Hardware Virtuilization for Driver Development/Debug???

NTDEV
1

I have been a big fan of VMWare for a long time, and am lucky enough to be
working on mainly on hardware-independent NDIS filters and protocols.

I typically make several VMs for each customer for the platforms they are
interested in, the tools that they use, etc. Do a lot of work just on the
VMs, then spend some final test time on real iron.

Always looking for better solutions, however.

Question really is: Any feedback on Windows Virtual PC on the Windows 7
desktop in the context of driver development?

Is an i7 Quad good enough?

What is a practical limit on the number of VMs that can run concurrently?
That’s vague… Can I keep three guests running on a host with 6 GB memory
and not be sorely disappointed? Probably only the host or one VM will really
be doing much work at any point in time.

If multiple VMs are running, can I associate a different USB device (say, a
NDIS 6 USB Native Wi-Fi adapter) to each VM?

(Basically, I never went for Virtual PC because of its lack of USB
support…).

I think I can concurrently debug each VM over a pipe from the host WinDbg,
but haven’t tried it on Virtual PC.

How about ease and flexibility of virtual network configuration?

Not trying to start any flame ware here. Just want enough feedback to know
whether getting a machine with HW virtualization is worth spending time and
money on at this point.

TIA,

Thomas F. Divine

2

I think you’ll discover that Virtual PC in Windows 7 exists only to serve as
an application compatibility platform. I suspect you’ll be frustrated by
its lack of amenities for any other endeavor.

–
Jake Oshins
Hyper-V I/O Architect
Windows Kernel Group

This post implies no warranties and confers no rights.

“Thomas F. Divine” wrote in message
news:xxxxx@ntdev…
> I have been a big fan of VMWare for a long time, and am lucky enough to be
> working on mainly on hardware-independent NDIS filters and protocols.
>
> I typically make several VMs for each customer for the platforms they are
> interested in, the tools that they use, etc. Do a lot of work just on the
> VMs, then spend some final test time on real iron.
>
> Always looking for better solutions, however.
>
> Question really is: Any feedback on Windows Virtual PC on the Windows 7
> desktop in the context of driver development?
>
> Is an i7 Quad good enough?
>
> What is a practical limit on the number of VMs that can run concurrently?
> That’s vague… Can I keep three guests running on a host with 6 GB memory
> and not be sorely disappointed? Probably only the host or one VM will
> really
> be doing much work at any point in time.
>
> If multiple VMs are running, can I associate a different USB device (say,
> a
> NDIS 6 USB Native Wi-Fi adapter) to each VM?
>
> (Basically, I never went for Virtual PC because of its lack of USB
> support…).
>
> I think I can concurrently debug each VM over a pipe from the host WinDbg,
> but haven’t tried it on Virtual PC.
>
> How about ease and flexibility of virtual network configuration?
>
> Not trying to start any flame ware here. Just want enough feedback to know
> whether getting a machine with HW virtualization is worth spending time
> and
> money on at this point.
>
> TIA,
>
> Thomas F. Divine
>
>
>

3

Humm…

Marketing makes it sound like it is really more capable…

Thanks, Jake!

Thomas

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Jake Oshins
Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2009 2:02 AM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: Re:[ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver Development/Debug???

I think you’ll discover that Virtual PC in Windows 7 exists only to serve as

an application compatibility platform. I suspect you’ll be frustrated by
its lack of amenities for any other endeavor.

–
Jake Oshins
Hyper-V I/O Architect
Windows Kernel Group

This post implies no warranties and confers no rights.

