Last week, during the TechEd Europe 2010 conference, Microsoft announced that the upcoming Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2, thanks to the Dynamic Memory feature that will ship with it, will increase by 40% the Hyper-V virtual machine density in VDI environments.
Microsoft obtained the result testing Hyper-V R2 SP1 in its labs, running the hypervisor on HP and Dell servers against the now popular Virtual Session Indexer (VSI) benchmark tool offered by Login Consultants.
Thanks to Dynamic Memory, Microsoft has been able to pass from 85 VMs (with Hyper-V R2) to 120 VMs, running Windows 7 and served by a single physical host following specifications defined in the Dell’s Reference Architecture for VDI.
The company also reports that its TAP customers increased their VM density by a value between 25% and 50% for other server workloads and specific usage patterns, even if it doesn’t specify which ones. Hopefully these details will be exposed in an upcoming whitepaper that Microsoft promised to publish.