HostingCon 2008 - Microsoft Spreads the Word on Hyper-V

• By Liam Eagle on August 06, 2008

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Certainly the most challenging discussion of the show, purely in terms of the amount of information to absorb and the breadth of understanding required was the conversation I had last Wednesday with Michael van Dijken and John Zanni of Microsoft, the company's main ambassadors to the hosting business, at least as far as conferences (and my own experience) are concerned.

The key point in their message at HostingCon this year was the emergence of the company's Hyper-V technology - the hypervisor virtualization engine for Windows Server 2008 that became officially available just a few weeks ago.

Most hosts are already aware of Hyper-V and its intended purpose. It's a virtualization technology designed as a core component of the Server 2008 operating system. Unlike a software-layer virtualization technology, such as Virtuozzo (which obviously has its hosting implementations), a hypervisor virtualizes a server at the hardware level, creating individual virtual instances of the operating system, so virtual machines can function fully independently of one another. Performance problems, errors and even attacks won't affect the performance of the other virtual machines hosted on the same server.

It's worth pointing out that while there is a huge amount of compatibility between many Microsoft and Parallels products, Virtuozzo and Hyper-V really represent two different visions of a "virtualized" environment. And while they aren't really intended to work together they are also not meant to compete.

The most apparent comparison for the Hyper-V technology is VMWare, which has been making its way into the hosting market for at least a year now, and represents an obvious challenge to Microsoft on the virtualization front. But Microsoft says there are certain up-front advantages to Hyper-V, among them being the deep integration with the operating system (Hyper-V is technically a part of Server 2008), its ease of operation through the System Center platform (particualrly through the Virtual Machine Manager, currently in beta) that controls most of the other server OS functions - and Microsoft's own considerable involvement, and investment, in the service provider space.

Hosting providers have their own initial impressions of what Hyper-V ought to mean to the hosting market. Its introduction has undoubtedly been as a tool for creating VPS-style hosting packages - we've reported on a handful of early offerings here at the WHIR from hosts with Hyper-V based VPS packages in various states of completion (including Layered Tech and SoftLayer). A lot of hosting providers develop for-free testing-ground type hosting packages using new products through Microsoft's "Go Live" licensing, and several brought Hyper-V solutions out that way.

But Zanni and van Dijken were careful to point out that the usefulness of Hyper-V to the hosting community definitely does not begin or end with VPS hosting packages.

The Hyper-V info section on the Microsoft website has a lot of information on the ways the technology can be used in a data center environment. Some of the ways it can be used by hosting providers include serving both Windows and Linux environments from the same machine and testing upgrades and other changes before bringing them live, as well as running multiple applications of the same physical server, or otherwise consolidating data center resources onto fewer machines.

Obviously, Hyper-V is important to the hosting space - it's just a function of the kind of clout that a company like Microsoft wields that when it launches a product like this, it quickly becomes sort of universally relevant, if not from a "deploy it immediately" perspective, then at least as an interesting aspect of Windows, worth noting and understanding.

By the sounds of it, that understanding is coming. The folks at Microsoft's HostingCon booth said the interest from attendees was encouraging. And you can pretty safely assume Microsoft isn't done promoting its virtualization technology (for one, it's promoting a launch event for its virtualization products on its website).

You can also count on the fact that we're not done covering Hyper-V here at the WHIR. There will be plenty of information to come, but I can really only remember so much from one conversation, not to mention a whole conference.

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