“Thomas F. Divine” wrote in message
news:xxxxx@ntdev…
> I have been a big fan of VMWare for a long time, and am lucky enough to be
> working on mainly on hardware-independent NDIS filters and protocols.
>
> I typically make several VMs for each customer for the platforms they are
> interested in, the tools that they use, etc. Do a lot of work just on the
> VMs, then spend some final test time on real iron.
>
> Always looking for better solutions, however.
>
> Question really is: Any feedback on Windows Virtual PC on the Windows 7
> desktop in the context of driver development?
>
> Is an i7 Quad good enough?
>
> What is a practical limit on the number of VMs that can run concurrently?
> That’s vague… Can I keep three guests running on a host with 6 GB memory
> and not be sorely disappointed? Probably only the host or one VM will
> really
> be doing much work at any point in time.
>
> If multiple VMs are running, can I associate a different USB device (say,
> a
> NDIS 6 USB Native Wi-Fi adapter) to each VM?
>
> (Basically, I never went for Virtual PC because of its lack of USB
> support…).
>
> I think I can concurrently debug each VM over a pipe from the host WinDbg,
> but haven’t tried it on Virtual PC.
>
> How about ease and flexibility of virtual network configuration?
>
> Not trying to start any flame ware here. Just want enough feedback to know
> whether getting a machine with HW virtualization is worth spending time
> and
> money on at this point.
>
> TIA,
>
> Thomas F. Divine
>
>
>

—
NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

4



Personally, I turn up all of my new development environments on a Hyper-V server on a beefy rack (or otherwise dedicated) box and remote into them.

Before I switched to Hyper-V, I used VMware Server in a similar fashion. I am deprecating and moving away from that as they couldn’t keep their virtual NICs reliably passing traffic in some circumstances (server 1.x), or kept forgetting all of my virtual network configs on every single reboot of the host (server 2.x). Very frustrating.

Anyways, my experiences with those products aside, I’d go for the server-ish products running on dedicated hardware versus running them with VMware Workstation or VPC. Besides, usually cheaper to get good hardware in a noisy rack/tower box somewhere and get a laptop without 8 or 16gb of ram vs. trying to cram that all into a laptop - unless you do your dev work on a tower box already, that is.

All of these solutions do support multiple VMs per host subject to your hardware capacity though. IIRC, Hyper-V’s limit is 64-ish or 128-ish (can’t remember for sure, though it’s on microsoft.com somewhere).

N.B. No USB redirection support in Hyper-V right now, keep that in mind. VPC does have that but I’ve not used it.

- S

-----Original Message-----
From: Thomas F. Divine
Sent: Monday, August 31, 2009 20:10
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: [ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver Development/Debug???

I have been a big fan of VMWare for a long time, and am lucky enough to be
working on mainly on hardware-independent NDIS filters and protocols.

I typically make several VMs for each customer for the platforms they are
interested in, the tools that they use, etc. Do a lot of work just on the
VMs, then spend some final test time on real iron.

Always looking for better solutions, however.

Question really is: Any feedback on Windows Virtual PC on the Windows 7
desktop in the context of driver development?

Is an i7 Quad good enough?

What is a practical limit on the number of VMs that can run concurrently?
That’s vague… Can I keep three guests running on a host with 6 GB memory
and not be sorely disappointed? Probably only the host or one VM will really
be doing much work at any point in time.

If multiple VMs are running, can I associate a different USB device (say, a
NDIS 6 USB Native Wi-Fi adapter) to each VM?

(Basically, I never went for Virtual PC because of its lack of USB
support…).

I think I can concurrently debug each VM over a pipe from the host WinDbg,
but haven’t tried it on Virtual PC.

How about ease and flexibility of virtual network configuration?

Not trying to start any flame ware here. Just want enough feedback to know
whether getting a machine with HW virtualization is worth spending time and
money on at this point.

TIA,

Thomas F. Divine

—
NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

5

Thomas F. Divine wrote:

I have been a big fan of VMWare for a long time, and am lucky enough to be
working on mainly on hardware-independent NDIS filters and protocols.

I typically make several VMs for each customer for the platforms they are
interested in, the tools that they use, etc. Do a lot of work just on the
VMs, then spend some final test time on real iron.

Always looking for better solutions, however.

Question really is: Any feedback on Windows Virtual PC on the Windows 7
desktop in the context of driver development?

I can relate one experience I had. After turning on Hyper-V, I
installed the Virtual Windows XP addon into my Windows 7 setup. To see
how far things had come, I tried assigning one of my high-bandwidth USB
2.0 cameras to the virtual machine. To my rather great surprise, it
worked perfectly. No dropped frames.

