How Stable is Hyper-V?
Recently, Microsoft has been trying to bust the myth that Hyper-V is an immature, 1.0 product, stating that it’s “a very scalable, highly reliable product.” They go on to say that we should go ahead and give it a try ourselves. Well Eric Sloof over at ntpro.nl did just that and even followed the steps documented in a TechNet article. In addition, Microsoft’s own Hyper-V Program Manager, Mike Sterling, points users over to it in this forum post. You might be surprised to find how easy it can be to bring down your entire Hyper-V host. Eric has even captured the host crash in a video. Check it out here:
http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1043-When-Im-feeling-blue.html
Would you run your mission critical, production applications on a platform this instable? I wonder what would happen if a normal user with VM creation rights provisioned a VM and accidently stored it on a CIFS share. Hmmmm…..Microsoft may need to rename their mascot IT 22-7.
Michael Hong
ehorschman
kmontakhab
tstephan
Alberto
Ouch.
Eric Gray
April 6, 2009 at 4:02 pm
If you read the technet article, the blogger made a comment on June 24, 2008 indicating that Microsoft does not support storing VHD files on file shares.
The same is described here:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsserver2008r2virtualization/thread/2007eb67-191a-4576-813d-9ef6330e4b1a/
Although I’m not thrilled about Hyper-V, the discussion should remain fair.
Erwin Zoer
April 8, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Thanks Erwin for the comment. Yes, Microsoft does state that it is unsupported but fail to mention what might result if anyone did try this. Many people, including myself find TechNet articles very useful and reliable at times, so it disturbs me that MS doesn’t warn people of the destruction they’re about to cause on their host. At least mention it or pull the article all together. Many people on the technet forums have tried it and get the same exact blue screen. As Eric Sloof mentioned, it wasn’t about running an unsupported configuration but how easy it was to blue screen the host.
Just think…what would happened if someone compromised your Windows Hyper-V host and wanted to bring it down. All they would need to do is create a VM on a CIFS. It would be that easy! I know I know there could be permission issues on the CIFS, but you see my point.
Michael Hong
April 8, 2009 at 2:10 pm
IT 22-7? Ha!
Peter Kazanjy
April 9, 2009 at 10:13 am
Michael, couple of things.
I am no fan of Hyper-V and in fact I continue to use Virtual PC because I think it is more performant than Hyper-V (and yes, I am only talking about my own test labs and not production boxes). However, I think it is unreasonable to request that Microsoft or really any vendor be put on the hook to describe every possible issue that may arise from doing something that is not supported. That’s not to say that it isn’t nice info to have but to say it’s ‘disturbing’ is a bit much.
Second, if someone compromises your Hyper-V box or any box, the ast thing that you are worried about is them creating a VM on a share. Particularly if they are trying to take the box down. If they own the box and want to take the box and all services down, they can just stop the services or shutdown the box or any other number of things. The issue is the box is compromised and has nothing to do with Hyper-V.
What you should really focus on is that VMWare is so mature because it has no unsupported configurations that would cause the hypervisor or the machine running it to come down. That’s the case right?
rich
May 29, 2009 at 6:17 pm