Where IT perceptions are reality Document # INDUSTRY2013002, September 2013 Copyright 2013© IT Brand Pulse. All rights reserved.
Harnessing the Power Most medium and large-sized IT organizations have deployed several generations of virtualized servers and they have become more comfortable with the performance and reliability with each deployment. As IT organizations increased VM density, they reached the limits of Hyper-V software, server memory, CPU, and I/O. A new VM engine is now available and this document describes how it can help IT organizations maximize use of their servers running Hyper-V® in Windows Server® 2012.
Best Practices in Hyper-V Start with Planning When planning a Hyper-V installation, it is important to take into account the new capabilities of Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012. Windows Server 2012 has added significantly to the scalability of Hyper-V. For data centers virtualizing Tier-1 applications, the critical scalability enhancement is the ability to have up to 1TB of memory and 64 virtual CPU cores per VM.
Power Needed for More VMs The Great VM Migration With many server admins working on their 3rd and 4th generation of virtualized servers, the focus has changed from interoperability and learning the behavior of Hyper-V, to increasing VM density (#VMs/physical host server). With the availability of servers based on Intel’s E5 processors (multi-core, 768GB of RAM, PCI Express® Gen3) and the combination of new features within Hyper-V, a new, game-changing compute platform was introduced.
A New VM Engine The Intel Xeon E5 Platform The introduction of the Intel® Xeon® E5 family of processors responds to the call for more virtual server resources with two more cores, 8MB more cache, and six more DIMMs of faster DDR3-1600 memory, increasing the total to eight cores, 768GB of RAM, and doubling the I/O bandwidth with PCIe® 3.0.
A New VM Chassis Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V The newest release of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V delivers a high-performance VM chassis harnessing the new I/O capabilities of Gen 5 Fibre Channel storage networking and 10GbE data networking. Several new features of Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V are highlighted below: vCPU—VMs can now have up to 64 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) and 1TB of virtual RAM (vRAM) allowing Tier-1 applications to be virtualized and new levels of VM density to be reached.
Virtualized I/O Picking the Right I/O Pieces, and Making Them Work Together Tier-1 applications are uniquely demanding in many dimensions. Their needs with respect to CPU power, memory footprint, high availability/failover, resiliency, and responsiveness to outside stimuli is typically unmatched within the enterprise. Moreover, Tier-1 applications also tend to be tightly integrated with other applications and resources within the enterprise.
Performance Turbo Chargers QLogic Server Adapters Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Xeon E5 streamline the process of moving VMs and their associated storage with Live Migration and Live Storage Migration and support low-latency networking traffic with SR-IOV. Moving terabytes of data across VMs and the migration of virtual servers requires low-latency, high-performance I/O adapters.
New Hyper-V Performance 25 Percent More Throughput with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V One of the most important features in Microsoft Windows 2012 Hyper-V for I/O performance is the VHDX virtual hard disk format, which provides storage for the guest OS. Testing by Microsoft shows that VHDX delivers nearly 25 percent better write throughput than virtual hard disk (VHD) for both dynamically expanding and differencing disks.
Performance with Gen 5 Fibre Channel Real-World Performance and CPU Efficiency When used with a high-efficiency Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapter, Hyper-V with VHDX can provide even larger performance advantages. In testing performed by QLogic, the QLogic QLE2672 Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapter delivered the same IOPS performance using real-world 4KB and 8KB block sizes for dual-port adapters as the nearest competitor—with 23 percent less CPU utilization.
Live VM Migration ODX Data Copy Model Offloads Server Microsoft’s Live Migration offers the ability to move a live VM from one physical server to another. Included are some interesting storage-oriented capabilities that provide added value if you use SANs (especially Fibre Channel SANs). The first is the ODX Data Copy Model. On compatible external storage arrays, ODX provides the ability to move data between LUNs without involving the server.
Live Storage Migration Gen 5 Fibre Channel Helps Close the Storage Migration Window A process known as Live Storage Migration allows for a non-disruptive migration of running VM disk files between two different physical storage devices. This process allows for the VM to remain running with no need to take its workload offline to move the VM’s files to a different physical storage device.
Lowering the Cost of VM I/O QLogic 8300 Series Converged Network Adapters Enable Convergence at the VM Edge QLogic Converged Network Adapter solutions leverage core technologies and expertise, including the most established and proven driver stack in the industry. These adapters are designed for next-generation, virtualized, and unified data centers with powerful multiprocessor, multicore servers.
Low-Latency Connectivity QLogic 8300 Series Converged Network Adapters Offload the VM Kernel from Switching Virtual NICs Single Root I/O Virtualization is a standard that allows one PCI Express (PCIe) adapter to be presented as multiple separate logical devices to VMs for partitioning adapter bandwidth. The hypervisor manages the Physical Function (PF) while the Virtual Functions (VFs) are exposed to the VMs.
Scalability with Gen 5 Fibre Channel In Transaction-Intensive and Bandwidth-Intensive Environments For virtualized environments, the most critical measure of performance is the ability to scale as the number of VMs and application workloads increase. In testing conducted by QLogic, the QLogic QLE2672 delivered three times the transactions and double the bandwidth of 8Gb Fibre Channel Adapters.
Accelerating App Performance QLogic FabricCache™ 10000 Series Adapters The QLogic FabricCache™ 10000 Series Adapter is the industry's first caching SAN adapter. This new class of server-based PCIe flash/Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters use the Fibre Channel network to cache and share SAN metadata. Adding large caches to servers places the cache closest to the application and in a position where it is insensitive to congestion.
The Bottom Line More VMs with Hyper-V, Xeon E5, and QLogic Server Adapters Fabric-based networks are a fundamental requirement in supporting highly virtualized data centers. Fibre Channel SANs are the nucleus of the next-generation Windows Server 2012 data center.
Resources Related Links What’s New in Hyper-V—Platform What’s New in Hyper-V—Networking What’s New in Hyper-V—Virtual Fibre Channel Storage What’s new in Hyper-V—Storage Migration QLogic Fibre Channel Adapters QLogic Converged Network Adapters Acceleration for Microsoft SQL Servers About the Authors Rahul Shah, Director, IT Brand Pulse Labs Rahul Shah has more than 20 years of experience in senior engineering and product management positions with semiconductor, storage networking, and IP networking manufac
