Another difference is that Hyper-V will fit easily into either a 1 Gigabit or 10 Gigabit Ethernet network. Cisco's Unified Computing System, on the other hand, moves its users beyond the 1-Gb structure into 10-Gb Ethernet. That may mean some virtualization users who are not yet ready to invest in 10-Gb Ethernet gear can get performance gains they want with Hyper-V -- and move to 10-Gb devices later.
"That puts Hyper-V and VMQueue is in a great position for the transition to 10 Gigabit Ethernet, when it comes," Woolsey said.
VMQueue is a substitute in Hyper-V for the software switch. It can recognize which virtual machine incoming network traffic is intended for and route it directly to that VM. "VMQueue allows me to copy that traffic directly from the network adapter to the virtual machine's TCP/IP network stack," without intermediate software switching, Woolsey said. Likewise, outgoing traffic gets moved from the VM directly to the network adapter card and out to the network, also without a switch.
VMQueue assesses the virtual machine network traffic while it's waiting in a queue. At the same time it knows which virtual machine is connected to which network adapter. It knows when a channel is needed to move traffic, and where among the physical devices that channel is located, Woolsey said.
In addition, Hyper-V will support jumbo Ethernet frames, which carry up to 9,000 bytes instead of 1,500, which results in many fewer interruptions by network traffic of the hypervisor's application processing. "With jumbo frames, everybody gets the benefit, even 1 Gigabit Ethernet," said Woolsey.
In yet another networking adaption, Windows Server 2008 late this year will support Chimney, or a way for Windows Server to intervene at the prospect of TCP/IP network traffic arising in a virtual machine and off-load it from the VM and physical server through the network adapter card to a TOE or TCP/IP offload engine, a hardware device external to the server. The shift saves up to 80% of CPU cycles formerly devoted to handling TCP/IP traffic.
These three additions to Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V are intended to allow more "balanced" configuration of virtual machines. As the number of virtual machines builds up per physical server, network I/O is more and more likely to emerge as a bottleneck. Release 2 of Windows Server 2008 seeks to relieve that bottleneck before it slows Microsoft's customers increasing reliance on VMs to carry their workloads, said Woolsey.
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