Hello, my name is Bryon Surace. I’m a senior program manager on the Windows virtualization team within the Server & Tools Business at Microsoft. Today’s announcement by AMD highlighting our two companies’ cooperative development efforts marks another milestone in Microsoft and AMD’s continued efforts to deliver an industry-leading virtualization platform that matches processor enhancement with Hyper-V technology advancements.

Hyper-V, as a feature of Windows Server 2008, relies upon hardware-assisted virtualization, such as AMD-Virtualization (AMD-V). The use of this technology is a design principle of Microsoft’s virtualization architecture that is continuing with the upcoming Windows Server 2008 R2 (now in beta).

Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, builds upon the solid foundation laid in Windows Server 2008. Of the many virtualization enhancements being made in Release 2, a few of the key features take advantage of advancements included in the newest generation processors.

Specifically Hyper-V, as part of Windows Server 2008 R2, will take full advantage of Second Level Address Translation such as AMD’s Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) (formerly known as Nested Page Tables). Through RVI, the AMD processor provides two levels of address translation. This additional page table is used to translate guest physical addresses to system physical address allowing the guest to control its own page tables. This negates the need for the hypervisor to intercept the guest’s modifications of the page tables. This model provides virtualization overhead improvement as compared with traditional software shadow page tables.

In Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V can use the AMD RVI technology to increase performance of the virtualization platform and results in system resource savings. These savings include a drop in Hypervisor CPU time as well as a reduction in memory overhead.

The continued cooperative development efforts between Microsoft and AMD are highly valued and critical in delivering great virtualization technology.

If you have more questions about Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, or about other Microsoft server, desktop, or management virtualization products, check out Edwin Yuen’s web chat on March 31. It’s 8am-noon PST. Register and submit questions ahead of time here.

Thanks to AMD for allowing me to post a guest blog.

Bryon Surace a senior program manager on the Windows virtualization team within the Server & Tools Business at Microsoft. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Any claims made herein have not been independently verified by AMD. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.