Sunday 18 September 2011

Virtualization Comparison Chart

VM Comparison

Hypervisor Attributes VMware ESXi 5.0 Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 with Hyper-V Citrix XenServer 5.6 FP1
Small Disk Footprint

144 MB disk footprint
(VMware vSphere Hypervisor)

>3GB with Server Core installation

~10GB with full Windows Server installation

>1GB
OS Independence

No reliance on general purpose operating system
(VMware vSphere Hypervisor)

Relies on Windows 2008 in Parent Partition

Relies on Linux in Dom0
management Partition
Hardened Drivers

Optimized with hardware vendors

Generic Windows drivers

Generic Linux Drivers
Advanced Memory Management

Ability to reclaim unused memory, de-duplicate memory pages, compress memory pages

Only uses balloning. No ability to de-duplicate or compress pages.

Only uses balloning.No ability to de-duplicate or compress pages. Does not adjust memory allocation based on VM usage.
Advanced Storage Management

Lacks an integrated cluster file system, no live storage migration

Lacks an integrated cluster file
system, no live storage migration, storage features support very few arrays
High I/O Scalability

Direct driver model

I/O bottleneck in parent OS

I/O bottleneck in Dom0 management OS
Host Resource Management

Network traffic shaping, per-VM resource shares, set quality of service priorities for storage and network I/O

Lacks similar capabilities

Lacks similar capabilities
Performance Enhancements

AMD RVI, Intel EPT large memory pages, universal 32-way vSMP, VMI paravirtualization, VMDirectPath I/O, PV guest SCSI driver

Large memory pages,
4-way vSMP on Windows
2008 and Windows 7 VMs only

No large memory pages, no paravirt guest SCSI device, Requires inflexible SR-IOV
Virtual Security Technology
Enables hypervisor level security introspection

Nothing comparable

Nothing comparable
Flexible Resource Allocation

Hot add VM vCPUs and memory, VMFS volume grow, hot extend virtual disks, hot add virtual disks

Nothing comparable

Nothing comparable
Custom image creation and management

VMware Image Builder allows administrators to create custom ESXi images for different types of deployment, such as ISO-based installation, PXE-based installation, and Auto Deploy.

Nothing comparable

Nothing comparable
Auto Deploy

vSphere Auto Deploy enables faster provisioning of multiple hosts. New hosts are automatically provisioned based on rules defined by user.

Requires in-depth setup in Systems Center Configuration Manager

Nothing comparable
Management Interface Firewall

ESXi Firewall is a service-oriented and stateless firewall that protects the ESXi 5.0 management interface. Configured using the vSphere Client or at the command line with esxcli interfaces.

Nothing comparable

Nothing comparable
Enhanced Virtual Hardware

32-way virtual SMP, 1TB virtual machine RAM, Non hardware accelerated 3D graphics, USB 3.0 device support, Unified Extended Firmware Interface (UEFI).

4-way virtual SMP only, 64 GB RAM per virtual machine

8-way virtual SMP only, 32 GB RAM per virtual machine
Note:  some of the ESXi features included are not available with vSphere Hypervisor

Saturday 17 September 2011

Windows 8 Fastest Boot Time compare to Windows Client OS Family

Windows 8 Fast Boot
The winner of the first Windows 8 vs. Windows 7 boot performance measuring contest is clear, and I doubt that we’ll ever see a comeback from Windows Vista’s successor in future comparisons.

An important aspect of Windows 8’s evolution is the fine tuning of the start-up process. Technologies such as solid state drive (SSDs) and Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) aside, the next iteration of Windows comes with optimizations which will let Windows 7 in its boot dust.


Featuring a new start-up mechanism which combines cold boot with resuming from hibernate, Windows 8 delivers unmatched speed, drastically reducing the time it takes toreach Metro-ready or desktop-ready.

The next version of Windows closes user sessions on shutdown, but makes sure to hibernate the kernel session.

Only a small portion of memory is actually written to disk, it’s what the Redmond company calls, session 0 hibernation, as opposed to full hibernation.

“If you’re not familiar with hibernation, we’re effectively saving the system state and memory contents to a file on disk (hiberfil.sys) and then reading that back in on resume and restoring contents back to memory,” explained Gabe Aul, a director of program management in Windows.

“Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested).”

The two graphics included with this article, courtesy of Microsoft, reveal the comparison between the new Windows 8 start boot and the old Windows 7 cold boot.


It’s rather obvious, that no matter the actual device customers will be running, it will deliver superior boot performance if it’s running Windows 8 as opposed to Windows 7.

“It’s faster because resuming the hibernated system session is comparatively less work than doing a full system initialization, but it’s also faster because we added a new multi-phase resume capability, which is able to use all of the cores in a multi-core system in parallel, to split the work of reading from the hiberfile and decompressing the contents,” Aul added.

Users can watch a video of Windows 8 booting on an EliteBook 8640p (Intel Core i7-2620M, 8GB, 160GB SSD) in just 8 seconds below.