You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December 2008.
Microsoft apparently isn’t going to ignore the iPhone completely.
Microsoft Dips Its Toe Into The iPhone With Seadragon (TechCrunch)
Video: http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/on10/1/8/1/4/2/SeaDragonMobile2_on10.wmv
Good news for anyone looking for more Silverlight controls including better chart/graph controls. The Silverlight Toolkit just released on CodePlex and includes numerous new controls with source. You can find a controls sample page here and a charting sample page here. The controls include the following:
- TreeView
- AutoCompleteBox
- DockPanel
- WraPanel
- Label
- Expander
- HeaderedItemControl
- HeaderedContentControl
- NumericUpDown
- ViewBox
- ButtonSpinner
- ImplicitStyleManager
- Charts (Pie, Bar, Column, Scatter and Line)
- Several theming samples
Windows Server 2008 R2 will include Hyper-V 2.0, it promises to deliver the final pieces for enterprise level OS virtualization (together with SCVMM2008) and to really compete with VMware at that level.
Live Migration
The most anticipated is of course Live Migration: moving running VM’s from one host to another without interruption of services running inside the VM’s
To accomplisch this technique a new shared filesytem is needed and so will also be introduced in Hyper-V 2.0: Clustered Shared Volumes.
The Live migration works best together with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, it can provide additional Live Migration management and orchestration scenarios such as Live Migration via policy.
Cool thing is you only need to update to Hyper-V 2.0, none of the rest of the infractructere needs updating.
Logical Processor Support
- Support for 32 logical processors on host computer
- Twice the initial supported number of logical processors of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V
Hot add remove storage
- Add and remove VHD and pass-through disks to a running VM without requiring a reboot.
- Hot-add/remove disk only applies to VHDs and pass-through disks attached to the SCSI controller (not the IDE controller)
- Hot-add remove of storage controllers is not supported
Benefits
- Enables storage growth in VMs without downtime
- Enables additional datacenter backup scenarios
SLAT
Second Level Translation (SLAT)
Overview
- Leverage new processor features to improve performance and reduce load on Windows Hypervisor
- AMD: Enhanced Page Tables
- Intel: Nested Page Tables
- Benefits
- Improved memory management performance
- Memory usage of Windows Hypervisor will decrease from approximately 5% to 1% of total physical memory.
- More memory will be available for child partitions enabling higher consolidation ratios
Dynamic Memory
Overview
- Pool of memory is dynamically distributed across VMs
- Memory is dynamically allocated/removed based VM usage with no service interruption
Benefits
- Enables much higher consolidation ratios per host by addressing the greatest limiting factor to consolidation: Memory
How
- VM memory configuration includes:
- Initial (what VM will boot with)
- Minimum (what VM is guaranteed)
- Maximum (what VM can grow to)
- Memory is added via Hot-Add MEM functionality
- Memory is removed via Balloon driver (supported OSs)
!!NOTE:The Dynamic Memory feature, will not be available as a part of the Beta for WS08 R2. Microsoft is still evaluating options to make this feature available as a part of RC/RTM of WS08 R2. So let’s hope this won’t be killed before release.
Boot from VHD
Allows any VHD to work on physical hardware, this is very interesting! Boot an OS VHD on your physical hardware.
Input from Hyper-v.nu:
New functionality can be expected on the network layer. Improved support for stateless and statefull offload technologies will improve the speed of iSCSI storage communication. We also expect support for multiple network channels (NIC teaming support), analogous to already existing support in Windows Server 2008 for MPIO (MultiPath I/O) for SAN path redundancy.
Finally the time is there to introduce Virtualized I/O, a technology allowing multiple operating systems in different virtual machines, to share a single PCI Express device. An application could be the introduction of virtual hostbus adapters (HBA) within virtual machines so a direct mapping can be made to a physical HBA in the host. This allows for better SAN support and similar management of LUN’s and zoning as is required in the physical storage world. An analogy with virtual NIC’s can be made as implemented in Hyper-V.
You can find more information at the WinHEC session descriptions: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winhec/2008/sessions.aspx
More in Windows Server 2008 R2 at Bink.nu: http://bink.nu/news/windows-server-2008-r2-overview-feature-overview.aspx
Hyper-V.nu article in Dutch: http://hyper-v.nu/blogs/hans/archive/2008/10/26/live-migration-in-hyper-v-r2-zal-gebruik-maken-van-microsoft-cluster-shared-volumes-csv.aspx
Microsoft Windows Live Skydrive has just been updated to have 25gb of space. Not bad for free at all.
I wish SkyDrive had Version control available. Wish I could easily synchronise and integrate with Live Mesh and Office Live. I’m sure you can programmatically somehow or other, but would be better if they simply became joined up technology.
Still… is 25GB of free storage which is easily shareable with friends… not bad at all!
