Ben Armstrong, Program Manager on Core Virtualization at Microsoft, publishes on his corporate blog a short but interesting insight about Hyper-V internals which explain why Hyper-V performance in installing guest operating systems is worse than Virtual Server 2005 R2 one:
With Virtual Server and Virtual PC we only had emulated devices to use – and as a result we spent a lot of time optimizing and tweaking the performance of these emulated devices. When we implemented the emulated devices under Hyper-V we had to remove many of these optimizations due to the entirely different architecture of Hyper-V. We did not, however, spend much time re-optimizing the emulated devices on Hyper-V because we had the new synthetic device architecture where we have focused our attention for performance tuning.
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- Yes – operating system installation on Hyper-V is slower than on Virtual Server / Virtual PC.
- No – I do not expect this to change much for the first release of Hyper-V.
- Yes – once you are up and running and have integration services installed performance of Hyper-V virtual machines is much better than Virtual Server / Virtual PC.