Software Recommendations and Licensing Notes

It’s highly recommended that you use the latest virtualization host software from your particular vendor. For example, the latest version of Hyper-V is included with Windows Server 2008 R2. Hyper-V 2.0 has significant performance improvements over Hyper-V 1.0, such as I/O improvements for fixed-size VHDs. Hyper-V 2.0 also has new features such as Core Parking, Live Migration, TCP Offload, the Jumbo Frames feature, and support for Second-Level Address Translation (SLAT)-enabled processors. If you’re virtualizing SharePoint on Hyper-V, also consider deploying the virtual host on Server Core to minimize its security footprint, OS disk overhead (2GB versus 10GB), and memory use.

Microsoft provides cost-effective virtualization licensing options for Windows Server, which lets organizations save significantly on Windows Server licenses when virtualizing servers. The three types of virtualization server licensing are as follows:

• Windows Server Standard Edition, which allows a single physical OS environment (POSE) or a single virtual OS environment (VOSE) with each Standard Edition license. Note that a virtualization host that’s dedicated to virtualization tasks doesn’t consume a license, regardless if it’s running Windows Server (such as in the case of Hyper-V).

• Windows Server Enterprise Edition, which allows for up to four VOSEs to be run at any one time on the host. Note that only running VMs are counted. So, if a VM is shut down, it doesn’t count against the four concurrent VOSEs permitted by the Enterprise Edition license.

• Windows Server Datacenter Edition, which is a per-processor (not per core) license for the virtual host (for example, a dual quad-core server would require two licenses) that grants you the right to run an unlimited number of VMs on the host.

These licensing options apply not only to Hyper-V but also to any hypervisor that is part of the SVVP. For organizations with a significant investment in virtualization infrastructure, buying the appropriate number of Datacenter Edition licenses to cover all your virtual hosts is the most cost-effective.