Microsoft Hypervisor - cool stuff

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The word Hypervisor in the virtualization world refers to a virtualization server (like Virtual PC and Virtual Server) that runs at the OS layer - that is it is deeply embedded into the operating system to provide performance that is as close to running on the bare metal as possible.  Think Virtual Server on steroids. :-)

In the Virtualization world the host is the server that runs the virtualization layer and the guests are the virtual machines running on that server.  One host runs multiple guests - virtualizing the hardware

The new Hypervisor that was featured as part of Bill Gates' keynote at WinHEC included the following key things that stand out to me.

  • Hot add hardware with zero downtime (including NIC's, Memory, CPU's - and that means without a reboot of the guest)
  • Support for Linux
  • New IO architecture that provides better IO performance for guests (the biggest bottleneck in virtualization) without requiring driver rewrites
  • Multiple CPU Architectures on one box - you can run a 32bit server and 64bit server on the same host - or single and multiple CPU guests on the same machine.

Very cool stuff!  Take a look at the keynote to see it in action.  Nathan has more here.