am running Windows XP SP3 but the Cisco client is not that reliable and crashes every now and then, sometimes taking its connection with it and sometimes not. And when it crashes, it usually requires a reboot to get it back in good shape.
But when I am connected into both VPNs, everything works fine including access to resources in my own home network so I kind of assumed that it was trivial thing. A ipconfig /all shows all the “virtual” plus the real network interfaces at the system.
Unless you want a set up with different default gateways depending on your needs at the moment? A few co-workers that are assigned to a different project/customer have a similar problem where they cannot use the corporate IM network among a bunch of other things most of the time so I definitely see a use case here but running multiple OS instances on VMs all the time to provide constant access to multiple VPNs sounds overkill to me…
Edited 2011-09-10 20:19 UTC
Yes there is a problem.
Issue is when the IP ranges from the VPN’s over lap.
Linux recently added a feature to its cgroup/container system to deal with this problem. Solaria has had it in there zones for a far while.
Basically that you can assign applications to network links. So avoid the issue.
Yes the virtual machine solution is major overkill to get around a OS design defect.
At work I use three VPN clients on a daily basis for connecting to our customers’ sites; Checkpoint, Nortel and Cisco.
Only the one from Checkpoint lets me use the local network while connected to the VPN.
Whether Windows’ built-in IPsec must be enabled or disabled varies between the clients, so you have to know when to start/stop the service.
For these reasons I have three VM images dedicated to each of the VPN clients. My host is currently OS X, but I moved the VPNs into VMs one or two years before switching to a Mac.
I have never been able to connect to two of the VPNs simultaneously. IIRC, you can even experience clients that are incompatible to the point where you can’t have both installed at the same time.
At the low end of the annoyance spectrum is the issue with existing TCP connections breaking when dialing a VPN. (Somebody calls you on VoIP, you need to connect to a VPN to answer their question, and bam! Call ended.)
On my Linux box at home, I am able to connect to the Cisco VPN server without loosing control the way I do with the Windows client. Normally vpnc does the usual routing table hijacking, but if I configure it to not run the default connect script, all it does is create a tunneling device. I can then route specific destination addesses through the VPN however I want.
I don’t think the issue is primarily with Windows, but rather with the VPN clients that mess too much with my system’s routing table. I have however not found any open source client for the Nortel and Checkpoint VPNs. I have not attemted to use non-official clients on Windows. The easy solution was to virtualize XP on XP to work around all the pain.