Windows Server 2008 includes Hyper-V R2, Microsoft's base hypervisor. Hyper-V R2 includes important scalability upgrades like Live Migration, which moves running VMs off of one physical server to another with no downtime; quadrupled processor support, all the way up to 64 logical processors; and support for up to 384 concurrently running VMs.
Combined with the management capabilities of System Center -- including Virtual Machine Manager specifically for virtual environments, and a SQL back-end -- Microsoft hopes these components add up to a compelling reason to choose its stack over the competition.
Whatever virtualization solution is chosen, it'll be sitting on an impressive hunk of metal, at least according to initial specs. A family of fabric interconnects, the UCS 6100 series provides line-rate, low-latency 10 Gbps Ethernet and Fibre Channel (FC) over Ethernet switches that consolidate I/O within the system. Twenty-port and 40-port versions include expansion modules that provide FC or 10GigE connectivity. The blade server chassis, called the UCS 5100, accepts up to eight blade servers and up to two fabric extenders in a 6RU enclosure. The fabric extenders, called the UCS 2100 series, bring unified fabric into the chassis, providing up to four 10Gbps connections each between blade servers and the fabric interconnects.
The B-Series blade servers, built on Xeon processors, use network adapters for access to the unified fabric. Cisco points to the servers' memory-expansion technology to increase the memory footprint for the kind of performance that virtualization and heavy workloads require. The network adapters are provided as mezzanine cards -- three separate adapters that are optimized for virtualization, compatibility with existing driver stacks and high-performance Ethernet.
Alternatively, a virtualization-optimized network adapter option uses Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV), a standard for allowing a physical network adapter to present multiple virtual adapters to upper-level software, typically the hypervisor.
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