I’ve recently persuaded myself not to purchase a new laptop, trying to get another year out of my HP Compaq nx7300 (running 32-bit Windows XP), which I purchased about four years ago. My home computing needs are fairly meagre, but I recently spent £23 upgrading my RAM to 4GB to see if I could get a strained instance of my SharePoint 2010 development environment running at home as needed. To this end, I decided I would clear enough System drive space to make room for Ubuntu (x64) and run my VMs from Virtual Box in the other partition, in order to get the most memory possible to my VMs. Like I said, strained…

So I loaded up the Ubuntu installation CD and launched GParted, cleared ~10GB for the OS and another 5GB for the SWAP partition, then installed. All went well, I installed VirtualBox, rebooted in to XP to make sure everything was cool over there. Went back in to Ubuntu to get a bit more familiar with the new version then shut down for the night. The next evening when I started up I was confronted with an ominous message:

No module name found
Aborted. Press any key to exit.

Non-System disk or disk error.

Not good. I checked I was booting to the right drive, then ran the Ubuntu installation disk again, which includes a no-installation trial option that runs entirely from CD/memory. I loaded up GParted again, checked all of the partitions, didn’t notice anything strange and then started searching for an answer. Luckily I dug a bit deeper than the first few results which recommended a full re-install of both boots. While that might have fixed the problem, it wouldn’t have been very desirable.

Eventually I found this Ubuntu forum thread, Grub “no module name found” after reboot, which points to this (in my opinion) definitive SourceForge article on Boot Problems:Windows Writes To MBR. While I would argue the problem actually has very little to do with Windows, it identifies the cause and four possible solutions. To summarise, the Windows partition contains software that writes to the Master Boot Record, which in turn corrupts GRUB, the Ubuntu bootloader. I say this has little to do with Windows because in all of the cases listed in this article and on the Ubuntu fora, the problem is caused by something that gets beneath Windows, like OEM “protection” tools, for lack of a better description. Here’s the list from SourceForge:

• HP: Credential Manager, Recovery Manager, ProtectTools, PC Angel, Backup and Recovery
• Dell: Recovery Tools, DataSafe Local Backup,
• Samsung: Recovery Solution III
• McAfee Security Center ???

This is all stuff that ships with your machine. I’ve always been distrustful of this software but I never got around to removing the HP tools on this laptop. Eventually I got worried that removing the credential management software might lock me out of the machine. Fairly irrational, I grant you, but as I say, I deeply distrust most things in Windows that appear to be getting beneath it and so I wind up avoiding them, even if they’re just sitting there doing nothing.

Back to the problem at hand, I eventually managed to restore the bootloader by following the first recommended solution from the SourceForge article – I uninstalled all of the HP software (except for Wireless/Bluetooth). However, there was one fiddle that’s worth noting. The HP Backup and Recovery Manager software did not have an entry in Add/Remove Programs and there was no uninstall option in the program or the Start menu. A quick search returned this recommendation, which launched the installer and started removing the tool.

RunDll32 C:\PROGRA~1\COMMON~1\INSTAL~1\PROFES~1\RunTime\10\01\Intel32\Ctor.dll,LaunchSetup "C:\Program Files\InstallShield Installation Information\{3F9F7336-6DF8-476F-ABF6-C70A17FAF619}\setup.exe" -l0x9 -uninst –removeonly

After rebooting into the Ubuntu installation media again I ran the recommended GRUB fix-up.

sudo mount /dev/sda6 /mnt
sudo grub-install --recheck --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda

As recommended in the posts above, make sure “sda6″ and “sda” refer to the correct targets. Basically, make sure to familiarise yourself with those posts thoroughly before doing anything, and of source I present this without warranty.

After shutting down and starting up again I was presented with the GRUB bootloader as expected. After shutting down one more time, everything continued to work. That’s the key. Until the corrupting software is removed you can repair the GRUB bootloader with the install CD and it will remain fixed until shut down. On the first boot after shut down the MBR changes from the offending software in the Windows partition will be referenced and GRUB will fail to load. This is why the GRUB fix needs to be made after removing the offending software.