That’s really the first time I’ve seen a virtual machine handle a
high-bandwidth isochronous stream correctly. It makes me think that I
might actually be able to do VM kernel debugging, like the rest of the
world.

Is an i7 Quad good enough?

I’m running on a 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad, and that’s way more than enough.

What is a practical limit on the number of VMs that can run concurrently?
That’s vague… Can I keep three guests running on a host with 6 GB memory
and not be sorely disappointed? Probably only the host or one VM will really
be doing much work at any point in time.

If only one of them is busy at a time, you can run dozens of VMs
concurrently. In our experience, the biggest bottleneck is disk
bandwidth. CPUs today are more than enough for any application you’re
likely to need in the next 10 years. We’ve started to add dedicated
spindles for our busiest VMs, and that’s been a huge improvement.

If multiple VMs are running, can I associate a different USB device (say, a
NDIS 6 USB Native Wi-Fi adapter) to each VM?

Yes. You have to assign specific USB devices to specific VMs.

(Basically, I never went for Virtual PC because of its lack of USB
support…).

Me, too. This situation seems to have changed…

–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.

6

Bad news, I guess. But what I needed to hear.

Looking at the WS 2008 R2 documents and forum comments it is clear that WS
2008 R2 by design does not support USB virtualization/passthrough. The
target market is limited (that sucks) to just the datacenter and not to
wider more wider uses. I guess that this focus is what pays the rent.

Windows Virtual PC on Windows 7 offers USB virtualization, but Jake didn’t
seem too enthusiastic about it being suitable for much more than application
compatibility.

Suggestions like “use USB-over-IP”, “just make an ISO image”, etc. don’t
seem practical when the USB device is a GPS receiver, video/audio device,
radio or US-Ethernet device.

So, looks like VMWare Workstation continues to be the best tool for me for
now.

I guess I won’t be placing that Hyper-V compatible machine order. :frowning:

Thanks to everyone for their comments!

Thomas F. Divine

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Skywing
Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2009 1:12 PM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: RE: [ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver Development/Debug???



Personally, I turn up all of my new development environments on a Hyper-V
server on a beefy rack (or otherwise dedicated) box and remote into them.

Before I switched to Hyper-V, I used VMware Server in a similar fashion. I
am deprecating and moving away from that as they couldn’t keep their virtual
NICs reliably passing traffic in some circumstances (server 1.x), or kept
forgetting all of my virtual network configs on every single reboot of the
host (server 2.x). Very frustrating.

Anyways, my experiences with those products aside, I’d go for the server-ish
products running on dedicated hardware versus running them with VMware
Workstation or VPC. Besides, usually cheaper to get good hardware in a
noisy rack/tower box somewhere and get a laptop without 8 or 16gb of ram vs.
trying to cram that all into a laptop - unless you do your dev work on a
tower box already, that is.

All of these solutions do support multiple VMs per host subject to your
hardware capacity though. IIRC, Hyper-V’s limit is 64-ish or 128-ish (can’t
remember for sure, though it’s on microsoft.com somewhere).

N.B. No USB redirection support in Hyper-V right now, keep that in mind.
VPC does have that but I’ve not used it.

- S

-----Original Message-----
From: Thomas F. Divine
Sent: Monday, August 31, 2009 20:10
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: [ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver Development/Debug???

I have been a big fan of VMWare for a long time, and am lucky enough to be
working on mainly on hardware-independent NDIS filters and protocols.

I typically make several VMs for each customer for the platforms they are
interested in, the tools that they use, etc. Do a lot of work just on the
VMs, then spend some final test time on real iron.

Always looking for better solutions, however.

Question really is: Any feedback on Windows Virtual PC on the Windows 7
desktop in the context of driver development?

Is an i7 Quad good enough?

What is a practical limit on the number of VMs that can run concurrently?
That’s vague… Can I keep three guests running on a host with 6 GB memory
and not be sorely disappointed? Probably only the host or one VM will really
be doing much work at any point in time.

