Microsoft's lead architect for the Windows Server Division on the latest server operating system
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Deuby: This is version 3 of the hypervisor; can you tell us about v3?
Snover: In the vast majority of my 31 years in the industry, I worked for companies that competed against Microsoft. Microsoft would enter a market and would quickly point out the competition's failings and flaws. We'd pat ourselves on the back and feel very confident -- but honestly, we always knew: Sell your stock options before Microsoft's version 3 hits the ground, because by version 3 they've dialed it in and figured it out. They do a great job with version 3. And that's certainly the case with hypervisor and virtualization. It's not just about scale, but also the ability to do replication -- definitely the best replication story out there, achieving what some people call the Holy Grail of replication, where not only can I do replicas based on a cluster, I can do it without a cluster using shared storage, or just having an Ethernet cable.
And you have the ability to do that replication synchronously or asynchronously and the capability for disaster recovery scenarios, where you can say, "Hey, I'm running this here and asynchronously replicating it, perhaps in the cloud to a hoster in case anything goes wrong here." Machines go down -- but sometimes entire sites go down, so the ability to inexpensively back up to the cloud is a wonderful thing.
Deuby: I think you bring up a key point, which is the inexpensive part of it. So, small-to-midsized businesses (SMBs) don't have to pay an arm and a leg.
Otey: That's true. VMware has been criticized for being an expensive solution, and it seems like it becomes more expensive all the time. If Hyper-V is built in to Server 8, it's a good value proposition for SMBs.
Snover: This is Microsoft's history and our distinct competence: the ability to take very high-end, very expensive computing and make it available to the masses. You see that with virtualization: very high-end and increasingly expensive. I think [VMware] became aware that v3 is coming out, so it's jacking up prices to get the money while it can. You see that with virtualization, you see it with storage, you see it with management.
Another example is remote direct memory access [RDMA]. It lets me say I've got a specialized NIC that allows me to have an alternate network path to TCP. It's amazingly fast, amazingly low-latency because it's all done in the hardware. In the past, that was really done by the high-performance computing world. So, x thousand guys pay through the nose to get these great NICs, get fantastic performance, but now what we're saying is that everybody should be delivering NICs like that because in addition to those scenarios, which continue to exist, we now have a kernel-mode API that can access that and we take advantage of that kernel-mode API with SMB. So now SMB Direct gives the ability to use this RDMA and go as fast as the wind.
Microsoft's engineers changed the protocol so we can use multiple TCP connections on the same SMB session. This means you can have as many NICs as you want, connected between source and destination. And the session is dynamic, so you can remove a NIC and dynamically adjust. You can add a NIC and dynamically adjust. So you have maximum bandwidth and maximum resiliency. This was the most impressive thing, in my opinion -- the fast failover.
In the past, if you clustered your file server, we've raised the bar from high availability to continuous availability. High availability says that if something goes wrong, you can fail over and restart your operation and succeed. Continuous availability says that if a failure occurs, we detect it and resolve it quickly enough that the application never notices it. The operation takes a little bit longer, but it doesn't time out -- which is a lot of hard work.
Otey: One of the other points you touched on is that Server 8 now has built-in NIC teaming, so you don't need specialized vendor NICs to get this kind of availability.
Snover: You can say, "I got that from my vendor in the past." Well, yes and no. You could, but it only worked with that vendor's NIC. You couldn't have heterogeneous NICs. If you ever had a problem and you called Microsoft and said, "I'm using NIC teaming," Microsoft would say, "OK, turn that off -- that might be the issue." But now we support it, so if you call, we'll help you through it. But 32 NICs -- it's just phenomenal. The performance team did such a good job paying attention to the NUMA algorithm's uniformed architecture.
Otey: And that's especially important for performance in VMs.
Snover: Yes, because you can't buy a server today that's not NUMA capable. So according to NUMA, there are things that are cheap and there are things that are expensive to do, and the software has to be aware of that and pay attention to it -- otherwise, you have bad performance. So we've gone through the entire stack looking for these problems. The receive-side scaling, which is to say, I've got a lot of bandwidth coming in and it all goes to the same processor. But you can only go so big -- so you want to fan it out in a way that's aware of the NUMA topology. So you're not just saying, "I fan it out to all these nodes, but they're all in the same NUMA node" -- because then that doesn't fan out. So it's just fantastic scaling.
