Dynamic Memory Coming to Hyper-V

Tip - Dynamic memory is an enhancement to Hyper-V R2 which pools all the memory available on a physical host and dynamically distributes it to virtual machines running on that host as necessary.

Details - Dynamic memory is an enhancement to Hyper-V R2 which pools all the memory available on a physical host and dynamically distributes it to virtual machines running on that host as necessary. That means based on changes in workload, virtual machines will be able to receive new memory allocations without a service interruption through Dynamic Memory Balancing. In short, Dynamic Memory is exactly what it’s named.

Reference - 

http://blogs.technet.com/b/virtualization/archive/2010/07/12/dynamic-memory-coming-to-hyper-v-part-6.aspx

Posted by - Aneesh Valeri

Microsoft Hyper-V

Tip - Microsoft Hyper-V, codenamed Viridian and formerly known as Windows Server Virtualization, is a hypervisor-based virtualization system for x86, x64 systems.

Details - Microsoft® Hyper-V™ Server 2008 R2 is a stand-alone product that provides a reliable and optimized virtualization solution enabling organizations to improve server utilization and reduce costs. Since Hyper-V Server is a dedicated stand-alone product, which contains only the Windows Hypervisor, Windows Server driver model and virtualization components, it provides a small footprint and minimal overhead.

Reference -  

http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-server/en/us/default.aspx

Posted by - Aneesh Valeri

Event Tracing for Windows

Tip - A new mechanism with high performance for event logging.

Details - ETW is a general-purpose, high-speed tracing facility provided by the operating system (Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 etc). Using a buffering and logging mechanism implemented in the kernel, ETW provides a tracing mechanism for events raised by both user-mode applications and kernel-mode device drivers.

Additionally, ETW gives you the ability to enable and disable logging dynamically, making it easy to perform detailed tracing in production environments without requiring reboots or application restarts. The logging mechanism uses per-processor buffers that are written to disk by an asynchronous writer thread. This allows large-scale server applications to write events with minimum disturbance.

ETW was first introduced on Windows 2000. Since then, various core OS and server components have adopted ETW to instrument their activities, and it's now one of the key instrumentation technologies on Windows platforms. A growing number of third-party applications are using ETW for instrumentation as well, and some take advantage of the events provided by Windows itself.

Reference -  

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163437.aspx

Posted by - Aneesh Valeri

Hypervisor

Tip - In computing, a hypervisor, also called virtual machine monitor (VMM), allows multiple operating systems to run concurrently on a host computer— a feature called hardware virtualization.

Details - The hypervisor presents the host operating systems with a virtual platform  and monitors the execution of the guest operating systems. In that way, multiple operating systems, including multiple instances of the same operating system, can share hardware resources.

References - 

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/entdev/article.php/3880086/Hypervisor.htm  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor

Posted by - Aneesh Valeri