Increase scalability and performance

Building cloud solutions, whether with private or public clouds, requires investment of
time, energy, and money. To ensure best return on your investment, you need to build your solution on a platform that can scale and perform well to meet the changing demands of your business. This means being able to take advantage of cutting-edge hardware that can provide extreme performance while handling the largest possible workloads. It means being able to use resources effectively at every level, while ensuring that SLAs can be met. It means reducing the chances of mistakes occurring when maintenance tasks are performed. And
it means being able to monitor performance effectively to ensure computing, storage, and
network resources are used with maximum efficiency.
Windows Server 2012 delivers a virtualization platform that can achieve the highest levels of performance while delivering extreme scalability that enables new scenarios for migrating

massive workloads into the cloud. This section examines some new features in Hyper-V and in the underlying operating system that enable such increased scalability and performance.

Expanded processor and memory support

Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 has been embraced by many organizations as a
way of making more efficient use of physical server hardware through virtualization and consolidating server workloads. But limitations in the number of logical processors supported on the host and for VMs, together with limitations of how much physical memory can
be supported on the host and assigned to VMs, has meant that Windows Server 2008 R2 lacked sufficient scalability for certain types of mission-critical business applications. For example, large database applications often require large amounts of memory and many logical processors when used to implement business solutions involving online transaction processing (OLTP) or online transaction analysis (OLTA). Until now, the idea of moving such applications into the cloud has been mostly a dream.
Windows Server 2012 changes all this in the following ways:

■ Through its increased processor and memory support on the virtualization host by enabling the use of up to 160 logical processors and 2 TB of physical memory per host system

■ Through its increased virtual processor and memory support for VMs by enabling the use of up to 32 virtual processors and 1 TB of memory per VM

Increased host processor and memory support

he advent of Windows Server 2012 brings the expansion of processor and

memory support in Windows Server 2012. In Windows Server 2008 R2, the host system had limitations of the amount of maximum logical processors (cores, Hyper-Threading, individual CPUs) and memory available for use between the host and the VM. To illustrate this point, note the following:

Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 had support for up to:

■ 64 logical processors per host

■ 1 TB of memory per host

■ 4 virtual processors per VM

■ 64 GB of memory per VM

Windows Server 2012 now has support for up to:

■ 320 logical processors per host

■ 4 TB of memory per host

■ 64 virtual processors per VM (up to a maximum of 2,048 virtual processors per host)

■ 1 TB of memory per VM

Please keep in mind that this is largely dependent on the configuration of your hardware and the support of the guest operating system and integrated services that are provided for the VM. The expansion of available processor and memory allocations would allow for your administrators to allocate VM resources as needed. Since many enterprise scale applications continue to consume additional resources to feed the needs of the organization, Microsoft has taken a tone to assist with this demand by increasing this memory and processor support in Windows Server 2012.

One of the points brought to our attention in Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V was the limitation of the hardware portrayal to the VM. With a large number of IT organizations seeking to consolidate their server farms to a handful of servers and virtualize many large infrastructure applications such as Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange Server, we decided to move toward larger scalability for these VMs in Windows Server 2012. With Windows Server 2012, the amount of virtual processors that you can have on a SQL Server 2008 virtual machine can go to a max total of 32 virtual CPUs. This is a large increase from the 4 in Windows Server 2008 R2.

Additional RAM is another point that our customers had requested be available to their virtual machines. With hardware able to run multiple terabytes of RAM and physical systems running 32, 64, or 128 GB of RAM, the ability to provide more RAM to the VM became needed as newer, advanced applications took advantage

of the larger RAM available. In Windows Server 2012, we move from 64 GB of RAM limitation to 1 TB per VM. This gives the organization the capacity to go to larger memory sizes if the hardware allocation allows.

Patrick Catuncan

Support Escalation Engineer, High Availability, Platforms Core