Rather irritatingly, I’d just started to doubt my suspicion of OEM software like this when I got to play with the Lenovo W520 tools briefly. They seemed quite useful. Indeed, my colleague Wes Hackett was just saying how much he liked the biometrics on it, so it’s a shame to have my suspicions slapped back in to place through this episode.

• SharePoint Development Productivity and Virtualisation Technologies
• SharePoint 2010 Development Environment Performance Tests

I’ve said my preamble in those posts, so I’ll cut to the chase here.

High-Level Summary of Findings

• Disk performance and bus speed did not prove to be significant factors in these results (except for virtual machine start-up times). Obviously there are fundamental differences about SSD (yet untested) that may skew this picture, but I will be surprised to see big differences. If we’ve got these tests right, and they are actually representative of the tasks that slow down development, then we would expect to see wider variance across bus or disk speeds. We don’t.
  • This assumes the disk is relatively uncontended. Virtual machine performance degrades in every type of test while large file operations are running concurrently on the same disk. This could be copying an ISO, importing or exporting a virtual machine or any other sustained large file operations.
    • At a minimum, this is certainly an argument for running VMs on their own spindle, whether it’s over USB, eSATA or SATA. This may be an area where SSD shines.
  • These disk performance figures can be found towards the bottom of this post. Desktop performance was nearly identical running on USB2 at 5400 RPM versus a RAID0 stripe or a RAID1 array on 7200 RPM disks. Laptop performance was also nearly identical over USB2 5400 RPM versus eSATA 7200 RPM.
• Hyper-V performance has been poor on all laptops with i-Series CPUs. This is more pronounced in some areas than others. Our three-year-old model with a Core 2 Duo actually outperforms the new i7 in some cases. When these results are added to known driver issues with Hyper-V on many newer laptop GPUs, we’re looking at a configuration that’s unfit for SharePoint 2010 development.
• VMWare Workstation outperforms Hyper-V on laptops by significant margins in most areas. The exceptions to this are start-up time and performance during the first 10-30 minutes of use (I believe VMWare is ballooning during this time). After that, VMWare Workstation is faster than Hyper-V in every type of test.
  • As a long-time advocate of Hyper-V despite usability deficiencies, I was probably more surprised by the significance of these differences than anyone. I wrongly assumed that Type-I hypervisors would outperform Type-II in nearly every way. While that may hold true on server class hardware, it doesn’t hold true here. I’m a convert.
• While less pronounced, these same findings hold true on the desktop.
  • Desktop performance is very quick on VMWare Workstation, considerably out-performing even Amazon EC2.
  • We can realise significant productivity gains by moving all users who are primarily office-based to a desktop + VMWare Workstation configuration from laptop + Hyper-V, at a fairly small cost (probably half the cost of EC2 over three years – see my recent posts on EC2 for more information).
  • Desktop performance on Hyper-V, while notably slower than VMWare Workstation, is generally faster than VMWare Workstation on the i7 laptop.
• Laptop performance is significantly improved on our current model with VMWare Workstation. These improvements are also realised on the newer model laptop, but the performance delta between the two physical systems is not so significant that it’s compelling to move to a low speed i7 from a reasonable speed Core 2 Duo.
  • The total times for the “End-to-end site creation to debugging tests” were two and a half minutes faster with VMWare Workstation compared to Hyper-V on the Dell XPS M1330. Moving from Hyper-V to VMWare Workstation for laptop users is now an obvious choice.
  • The benefit of spending on i7 processors is in doubt. We are seeing very minor performance penalties when adding more than two CPUs in both VMWare Workstation and Hyper-V for most tests. There were also very minor improvements for some tasks, but on the whole there does not appear to be a measurable benefit. This might vary if the host OS is doing a great deal with the CPU, but that is liable to cause other contention issues than just in the CPU (on a laptop).
  • The only tasks that appeared to use all 8 cores in a SharePoint VM were:
    • Retract/Deploy of a solution (but only very briefly)
    • Create web app, or Create site collection (but at low percentages)
    • Rebuild with Code Analysis (but not fully)
  • We will be running future tests on i5 processors at higher clock speeds to see how these models perform relative to the 1.6 GHz i7.
• The User Profile Service Connection doubles first page load times after an IISRESET in all test cases. I consider this a full validation of these preliminary findings.