If multiple VMs are running, can I associate a different USB device (say, a
NDIS 6 USB Native Wi-Fi adapter) to each VM?

(Basically, I never went for Virtual PC because of its lack of USB
support…).

I think I can concurrently debug each VM over a pipe from the host WinDbg,
but haven’t tried it on Virtual PC.

How about ease and flexibility of virtual network configuration?

Not trying to start any flame ware here. Just want enough feedback to know
whether getting a machine with HW virtualization is worth spending time and
money on at this point.

TIA,

Thomas F. Divine

—
NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

—
NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

7

Maybe VMWare can use the capabilities to improve speed, but I don’t know.
Just don’t need much virtual capability now since we use real hardware. I
think the Dell T3500 systems even in a fairly minimal system can give you
what you might find useful. I find that with a TI chipset 1394a card, it is
a real screamer using windbg. The only think bad about Nahalem Xenons is
that for network cards and most hardware the hyper-threaded cpus don’t help
much, but the other 4 are good. With Win7 and 2k8 R2, NDIS will not
schedule NDIS miniport drivers on the HT processors.

“Thomas F. Divine” wrote in message
news:xxxxx@ntdev…
> Bad news, I guess. But what I needed to hear.
>
> Looking at the WS 2008 R2 documents and forum comments it is clear that WS
> 2008 R2 by design does not support USB virtualization/passthrough. The
> target market is limited (that sucks) to just the datacenter and not to
> wider more wider uses. I guess that this focus is what pays the rent.
>
> Windows Virtual PC on Windows 7 offers USB virtualization, but Jake didn’t
> seem too enthusiastic about it being suitable for much more than
> application
> compatibility.
>
> Suggestions like “use USB-over-IP”, “just make an ISO image”, etc. don’t
> seem practical when the USB device is a GPS receiver, video/audio device,
> radio or US-Ethernet device.
>
> So, looks like VMWare Workstation continues to be the best tool for me for
> now.
>
> I guess I won’t be placing that Hyper-V compatible machine order. :frowning:
>
> Thanks to everyone for their comments!
>
> Thomas F. Divine
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
> [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Skywing
> Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2009 1:12 PM
> To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
> Subject: RE: [ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver
> Development/Debug???
>
>
>
> Personally, I turn up all of my new development environments on a Hyper-V
> server on a beefy rack (or otherwise dedicated) box and remote into them.
>
> Before I switched to Hyper-V, I used VMware Server in a similar fashion.
> I
> am deprecating and moving away from that as they couldn’t keep their
> virtual
> NICs reliably passing traffic in some circumstances (server 1.x), or kept
> forgetting all of my virtual network configs on every single reboot of the
> host (server 2.x). Very frustrating.
>
> Anyways, my experiences with those products aside, I’d go for the
> server-ish
> products running on dedicated hardware versus running them with VMware
> Workstation or VPC. Besides, usually cheaper to get good hardware in a
> noisy rack/tower box somewhere and get a laptop without 8 or 16gb of ram
> vs.
> trying to cram that all into a laptop - unless you do your dev work on a
> tower box already, that is.
>
> All of these solutions do support multiple VMs per host subject to your
> hardware capacity though. IIRC, Hyper-V’s limit is 64-ish or 128-ish
> (can’t
> remember for sure, though it’s on microsoft.com somewhere).
>
> N.B. No USB redirection support in Hyper-V right now, keep that in mind.
> VPC does have that but I’ve not used it.
>
> - S
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Thomas F. Divine
> Sent: Monday, August 31, 2009 20:10
> To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
> Subject: [ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver Development/Debug???
>
>
> I have been a big fan of VMWare for a long time, and am lucky enough to be
> working on mainly on hardware-independent NDIS filters and protocols.
>
> I typically make several VMs for each customer for the platforms they are
> interested in, the tools that they use, etc. Do a lot of work just on the
> VMs, then spend some final test time on real iron.
>
> Always looking for better solutions, however.
>
> Question really is: Any feedback on Windows Virtual PC on the Windows 7
> desktop in the context of driver development?
>
> Is an i7 Quad good enough?
>
> What is a practical limit on the number of VMs that can run concurrently?
> That’s vague… Can I keep three guests running on a host with 6 GB memory
> and not be sorely disappointed? Probably only the host or one VM will
> really
> be doing much work at any point in time.
>
> If multiple VMs are running, can I associate a different USB device (say,
> a
> NDIS 6 USB Native Wi-Fi adapter) to each VM?
>
> (Basically, I never went for Virtual PC because of its lack of USB
> support…).
>
> I think I can concurrently debug each VM over a pipe from the host WinDbg,
> but haven’t tried it on Virtual PC.
>
> How about ease and flexibility of virtual network configuration?
>
> Not trying to start any flame ware here. Just want enough feedback to know
> whether getting a machine with HW virtualization is worth spending time
> and
> money on at this point.
>
> TIA,
>
> Thomas F. Divine
>
>
>
> —
> NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
>
> For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
> http://www.osr.com/seminars
>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
>
> —
> NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
>
> For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
> http://www.osr.com/seminars
>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
>
>

