What is Hyper-V?

[bX510]

In a way where a novice can understand, what is hyper-v? do I need it in Windows Home Server 2008 in order to have all my hard drives become one?

 

[QuixoticOne]

No you don't need Hyper-V for setting up hard disc arrays.

Hyper-V is like VMWARE, it is a system to make one computer emulate many individual computers so one powerful PC can do the work of several less powerful PCs without having to have several physical PCs. Basically it just divides up the one computer's function into different pieces and lets each one of those pieces run all the software (operating system + applications) that an entire ordinary PC would run.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-V

 

[yinan]

Dont insult Vmware like that

 

[hooflung]

Actually it is very much like VMWare ESX. It installs on the the PC as the hypervisor and Windows 2008 acts as the host OS, or Dom0. Then the guest OSs, DomU's run in their own footprint that is allotted by tools you use to create it.

It works almost identically to VMWare ESX and any Linux Distro with Xen. There is a version sans Win2k8 that is basically a direct response to the VMWare ESXi product which is just a trimmed down version of the complete package ESX that makes a server into an VM host appliance and you use tools over the network ( or remoted into a guest ) to manage it.

Say what you will about MS... its probably one of the better packages out there. After a lot of research and trial and error with most of the affordable and open source the MS way is actually cost effective and very, very stable.

 

[VirtualLarry]

What is the hardware requirements for using a hypervisor. Do you need a C2D CPU with VT extensions? What about mobo/chipset requirements?

 

[QuixoticOne]

Edited to delete incorrect information; thanks for the correction RebateMonger, I'm surprised they took VT out of some of their newer CPUs.

Actually you don't NEED CPU integrated support for a hypervisor; many emulators work totally by software emulation or paravirtualization or other techniques that don't involve CPU based virtualization. In fact in many cases it is about as fast or faster to just skip most / all of the CPU integrated virtualization support.

In some cases, though, depending on the hypervisor, the host, and the guest you will need CPU based virtualization to be present.

There are no real specific motherboard or chipset requirements other than being compatible with your Host OS or host hypervisor (if the hypervisor runs on bare metal without a host OS).

If you have a motherboard with a more well supported set of peripheral controllers like USB, video chip, IDE/SATA controller, et. al. you may find that things run faster / more efficiently since the hypervisor may not have to virtualize the emulated device drivers quite as much if you're sharing host hardware resources with the guest.

It helps to have as much RAM as possible.. ideally what you'd expect to perform well for the host + what you'd expect to perform well for the guess + some more.

Having a multi-core CPU helps in that more cores are free to run the host / guests / et. al.

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
What is the hardware requirements for using a hypervisor. Do you need a C2D CPU with VT extensions? What about mobo/chipset requirements?

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: QuixoticOne
C2D CPUs including and above E6xxx have Intel VT support.

There are definitely C2D processors with numbering above E6xxx that don't support VT. The E7200 is an example. Even some C2Q processors don't support it.

Intel's Processor Spec finder will tell you for sure if a processor supports HyperV. You need "Intel EM64T" support, "Intel Virtualization Technology" support and "Execure Disable Bit" support. You can select these three items in the "Supported features" section of the Intel Processor selector.