Hyper-V versus Virtual PC 2007?

[rpeters83]

I'm using Win 2008 server as a workstation and run several virtual machines using virtual pc 2008. I'm able to install Hyper-V but not really sure what it does and it's advantage over virtual PC. Can someone explain the difference? Thanks.

 

[aaronearles]

Hyper-V is designed to be used on the server, obviously. Whereas VirtualPC is designed for the end user. Hyper-V will give you more control, and the ability to create and restore snapshots. However, it does not have a direct console interface to the VM, you would use a browser to access the console. I would go Hyper-V, but it really depends on what you're using your VMs for. Luckily, they share the same format for virtual disks, so you can try it out with your existing VMs.

Hopefully this is all accurate, I haven't used hyper-v but I have used Virtual Server 2005, and VMWare Server, which are both as I described. I prefer VMware over the MS products.

Are you running server 08 x64? I believe 64bit is a requirement for Hyper-V

 

[Mabrito]

Hyper-V is designed to be used on the server, obviously. Whereas VirtualPC is designed for the end user. Hyper-V will give you more control, and the ability to create and restore snapshots. However, it does not have a direct console interface to the VM, you would use a browser to access the console. I would go Hyper-V, but it really depends on what you're using your VMs for. Luckily, they share the same format for virtual disks, so you can try it out with your existing VMs.

Hopefully this is all accurate, I haven't used hyper-v but I have used Virtual Server 2005, and VMWare Server, which are both as I described. I prefer VMware over the MS products.

Are you running server 08 x64? I believe 64bit is a requirement for Hyper-V

I am messing with Hyper-V now and it does not use a browser to access the console. The console is built into Windows MMC. So in other words it does have a direct console interface.

 

[nessus]

. Luckily, they share the same format for virtual disks, so you can try it out with your existing VMs.

Are you running server 08 x64? I believe 64bit is a requirement for Hyper-V

These two statement are mostly true. The other infomation posted by aaronearles has no bearing on Hyper-V.

Virtual PC is an application and all of its virtualization pieces run in user space, or at the ring 3 level of processor security. Most items like I/O operations require ring 0 operations, and some fairly computationally expensive processing has to be done to transition these and have the host OS process them.

Hyper-V is a true hypervisor, where the access to the hardware of the computer is accomplished thorugh a much thinner tranlation layer that runs at ring 0. The guest server OS instance is actually mostly virtualized once Hyper-V is installed, but it is a highly priviledged client that is allowed to send configuration commands to the Hypervisor and appears to have direct access to the hardware.

This Windows 2008 specially priviledged OS is very similar to the Linux OS session used to configure the ESX hypervisor for VMWare ESX. You are not actaully using Linux to run ESX, its just an interface that tranlates Linux commands into those needed to actually configured the ESX hypervisor running underneath it. VMWAre ESXi actually does away with most of teh translation OS layer, and is remotely configured by using a Virtual Infrastructure client, this reduces the overhead required to provide hypervisor services. The free MS standalone product Hyper-V server does this to some extent also, but doesn't take it quite as far as VMWare ESXi.

Hyper-V and Virtual PC 2007 use different integration packs. You can take an image created under Virtual PC 2007 and use it in Hyper-V. However, unlike Virtual PC 2005, you cannot then take that image back and use it with Virtual PC 2007. The exceptions to this are OSs like Windows 2000 or older or a non-Windows OS that does not have a Hyper-V integration pack (SUSE Enterprise Linux versions 10+ have a MS supplied integration pack for Hyper-V), as running a Virtual PC 2007 image of XP or any newer OS will update it to a HAL that is not compatible with Virtual PC 2007, but provides superior performance on Hyper-V.

Hyper-V requires a 64 bit server with hardware virtualization support in the processor, and with support for it turned on in the BIOS. If any of those conditions are not met, it will not install.