8

> Not trying to start any flame ware here.

Actually, this is really exciting idea - up to this point we had countless “Windows vs Linux” and “C vs C++” discussions, and at the time when SI was alive “SoftIce vs WinDbg” was quite hot topic as well. However, we haven’t yet had any “Virtual PC/Hyper-V vs VMWare” discussions in so far…

Anton Bassov

9

Being a glutton for punishment…

On Intel i7 running Windows 7 x64 I installed Windows Virtual PC. Install
went smooth and the interface for creating and running VMs was pretty simple
to use.

The USB support was fine and the device I need was attached to the VM
without any problem. Haven’t really explored performance yet and my
performance criteria is really pretty crude: can I debug more effectively?

Down-sides, from driver developer perspective, are 1.) they have limited
each guest to only one virtual CPU and 2.) x64 guests are not supported.
Since WS 2008 can support these missing features it was probably a marketing
genius that decided to cripple these capabilities.

I’ll probably re-image this machine and put some sort of virtualization tool
on it. Don’t know what yet, though…

FWIW,

Thomas

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Tim Roberts
Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2009 1:43 PM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: Re: [ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver Development/Debug???

Thomas F. Divine wrote:

I have been a big fan of VMWare for a long time, and am lucky enough to be
working on mainly on hardware-independent NDIS filters and protocols.

I typically make several VMs for each customer for the platforms they are
interested in, the tools that they use, etc. Do a lot of work just on the
VMs, then spend some final test time on real iron.

Always looking for better solutions, however.

Question really is: Any feedback on Windows Virtual PC on the Windows 7
desktop in the context of driver development?

I can relate one experience I had. After turning on Hyper-V, I
installed the Virtual Windows XP addon into my Windows 7 setup. To see
how far things had come, I tried assigning one of my high-bandwidth USB
2.0 cameras to the virtual machine. To my rather great surprise, it
worked perfectly. No dropped frames.

That’s really the first time I’ve seen a virtual machine handle a
high-bandwidth isochronous stream correctly. It makes me think that I
might actually be able to do VM kernel debugging, like the rest of the
world.

Is an i7 Quad good enough?

I’m running on a 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad, and that’s way more than enough.

What is a practical limit on the number of VMs that can run concurrently?
That’s vague… Can I keep three guests running on a host with 6 GB memory
and not be sorely disappointed? Probably only the host or one VM will
really
be doing much work at any point in time.

If only one of them is busy at a time, you can run dozens of VMs
concurrently. In our experience, the biggest bottleneck is disk
bandwidth. CPUs today are more than enough for any application you’re
likely to need in the next 10 years. We’ve started to add dedicated
spindles for our busiest VMs, and that’s been a huge improvement.

If multiple VMs are running, can I associate a different USB device (say,
a
NDIS 6 USB Native Wi-Fi adapter) to each VM?