Snapshot of key data

The Data

How to read the data:

• Hardware: the physical laptop or desktop model (or Amazon’s EC2)
• Virtualisation: “Hyper-V” is short-hand for the Hyper-V role in Windows Server 2008 R2. “VMWare 7.1.2″ is short-hand for VMWare Workstation.
• #CPU: the number of physical CPU presented to the guest operating systems. Multiple logical cores were only tested in the 4×2 results below.
• Disk: the physical disk configuration where the virtual hard drives are running.
• RAM: the amount of RAM running inside the SharePoint Server 2010 VM. The Amazon EC2 instances were “large instances” but the domain controller was running locally.
• Test: The tests have been described in more detail in my last post.
• Result 1, 2, 3: Each test was carried out three times. The far-right column, Average Result, is an average of the three.
• The Two “Average Load…” rows are an average per-result of the three rows above them. These are tests built on SharePoint 2010 default site templates, which anyone should be able to replicate.
• The “Total create to debug time” row is a sum of the five rows above it.
• All results are in seconds. In cell G21 below, 524 seconds = 9 minutes and 2 seconds.
• For more information on the tests and the testing methodology, see my last post.

Hyper-V versus VMWare tests, all other things being equal

Dell XPS M1330, running Hyper-V

Dell Studio XPS 1645 laptop, running Hyper-V

ASUS V7-P7H55E desktop, running Hyper-V
Note: these Hyper-V tests were accidentally carried out while the VM was running on a RAID 0 stripe rather than on the System disk, so this is not apples and apples, but later disk tests on VMWare Workstation indicated that this shouldn’t make much of a difference, so I’ve left these results in, with this comment.

Dell XPS M1330, running VMWare Workstation

Dell Studio XPS 1645 laptop, running VMWare Workstation

ASUS V7-P7H55E desktop, running VMWare Workstation

VMWare Workstation i7 tests with 4 or 8 cores

Dell Studio XPS 1645 laptop, running VMWare Workstation with 4 CPU

ASUS V7-P7H55E desktop, running VMWare Workstation with 4 CPU

Dell Studio XPS 1645 laptop, running VMWare Workstation with 4 CPU, 2 Cores Each

ASUS V7-P7H55E desktop, running VMWare Workstation with 4 CPU, 2 Cores Each

Amazon EC2 Results

Notes:

• Times were much slower one day than others. This hasn’t been measured over time, but it’s worth keeping in mind. Other EC2 users reported similar problems on the same day.
• Also note: a couple of rows of test data (245 and 248) have been accidentally deleted, but the results were not unexpected in any way.
• Row 263 has no data because measuring time to desktop with EC2 would be too imprecise. It would normally be available within five minutes from start, for reference.

Disk Tests on VMWare Workstation with two cores

The format of these tests change slightly, as I am grouping all disk permutations for the Dell Studio XPS 1645 together, then moving on to the ASUS V7-P7H55E desktop. I grouped them this way because the tests were fundamentally different for laptops and desktops. I did not get the time to repeat the laptop tests on the Dell XPS M1330.

Dell Studio XPS 1645 laptop with VM running on 5400 RPM USB2

Dell Studio XPS 1645 laptop with VM running on 7200 RPM eSATA

ASUS V7-P7H55E desktop with VM running on 5400 RPM USB2

ASUS V7-P7H55E desktop with VM running on a 2nd set of RAID 0 spindles

ASUS V7-P7H55E desktop with VM running on a 2nd set of RAID 1 spindles

…and with that, I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. Should anyone want to contribute supplementary test data in the comments here, or carry out further tests (perhaps with SSD), I would love to see the results. As I mentioned in the last post, there’s still more testing to do.

Update 08 June 2011:SharePoint 2010 Development Environment Performance: SSD, i5 vs. i7, WEI and Sandy Bridge

The Tests

The 21 tests that we settled on were the result of discussions with a number of the core developers, consultants and architects at Content and Code, plus a few tests that I threw in to confirm/disconfirm some of my suppositions, such as the impact of the User Profile Service Connection on first page load time. All 21 tests were run three times for each permutation of hardware candidate and virtualisation technology. We also tested on Amazon EC2. I will discuss the testing process in more detail in a moment.

