Microsoft has announced a number of new technologies and initiatives around desktop/server virtualization and VDI.  

 

The company also announced a new paper titled Virtual Hard Disk Performance.

 The 35-pages document describes a benchmark executed by Microsoft to compare I/O performance of files inside its Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format (both fixed size and dynamically created) against files inside raw disks and files inside the NTFS file system.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tests were executed on systems running a number of different workloads, including SQL and Exchange.
Microsoft explains that compared to previous implementations, VHD support is native inside Windows Server 2008 R2 and thus is not depending on the presence of Hyper-V:

 

 

 

 

…the impact of the Windows hypervisor is quite small based on past experimental results. This is mainly due to the fact that performance critical workloads are re-directed to synthetic VMBus channels instead of using the longer emulation path. To get the most accurate CPU utilization and to focus on native performance, the Windows hypervisor is turned on only during VHD performance measurement in Windows Server 2008 which is required to mount VHDs on a Windows Server 2008 machine while it remains off for all other performance testing scenarios…

 

 

 

 

Microsoft decided to use a server (the vendors is undisclosed) with two quad-core Intel Nehalem-EP processors, 6GB RAM with NUMA enabled, serving 64bit Windows Server Enterprise 2008 and Windows Server Enterprise 2008 R2, attached to a Dell PowerVault MD1000 DAS.

 

 

 

 

Here its possible do download a Microsoft White Paper….

 

 

 

 

I have done copy and paste but I think that is not possible to lose this post for the content... read and think!

 

Backup, convert, flexibility and so on wow....

 

The Windows Sysinternals team as brought out a new utility, called Disk2vhd that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines. The cool thing about Disk2vhd is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online. Disk2vhd uses Windows’ Volume Snapshot capability, introduced in Windows XP, to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to include in a conversion. You can even have Disk2vhd create the VHDs on local volumes, even ones being converted (though performance is better when the VHD is on a disk different than ones being converted).

 

Go to http://www.sysinternals.com and try it

 

cheers

 

 

Alex

 

This VHD release is available in English only and is for evaluation and testing purposes. Evaluating Windows Server2008 software does not require product activation or entering a product key. Any edition of Windows Server 2008 may be installed without activation and evaluated for an initial 60 days.

 

At this Microsoft web page there are all requirements and link to download Server 2008 for Hyper-V.