Yes. You have to assign specific USB devices to specific VMs.

(Basically, I never went for Virtual PC because of its lack of USB
support…).

Me, too. This situation seems to have changed…

–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.

NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

10

Personally, I use Vmware workstation running on my XP32 laptop. It allows me
to have x64 guests, USB support is pretty good in the latest versions, and
you can have 2 virtual CPUs.

Just my 2cents

GV

----- Original Message -----
From: “Thomas F. Divine”
To: “Windows System Software Devs Interest List”
Sent: Wednesday, September 02, 2009 10:09 PM
Subject: RE: [ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver Development/Debug???

> Being a glutton for punishment…
>
> On Intel i7 running Windows 7 x64 I installed Windows Virtual PC. Install
> went smooth and the interface for creating and running VMs was pretty
> simple
> to use.
>
> The USB support was fine and the device I need was attached to the VM
> without any problem. Haven’t really explored performance yet and my
> performance criteria is really pretty crude: can I debug more effectively?
>
> Down-sides, from driver developer perspective, are 1.) they have limited
> each guest to only one virtual CPU and 2.) x64 guests are not supported.
> Since WS 2008 can support these missing features it was probably a
> marketing
> genius that decided to cripple these capabilities.
>
> I’ll probably re-image this machine and put some sort of virtualization
> tool
> on it. Don’t know what yet, though…
>
> FWIW,
>
> Thomas
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
> [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Tim Roberts
> Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2009 1:43 PM
> To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
> Subject: Re: [ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver
> Development/Debug???
>
> Thomas F. Divine wrote:
>> I have been a big fan of VMWare for a long time, and am lucky enough to
>> be
>> working on mainly on hardware-independent NDIS filters and protocols.
>>
>> I typically make several VMs for each customer for the platforms they are
>> interested in, the tools that they use, etc. Do a lot of work just on the
>> VMs, then spend some final test time on real iron.
>>
>> Always looking for better solutions, however.
>>
>> Question really is: Any feedback on Windows Virtual PC on the Windows 7
>> desktop in the context of driver development?
>>
>
> I can relate one experience I had. After turning on Hyper-V, I
> installed the Virtual Windows XP addon into my Windows 7 setup. To see
> how far things had come, I tried assigning one of my high-bandwidth USB
> 2.0 cameras to the virtual machine. To my rather great surprise, it
> worked perfectly. No dropped frames.
>
> That’s really the first time I’ve seen a virtual machine handle a
> high-bandwidth isochronous stream correctly. It makes me think that I
> might actually be able to do VM kernel debugging, like the rest of the
> world.
>
>> Is an i7 Quad good enough?
>>
>
> I’m running on a 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad, and that’s way more than enough.
>
>> What is a practical limit on the number of VMs that can run concurrently?
>> That’s vague… Can I keep three guests running on a host with 6 GB
>> memory
>> and not be sorely disappointed? Probably only the host or one VM will
> really
>> be doing much work at any point in time.
>>
>
> If only one of them is busy at a time, you can run dozens of VMs
> concurrently. In our experience, the biggest bottleneck is disk
> bandwidth. CPUs today are more than enough for any application you’re
> likely to need in the next 10 years. We’ve started to add dedicated
> spindles for our busiest VMs, and that’s been a huge improvement.
>
>> If multiple VMs are running, can I associate a different USB device (say,
> a
>> NDIS 6 USB Native Wi-Fi adapter) to each VM?
>>
>
> Yes. You have to assign specific USB devices to specific VMs.
>
>> (Basically, I never went for Virtual PC because of its lack of USB
>> support…).
>>
>
> Me, too. This situation seems to have changed…
>
> –
> Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
> Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
>
>
> —
> NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
>
> For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
> http://www.osr.com/seminars
>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
>
>
> —
> NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
>
> For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
> http://www.osr.com/seminars
>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

11

There is absolutely no doubt that your approach is really more than adequate
when you get down to it.