These tests have been selected for a few reasons:

• They are tests that anyone can run, including Visual-Studio-allergic types like myself.
• They re-enact real-world productivity loss. All tests needed to be significant on our current system or they were thrown out.
• They needed to account for tasks that impact non-developers as well as people that have their head down in code 40 hours/week.
• They needed to be examples of tests that would stress systems in different ways.

First page load tests
These tests were designed to examine what, if any impact different sets of features, functionality and structure might have on first page load times after the application pool is recycled or IIS is reset (while gathering a large set of data to make comparisons across systems). I also wanted to fully validate my preliminary findings about the User Profile Service Connection.

I ran these tests against NTLM-authenticated web applications with the following root site collections:

• Central Administration
• Blank Site
• MySite
• Blank Site, with no User Profile Service Connection
• The Content and Code website solution (structure, without content)
• A custom intranet solution (structure, without content)

All of these first page load tests were repeated for application pool recycles and IIS resets.

End-to-end site creation to debugging tests
I hope these tests are fairly self-explanatory. I used the Content and Code website solution because it’s a public site that people can examine if they want to understand more about the structure of the solution and the scope of customisation tested here.

1. Create new NTLM-authenticated web application from the GUI
2. Create new Publishing Portal Site Collection from the GUI, at the root of the new web application
3. Deploy Content and Code website solution from Visual Studio
4. Delete the publishing site collection (this was a necessary step, but not a test that I timed)
5. Create Content and Code website (structure, without content) from the GUI
6. Debug Content and Code website solution in Visual Studio

Core development tests
These tests were added to account for pure development activity for large projects with lots of dependencies. We turned Code Analysis on for the first test because this is a feature that’s very useful but taxes systems pretty heavily. The code deployment times were all fairly small relative to other tests here, but we need to keep in mind that this could be repeated literally hundreds of times per-day. Note: full deployment is accounted for above in the end-to-end test.

• Rebuild Large Project w/Code Analysis
• Deploy Large Project to GAC/BIN

Disk/IO tests
These tests were thrown in because they have an impact on productivity even if they aren’t particularly routine. For the first test I measured the time from turning on the VM until the desktop rendered after logging on. The second test doesn’t really meet the “real world” criteria I name above, but it is a task that can be a productivity barrier in some cases.

• Time to desktop
• Run full crawl (three web apps, no content)

The Testing

The testing process was entirely subject to personal fallibility, as I carried these tests out myself using fairly imprecise methods like a browser-based stopwatch running on my host system (I made sure not to time things inside the guest, where time can slip occasionally). I also went to great lengths to carry out these tests when the systems were performing optimally; I would run through all of the tests once before recording the first set of results. I felt this approach was the best way to discount random variance. The test results were largely very consistent, so I believe these efforts paid off. Obviously the down-side to testing in this manner is that real work is not carried out in a vacuum, but I don’t see any other way to come up with repeatable tests aside from measures like these. It’s what works for science, after all.

The Virtualisation Technologies

As I mentioned in my last post, I chose to limit the virtualisation technologies to a single technology from each of the types I described. I had to postpone testing against “local systems” due to time pressures. It was the option that fell off because we are unlikely to ditch virtualisation any time soon. It works well for us.

To reiterate here, the candidate technologies were VMWare Workstation 7.1, the Hyper-V role in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Amazon’ s EC2 IaaS offering (a Red Hat implementation of the Xen hypervisor). Again, there’s background for all of this in my last post.

What About the Server Room?

One thing I haven’t discussed in any detail so far is VDI or Remote Desktop services. I briefly touched on shared development environments, but I’ve not talked about hosted, individualised development environments. The reason we ruled this out is cost. While this would probably be the best-performing option, all other things being equal, the costs associated with providing this level of performance in the server room would be pretty enormous. For our purposes we might have exceeded power, cooling and weight limitations before we considered the costs of new blade centres and SANs. These costs would probably be even greater in the datacentre. In short, the same criticism applies to individualised hosted development environments as to shared environments: redundancy and resilience at this level is overkill given the associated costs. The data is not critical and anything that needs to be backed up can be stored elsewhere (like TFS).

