SCVMM, choose your CPU Type wisely

A few months ago my beloved colleague Walter gave me the Beta version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Unfortunately I haven’t had the time to play with it until now. While most people enjoy their well earned vacation, I’m playing around with SCVMM.

There are definitely things to be excited about:

Ability to manage both Hyper-V and VMware farms
Migrate virtual machines between Hyper-V hosts (maybe not a live migration, but a migration none the less! )
But the main thing to be excited about is the future integration within the System Center family.

And their are also some irritating things:

Hyper-V has just RTM’ed and SCVMM is still in beta. This means you got to install update after update to make everything work.
When I try to install the integration services on Windows Vista it comes with the message: “Unsupported Guest OS - An error has occurred: The specified program requires a newer version of Windows.” Unfortunately I’m not yet in the possession of Windows 7…
I created a new library share. But when I try to mount an ISO file to my virtual machine it fails and the only thing you can do with your virtual machine from that point is remove it and repair it. Through the repair option you can save him by the way.

I properly can go on and on with these things but I can rather posts these on connect.microsoft.com. It is still a beta and I believe eventually these ‘minor’ issues will be solved.

There is one very interesting feature I found in SCVMM and I’m still not sure if it’s a brilliant or stupid thing. When you create a new virtual machine you got to choose your processor type. Not just the number of virtual processors or the clock rate, no actually the processor type. Like the 1.2 Ghz Athlon, the 3.0 Ghz Pentium 4 (HT Technology) or the 2.8 Ghz Xeon MP.

It states that it uses this info to determine the processor requirements of the virtual machine. That’s being used when calculating host ratings and when setting CPU resource allocations.
You can view the host rating when you create a new virtual machine. The host rating helps you to choose the best host for your virtual machine. Based on free resources.
CPU resource allocation is something we know from VMware ESX. VMware uses shares to do this. A plain number like 1000 or 2000. The virtual machine with 2000 shares gets twice the amount of CPU cycles (when needed) in comparison with the machine that has 1000 shares.

I understand that SCVMM should use his own system that can be plotted on all the different virtualization platforms it’s going to manage (Hyper-V, XEN, ESX). But I don’t understand how a 2.4 Ghz Opteron relates to a 2.4 Ghz Xeon.
So if I just want my production server to have a 50% preference over my test server which should I choose? And what’s worse, if I’m in doubt with this option, how about a self service user that’s got the option to create a new virtual machine? I can imagine it would properly mean that this user got the advise to skip it.

But there is one more thing confusing about this. When you use the Virtual Machine Manager snap in, there is another way to set the processor weight and you can use a simple number!

So if I change the processor type in SCVMM of a virtual machine, you would suspect something to change within this screen. But it doesn’t… Neither does it the other way around.

I’m going to investigate some more but if you got some tips or hints, please post them!

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