Virtual Technologies:Hyper-Server backup and backup virtual pc
Mware and Microsoft have been providing many alternatives to host VMs at no charge and if you are a newcomer to virtual machines it may be a good idea to reflect on the benefits of each product before installing it.
It seems VMware was actually first to provide these virtualization systems and now offers its systems at no charge as well, but Microsoft has joined the party and offers some strong alternatives.
Hyper-V is a main competitor and challenges VMware because it allows for more reliable hot backups to be taken using Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Service. So if you are a professional and want to run VMs without interruption, Microsoft may be the answer for you.
Now, home users are offered Virtual PC which runs from XP onwards and can be downloaded from Microsoft’s website.
Its feature set is minimal but allows users under Windows 7 to run older utilities directly on their desktop. In other words, you are able to see an old XP app inside Windows 7 as a window. There is no need to use VNC or to access the entire virtual machine in a separate window.
This is pretty much all that’s useful in virtual PC. Virtual Server is equipped with a website-based management page where you can manage several VMs concurrently and also installs under x64, which isn’t supported by Virtual PC.
However, one big problem with virtual PC as well as Virtual Server is their lack of multi CPU core utilization. For many months, VMware was ahead of the game in this type of virtualization technology.
A year or so later, Microsoft has hacked its own VM kernel to compete with VMware and now also has this feature built-in Hyper-V Server.
Using Hyper-V you can install a VM exclusively to a physical drive and skip VHD files altogether. For that reason there is no need to have these bulky VHD files anymore if you don’t want to. Think about how much faster the VM can access the hard drive using direct RAW disk operations!
Reading directly from the raw disk is a major performance factor and should be considered if you want to host several disk hungry virtual machines.
While Hyper-V is powerful, it has a downside as well: it requires either Windows Server 2008 or the stripped down version Hyper-V Server 2008 which is free but needs to be installed as a separate OS. Along with this, Hyper-V server backup is needed for this platform.
VMware, on the other hand, runs on all operating systems but isn’t as slick with backup software.
To summarize, VMware is advanced, backup Virtual PC is easy to use, Virtual Server is medium ground, and Hyper-V is Microsoft’s alternative to VMware.
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