Basically, people opt for VDI or Remote Desktop services because a mass of underutilised desktop systems can be heavily consolidated. These systems are not underutilised.

The Hardware Candidates

Dell XPS M1330
This is our current laptop model, upgraded with a 320GB 7200 RPM local hard drive and 8GB RAM. One of the serious options we’re considering is a laptop refresh, due to the age and fail rate of the graphics cards and motherboards on these models.

Dell Studio XPS 1645
This was the least expensive decent i7 laptop I could find for testing purposes, and a leading candidate as a replacement laptop. With an £833 (ex-VAT) starting price it could be bumped up to 8GB RAM for a little over £100 more via Crucial. It’s a very heavy laptop and the glossy shell does it no favours, picking up fingerprints within seconds of use. However, it comes wth a 1.6 GHz i7 processor, 500GB 7200 RPM disk standard, eSATA port and HDMI. No USB3. Basically, nothing here was an absolute deal-breaker for us if performance was good.

ASUS V6-P7H55E
This is a barebones system with the following configuration/cost (as priced at scan.co.uk):

• ASUS V6-P7H55E barebones System = £121.67
• Intel i7 870 (8M Cache, 2.93 GHz) = £217.57
• 4GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 PC3-10666 (1333) Dual Channel – 4x£56.59 = £226.36
• 1TB Seagate Barracuda SATA 3Gb/s, 7200rpm, 32MB Cache, 8.5 ms, NCQ – 3x£41.94 = £125.82
• Adaptec 1220SA PCI-E RAID Card = £46.40
• ASUS 512MB GeForce G 210 DDR2 NVIDIA Graphics Card = £27.71
• Total = £768.58 (VAT-inclusive)

This system is configured with three internal 1TB hard drives and 16GB RAM. We needed to purchase the RAID card because the motherboard does not have an on-board RAID controller. The graphics card was necessary because there are no integrated graphics on desktop i7 processors (although there are for some i3 and i5 models). The disk configuration was variable, as this was one of the test scenarios. The assumption going in was that two disks would be configured in a RAID 0 stripe or a RAID 1 array, depending on performance outcomes. We would only stripe the disks if there was an obvious, significant performance gain. The third disk would be attached to the on-board SATA controller. I will discuss the recommended configuration in more detail later. Also note: the graphics card supports two monitors across any two of the three outputs, but not three concurrently. Finally, the ASUS V7-P7H55E is nearly identical in every respect. We went with the V6 based on availability.

Other laptop models
During preliminary testing we looked at the Lenovo W510, the Dell Precision 6500 and the Alienware M17x among others. All of these models were candidates that we never ruled out, but we didn’t have sufficient time with them to run the entire set of tests. However, these models had a reasonably similar configuration to the Dell Studio XPS 1645 and the Hyper-V tests we ran on these systems yielded similar results to our test model.

Other desktop models
Obviously a barebones system won’t appeal to everyone as a business solution, and it took me some time to persuade myself that it might be suitable for these environments. It wasn’t until I actually priced up this model and compared it to the comparable Dell T1500 (+~£600) and HP Z200 (slower than either model, and pricier) that I considered how it might work for us more seriously.

What am I examining, and not examining?

We have an old laptop, a new laptop, a new desktop and the cloud. Excepting the cloud (which is fixed), we’re permuting each of these hardware options with VMWare Workstation and Hyper-V test results. We’re then adding tests to examine the impact of spindle/bus speeds and the impact of adding/removing cores to these VMs. Ultimately, I wanted to quantify the productivity impacts of a change to our hardware and/or virtualisation technology as opposed to a change within our virtualisation technology, insofar as these tests could be decoupled.

