During his keynote at the recent VMWare Partner Exchange, Paul Jackson made some interesting comments.
The chief marketing officer of VMWare told the attendees that: "Microsoft is painting a beautiful picture about cloud computing, but according to its own internal documents is not using its own Hyper-V virtualization platform because it cannot easily pool CPU, memory, and networking resources."
Now he has a point, the current version of Hyper-V doesn't shine in the possibilities to pool CPU, memory and network resources and yes, Microsoft doesn't use Hyper-V for its azure platform. But what supervisor does it use in its Azure platform and why does Azure use it?
The foundation of the Azure platform is a newly developed hypervisor that was built with three basic principles in mind. The hypervisor should have a small footprint, be efficient and provide tight integration.
- The small footprint means that any features that are not needed in the cloud scenario are removed. That way you remove the need for fixing unnecessary code. Having a small footprint reduces the amount of patching and rebooting of your servers and making your hypervisor less vulnerable for potential attacks.
- The efficiency is obvious. Any percentage gain will be significant once multiplied by tens of thousands machines. The result is that more CPU cycles are available for the hosted applications.
- To achieve the required level of performance and scalability it is necessary to have a tight integration between the Azure Hypervisor and the Azure Kernel.
As you see, a lot of the requirements for the Azure hypervisor are specific for the needs of azure only, and therefore there is a need for a separate supervisor. However a lot of the innovations in the Azure hypervisor will be incorporated in the next releases of Hyper-V