The fight is on

Microsoft and Oracle made an interesting announcement today. If you run Oracle software like Java, Oracle Database or Oracle WebLogic Server on Hyper-V, it is now fully supported by Oracle.

For me, what is interesting in this announcement, and when one also see other news and information related to Hyper-V, is one thing. Microsoft are doing anything to make sure that Hyper-V is the king of Type 1 hypervisor. Is that necessary wrong – not at all if you ask me. But definitely, it’s a do or die for Microsoft. Why – see https://pcortis.wordpress.com/2013/06/02/why-microsoft-cant-afford-to-loose-the-type-1-hypervisor-battle/

Azure is based on Hyper-V. So the above holds for Azure as well.

Why Microsoft can’t afford to loose the Type 1 Hypervisor battle

Microsoft is all out in the Type 1 (bare metal) Hypervisor battle and they are giving it out for free. Sure, for installation of 5 or more Hyper-V servers, your life could be easier if you know PowerShell or if you get the System Centre. But still, Hyper-V is free

Free means no revenue? Surly Microsoft is not the type of company that needs to give free stuff, so why it’s free? They are spending lots in engineering and marketing and they give it away for free.

In my opinion, the reason is quite simple. The Type 1 hypervisor is what interacts with the hardware. So far Windows is the defector OS (client or server) so hardware vendors make sure that each new piece of hardware released does have Windows Drivers. Linux, VMware and others struggle for that. An OS without drivers is, well nothing. So by having the hardware vendors themselves writing the drives for Windows, Microsoft is is a very great position. Microsoft is the defacto standard.

Type 1 hypervisor changes this. It’s the Hypervisor that interacts with the hardware. The VM’s has drivers to talk to the hypervisor and not to the hardware. Who wins the Type 1 Hypervisor battle will be the defacto standard. It’s not an option for Microsoft to lose this status.

This explains that massive drive, in engineering, Microsoft has been putting in Hyper-V. As Aidan Finn (@joe_elway) tweeted a few days, Microsoft Azure is running on Hyper-V. That’s how good Hyper-V became.

For us customers, that’s a good thing. We get excellent, free Type 1 hypervisor.

Performance of MDaemon Outlook Connector

Recently I saw a setup where a particular user was using MDaemon server with outlook using the MDaemon Outlook Connector. This user had around 12GB cached locally. The way outlook connector work is by keeping a local cached copy of the e-mail body in a database and the attachments as separate files. This is different from Microsoft Exchange caching where everything is kept in one files, the OST file.

The problem was that it was taking the customer around 40 minutes to open outlook (from a cold boot). That’s quite unacceptable!!

The first time I was working on this, I did some “standard” housecleaning like defrag (both client and server) but the single most important this is the disable AV on the Outlook Connector caching folder. From cool book, outlook was now loads and usable in 4 minutes. That a huge improvement but still not acceptable.

The second stage was upgrading the RAM from 2GB to 4GB, installing a small SSD drive which was used exclusively for the Outlook Connector local cache. Now outlook is loading and usable in 40 seconds.