I am not examining every virtualisation solution nor every hardware permutation but I do try to account for a number of these variables with these tests. I would love it if people carried out similar tests on their environments to help build knowledge in an area that’s hugely uninspected today. These are some of the other tests that I hope to revisit next year:

• The impact of application pooling on first page load times. Preliminary tests suggested there might be a small impact, but nowhere near as significant as the User Profile Service Connection. This warrants further inspection.
• The performance of “local systems” on this same hardware. As I mention above, these tests had to be de-prioritised, but I feel it would be worth identifying if there are any of these development-specific tasks where some, or all virtual technologies suffer.
• While I am running tests against a number of disk buses and configurations, I did not get the opportunity to test SSD performance. Obviously a lot of people will want to know the impact of SSD on these timings, but unfortunately I won’t have an opportunity to inspect that until early next year at the earliest.
• In some cases we work with deep snapshot trees. I want to gain an understanding of how differencing across ten or more files impacts performance for these tasks.
• Compare performance of a higher-clocked i5 to a lower-clocked i7 at a similar price range and potentially explore over-clocking options.
• Compare slower memory on an otherwise-identical system.
• Run VirtualBox tests on an otherwise-identical system.
• Assess the impact of virtualisation optimisations.

Obviously these tests say nothing about the usability of the system, power costs, mobility and more. For the purposes of this post I’m only concerned with outlining how I tested system performance for these real world tasks. In the next post, at long last, I will share the results.

I hit the search engines in earnest and found that these problems were prevalent across a fairly wide range of graphics cards. We enlisted Dell’s help and they told us that they do not certify that Hyper-V will work on any laptops. More precisely, they clarified the primary support concern is that future driver releases may not work with Hyper-V even if we find a model that works with today’s drivers. At this point we were considering a pricier Precision model and they put us in touch with their Precision product team in Texas. They were most helpful but we were told that Dell themselves do not use Hyper-V on laptops except for demonstration purposes and they simply use it as a server for connected workstations, so they would never experience the same graphics issues. Dell kindly offered to let us test our development build on various models at their campus if we agreed to share the results with them, but before we could arrange that visit, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Beta* was released and I upgraded my machine in order to test out Dynamic Memory.

As I was installing it I had a chat with my colleague (and serial early adopter) Lambros Vasiliou to gauge his impressions. He mentioned his favourite improvement is that the known Hyper-V host graphics performance issues are either gone or greatly mitigated. This is an issue that’s been repeatedly discussed in our organisation since we moved from a hotchpotch of virtualisation technologies to Hyper-V as our standard development build last year. It’s probably the single thing that irritates our users of this system more than anything else.

I did some testing myself with videos playing and moving windows about with Windows Key + Arrow hot keys. The results were fairly impressive – without doubt a big improvement. One thing that still behaved poorly on my Dell XPS M1330 (with NVIDIA GeForce 8400GS) is full-screen YouTube, Vimeo, etc. The CTRL+ALT+DEL redraw operation seems a bit sluggish still as well. I noticed that my PowerPoint Presenter View was better, but still not 100% responsive.

I also tested on the Dell Latitude E6410 (with NVIDIA NVS 3100M). Not only is the previously-mentioned blue screen fixed and the graphics generally improved in the same ways as on the XPS, but the full-screen in-browser video and CTRL+ALT+DEL are instantaneous. One possible explanation for this different experience is that the Latitude has a processor with SLAT, but I can’t validate that at all yet… because I can’t find any information whatsoever about why/how this has changed!

I think it’s unlikely that these changes are related to RemoteFX (since the XPS M1330 does not have a processor with SLAT and I never enabled it on the Latitude E6410). I would expect RemoteFX to improve the experience connecting to the guests, not the Hyper-V root partition (although it’s possible that this improvement is somehow related). I’ve tried pinging Virtual PC Guy and posted this query on the SP1 Beta TechNet forum but so far the community can only confirm that this is indeed working on a number of different models including a Mac (drill down in the links on the TechNet thread for more information). One way or the other this is great news, but I’m finding the lack of information about these changes quite maddening given the amazing detail that’s been produced for the Dynamic Memory launch. I’d really appreciate further insights if anyone can reveal the internals.

