The importance of Hyper-V drivers to Windows Administrators

One key to developing the Microsoft Hyper-V platform is to increase the performance of virtual machines by interacting with hardware. However, many system administrators are frustrated by the performance levels directly carried by Hyper-V. In fact, these performance ultimately involves understanding the I/O stack of the Virtual Machine and how it interacts with the Hyper-V hypervisor.

The management program provides a fully integrated driver, called the synthesis driver, which includes 80% of the drivers required by most administrators to run a new operating system. In fact, these systems take care of storage, network, and video. The merging driver fully interacts with the Virtual Machine Bus (Virtual Machine Bus) and follows the instructions on the Hyper-V super call Hypercall interface.

The simulation driver is also supported by Hyper-V. Although these drivers interact with the hypervisor in a more basic way, they do not understand the hypervisor and allow machines to run as independent machines. This is also the reason why the virtual machine running this synthesis driver is called civilized, although these running simulation or legacy) is not civilized. In general, the Administrator runs the merging driver to achieve optimal operation optimal performance ).

Role of the parent Partition

Microsoft has made virtualization very easy to manage the parent partitions in Hyper-V. If you have been authenticated by Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2, you are also authorized to use Hyper-V. Check the hardware compatibility list ). By using the parent partition to contribute its resources and manage virtual machines, the management program is flexible in many computer configurations.

However, problems may also occur, such as improper drivers or specific default settings on some network drivers. These network drivers are installed with NIC processor removal functions, including TCP Verification Code uninstallation errors and mainframe architecture support problems. Therefore, in the face of network performance problems, the Administrator may not want to enable the enhanced features in the driver on the Hyper-V parent partition. This is especially important for network ports that are not designed as "server-level.

The right hardware that allows vendors to consider virtualization is the adapter that provides the best performance and the least problems. Similarly, if the server-level adapter is available, find the network ports that use tools such as TCP Large Send Offload, it allows a session to create a large TCP information that reduces the verification code requirements in a virtual environment.

Working with an earlier version of Windows Server

Sometimes administrators need something different from virtual machines. For example, I have a client running a custom application that requires Windows 2000. The hardware is defective, but the upgrade of the operating system is not a good option due to the compatibility requirements of the old version of the software. However, I can install Windows 2000 on a Hyper-V virtual machine. In this case, Hyper-V did what I should have done, just after learning.

The first step for each Hyper-V Administrator after installing the operating system is to install the integration service. This is installed with a compositing driver that enhances the performance of virtual devices, especially NICs. These are especially important for storage and network drives. Because Windows 2000 is an old system, the integration service is somewhat compatible but not supported. In this case, it is better to use the original adapter because it is fully supported despite its poor performance.

In addition, the Administrator may still find limited mouse integration in the control panel. However, enabling the Invalid server and running it on a stable hardware platform that is easy to back up and take snapshots is not costly.

What does Linux support?

Linux in Hyper-V supports expansion over time, but it is still relatively limited. In fact, only paid and supported Linux versions support integrated services, including specific Red Hat Enterprise Server versions and SUSE Linux Enterprise Servers. However, if the administrator needs to use another Linux version, they can return to the original driver. For example, Asterisk, a recently installed open-source VoIP system, now uses the original network adapter and other simulation drivers without significant performance impact.

In most cases, the operating system that supports merging drivers has the greatest impact. When the administrator needs to turn to the original driver, the benefit is still far greater than the small performance cost normally related to the decision.