Fun side of virtualization: virtual games, and Hyper-V benchmarking

Want to get rid of Windows (Vista) and run DirectX games on Linux? Found recent virtualization articles just a TAD bit too much "nuts and bolts? Or you're wondering how well Microsoft Hyper-V performs compared to VMware ESX in? That's all for cooking in our IT lab.

Liz will explain to you why virtualization is fun and interesting in layman terms and make you see the virtual tree, in spite of the trees. This article should give those of you taking your first steps in virtualization solid knowledge base on technology, as well as a good prerequisite for our depth articles. Of course, all work and no play AnandTech IT boring site, so that the article will also look at some fun bit virtualization has introduced to the world of desktop user. Half-Life 2 working on Linux or Mac OS-X? It works fine, and pretty soon!

Back to work. Microsoft has made a big splash with Hyper-V, so that we could not resist, we had to include it in our long-awaited hypervisor comparison. Hyper-V is a very interesting technology: a combination of paravirtualization and hardware virtualization. Surprisingly, Hyper-V fully supports Linux, paravirtualized "Linux integration tools" (paravirtualized driver Pack) for several distributions of Linux. There is one catch: SMP does not work (yet?). In other words, software, Windows 2008 can operate up to 4 virtual CPUs, Linux guest operating system will have to be satisfied with just one. According to official data, Windows 2003 only supports 2, but we've found that works with 4 virtual CPUs is not a problem at all (unlike Linux: more than one processor will simply not work on Hyper-V).

Hyper-V team has gone to great lengths to paravirtualized Windows 2008, to spend less effort on Windows 2003. Remember Oracle OLTP test, MySQL decision support database test and heavy PHP web site, which we spent together?

Well, we noticed that

* MySQL DSS ran 2% faster
* Heavy PHP website ran 3-7% faster
* And databases running Oracle OLTP tangible 18% faster

If we run those realworld work on Windows Server 2008 instead of Windows Server 2003. We will not change anything, except for the operating system, for example, PHP-site is still working on IIS6 webserver instead IIS7 (which is standard on Windows 2008). As compared to ESX? Well, we will report full results in the near future. It is interesting, as the picture is changing from application to application. Intel or AMD? He can make a difference in a race hypervisor.

Summary of Dutch and Flemish readers, we're going to - Live - our virtualization research on 23 October, together with VMware, Microsoft and Novell is in the details. Some of the greatest hardware will also be present (HP Blades, HP EVA storage array, Intel "Dunnington" and maybe more, we can not talk about :-).