* A few notes regarding the Service Pack 1 Beta installation process:

1. The links on the SP1 Beta page are a bit confusing. You should be aware that if you click the “Evaluate Windows Server 2008 R2 and SP1 Beta” link you will be taken to a page with a “Download Windows Server 2008 R2 Trial Software” section at the top. “Download SP1 Beta Software” is beneath that section. This is what you want. If you click the first link you will initiate a download of the full Windows Server 2008 R2 (SP0) installer. If you “upgrade” your system using that installer you’ll wind up with a nice new trial version of SP0. AGH. Starting again from the links in the right section I was able to run a small installer that presents the updates to Windows Update and that has all worked fine, so I’d recommend that route. Alternately the Service Pack can be downloaded stand-alone. I did that for my second install and it worked fine too. Also note the Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Beta Reviewer’s Guide, “to evaluate the core features of Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Beta release in your environment”.
2. If you use Forefront you will need to uninstall it in order to install SP1 Beta, so make sure to remember to reinstall it afterwards.
3. When I installed the Service Pack my screen went black for about ten minutes following the first reboot. Be prepared for this. You’ll see plenty of ongoing disk activity but nothing on the screen. Fairly disconcerting, but perhaps this is all a part of these same video changes.

• It’s not an issue on processors with SLAT, but these are only just hitting the market in laptops in the near future
• It’s not an issue with the SVGA driver
  • I’ve asked if the SVGA driver might ever offer multi-monitor support. He’s looking in to it. This might be a great compromise until processors with SLAT become ubiquitous
• This same problem occurs in all native Hypervisors
  • Virtual PC and VMWare Workstation do not have the same problem but they are Type 2 hypervisors and do not offer the same performance as Hyper-V

So… there’s still no conclusive solution but it’s good to have the full context of the problem. For more background on why this matters for SharePoint see my previous post on the matter. ]]> http://tristanwatkins.com/index.php/the-definitive-word-on-hyper-v-high-end-graphics-performance/feed/ 1 http://tristanwatkins.com/index.php/hyper-v-graphics-performance-is-in-on-the-way-if-you-need-a-new-laptop/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hyper-v-graphics-performance-is-in-on-the-way-if-you-need-a-new-laptop http://tristanwatkins.com/index.php/hyper-v-graphics-performance-is-in-on-the-way-if-you-need-a-new-laptop/#comments Wed, 23 Sep 2009 23:12:21 +0000 Tristan Watkins http://tristanwatkins.com/?p=247 Dell announced today that they are releasing Alienware and Studio laptops with Intel Core i7 processors. Why is this worth regurgitating? The Core i7 processors feature the Nehalem processor microarchitecture, which means that Hyper-V V2 (in Windows Server 2008 R2) can take advantage of SLAT (Second Level Address Translation). SLAT is implemented as EPT (Extended Paging Tables) in Intel technology and NPT (Nested Paging Tables) for AMD. Here’s Microsoft’s summary of the new Hyper-V support for SLAT:

The new Hyper-V also adds performance enhancements that increase virtual machine performance and power consumption. Hyper-V now supports Second Level Address Translation (SLAT), which uses new features on today’s CPUs to improve VM performance while reducing processing load on the Windows Hypervisor and new Hyper-V VMs will also consume less power by virtue of the new Core Parking feature implemented into Windows Server 2008 R2.

VitualizationAdmin.com adds a bit more to that:

Using NPT or EPT, AMD-V and Intel VT processors can maintain and perform the two levels of address space translations required for each virtual machine in hardware, reducing the complexity of the Windows Hypervisor and the context switches needed to manage virtual machine page faults. As a result, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V provides better scalability of Hyper-V servers.

But what’s really important is that this solves the Hyper-V graphics performance problem for new laptops.  Scott Havens summed up the graphics issue nicely. Actually it was his comments on the Virtual PC Guy blog entries that first drew my attention to this caveat. Here’s his take on the same issue as it regards laptops and he fleshes out some more of the complexities around this issue – but as I say, Dell has announced the new laptops today, so we aren’t far off!

For those of us who are unlikely to get new laptops any time soon, it’s worth reviewing my original assessment. One thing that Scott’s articles pointed out for me that hadn’t really sunk in for me yet is that this isn’t just an issue for SharePoint 2010 – but for Windows Server 2008 R2 full-stop, as it is also x64-only. Oh, and it’s worth considering a Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V dual-boot if you’ll be doing anything massively graphics-intensive. This is actually how Virtual PC Guy describes his laptop setup.