Wonderware Announces Support for Microsoft Hyper-V (Version 3.0)

Invensys Operation Management is pleased to announce support for the latest version of Microsoft Hyper-V (Version 3.0) that ships with the Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 Operating Systems.  The qualification of this Hyper-V version only validated that the host machine, Hypervisor, can be run on these new platforms.  This is similar to upgrading from VMware 4.0 to 5.0.

The Hyper-V 3.0 Guest Operating Systems and the Operating Systems that Wonderware branded products support are in accordance with the compatibility matrix posted on the Wonderware Developer Network (WDN), these have not changed.  Wonderware branded products supporting this version of Hyper-V are System Platform 2012 R2 and later.

Existing supported technologies that where qualified are:

• Generic Virtualisation
• Snapshots
• Failover clustering using Quick and Live migration (HA)
• Using Sios for small business HA with no central storage required.
• Disaster recovery solutions using Sios, in combination with Fail over clustering.
• HA and DR solution combined.

New Technologies that where qualified:

• Hyper V Live Migration
• Hyper V Replica
• Hyper V Numa Spanning
• NIC Teaming
• Hyper V Storage Migration

In short, Live Migration has been removed from Failover Clustering and is possible between clustered and non-clustered hosts. This is slower than HA with clustering and shared nothing is failovers in minutes rather than seconds for clustered systems. But it is an option for infra structures where there is no shared storage. The Sios solution has value in the sense that that will be fast and makes clustering feasible without shared storage. There are now three options for Live migration, with shared storage and clustering, without shared storage using Sios and clustering, build into Hyper V without clustering. All three methods have no impact on the running vm, however the total execution time to do the live migration and how many vm’s simultaneous, is determined by one of the three choices and is best with clustering, shared storage or Sios and last with build into Hyper V. Cost is a factor as well where build into Hyper V is the lowest cost.
Hyper V Replica

Hyper-V Replica provides asynchronous replication of Hyper-V virtual machines between two hosting servers. It is simple to configure and does not require either shared storage or any particular storage hardware. Any server workload that can be virtualized in Hyper-V can be replicated. Replication works over any ordinary IP-based network, and the replicated data can be encrypted during transmission. 

Hyper-V Replica works with standalone servers, failover clusters, or a mixture of both. The servers can be physically co-located or widely separated geographically. The physical servers do not need to be in the same domain, or even joined to any domain at all.

Hyper V Numa Spanning

Guests will have will get a new feature where the guest OS can be NUMA node aware.  With this feature, guest OS processes/memory can be scheduled to take NUMA node placement into account.

NUMA is a hardware design feature that divides CPUs and memory in a physical server into NUMA nodes.  You get the best performance when a process uses memory and CPU from within the same NUMA node.  When a process requires more memory, but the current NUMA node is full, then it’ll get memory from another NUMA node and that comes at a performance cost to that process, and possibly all other processes on that physical server.

NIC Teaming

Native teaming of network adapters to provide load balancing, bandwidth aggregation and failover capabilities using standard Ethernet NICs.  can provide the extra bandwidth and fault tolerance needed for business critical networks segments supporting virtual machines, clusters, live migrations and storage.

Hyper V Storage Migration

You can perform storage live migration for as well .vhd as .vhdx disks and you can do this on client Hyper-V, standalone Hyper-V server and clustered Hyper-V servers. The only exception is that you can’t perform storage live migration of VM’s that have local pass-through disks.

Rob Kambach, Product Manager AppServer and System Platform

New Features in Hyper V 3.0
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831410.aspx

Top Ten  Hyper v 3.0 features coming up tomorrow, March 21, 2013! 

You can also visit the Wonderware Solutions page.

*Note for customer using HA or DR or a combination thereof there are license implications and the part numbers can be found in our price lists.