Occasionally I like to take a peek at alternatives to see if they are really
better. In this case alternatives really don’t offer much for me except 1.)
faster CPU, 2.) possibly more memory and 3.) possibly a bigger disk. Tim’s
comment that high-bandwidth video seems better with HW virtualization is the
only real exception I have seen so far - and that’s not “my bag”.

All said and done my take-away from this exercise is really that I like
Windows 7 and will probably move from XP-32 to Win7-64 for most development
hosts before the end of the year.

Thomas

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Gianluca Varenni
Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2009 1:26 AM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: Re: [ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver Development/Debug???

Personally, I use Vmware workstation running on my XP32 laptop. It allows me

to have x64 guests, USB support is pretty good in the latest versions, and
you can have 2 virtual CPUs.

Just my 2cents

GV

----- Original Message -----
From: “Thomas F. Divine”
To: “Windows System Software Devs Interest List”
Sent: Wednesday, September 02, 2009 10:09 PM
Subject: RE: [ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver Development/Debug???

> Being a glutton for punishment…
>
> On Intel i7 running Windows 7 x64 I installed Windows Virtual PC. Install
> went smooth and the interface for creating and running VMs was pretty
> simple
> to use.
>
> The USB support was fine and the device I need was attached to the VM
> without any problem. Haven’t really explored performance yet and my
> performance criteria is really pretty crude: can I debug more effectively?
>
> Down-sides, from driver developer perspective, are 1.) they have limited
> each guest to only one virtual CPU and 2.) x64 guests are not supported.
> Since WS 2008 can support these missing features it was probably a
> marketing
> genius that decided to cripple these capabilities.
>
> I’ll probably re-image this machine and put some sort of virtualization
> tool
> on it. Don’t know what yet, though…
>
> FWIW,
>
> Thomas
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
> [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Tim Roberts
> Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2009 1:43 PM
> To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
> Subject: Re: [ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver
> Development/Debug???
>
> Thomas F. Divine wrote:
>> I have been a big fan of VMWare for a long time, and am lucky enough to
>> be
>> working on mainly on hardware-independent NDIS filters and protocols.
>>
>> I typically make several VMs for each customer for the platforms they are
>> interested in, the tools that they use, etc. Do a lot of work just on the
>> VMs, then spend some final test time on real iron.
>>
>> Always looking for better solutions, however.
>>
>> Question really is: Any feedback on Windows Virtual PC on the Windows 7
>> desktop in the context of driver development?
>>
>
> I can relate one experience I had. After turning on Hyper-V, I
> installed the Virtual Windows XP addon into my Windows 7 setup. To see
> how far things had come, I tried assigning one of my high-bandwidth USB
> 2.0 cameras to the virtual machine. To my rather great surprise, it
> worked perfectly. No dropped frames.
>
> That’s really the first time I’ve seen a virtual machine handle a
> high-bandwidth isochronous stream correctly. It makes me think that I
> might actually be able to do VM kernel debugging, like the rest of the
> world.
>
>> Is an i7 Quad good enough?
>>
>
> I’m running on a 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad, and that’s way more than enough.
>
>> What is a practical limit on the number of VMs that can run concurrently?
>> That’s vague… Can I keep three guests running on a host with 6 GB
>> memory
>> and not be sorely disappointed? Probably only the host or one VM will
> really
>> be doing much work at any point in time.
>>
>
> If only one of them is busy at a time, you can run dozens of VMs
> concurrently. In our experience, the biggest bottleneck is disk
> bandwidth. CPUs today are more than enough for any application you’re
> likely to need in the next 10 years. We’ve started to add dedicated
> spindles for our busiest VMs, and that’s been a huge improvement.
>
>> If multiple VMs are running, can I associate a different USB device (say,
> a
>> NDIS 6 USB Native Wi-Fi adapter) to each VM?
>>
>
> Yes. You have to assign specific USB devices to specific VMs.
>
>> (Basically, I never went for Virtual PC because of its lack of USB
>> support…).
>>
>
> Me, too. This situation seems to have changed…
>
> –
> Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
> Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
>
>
> —
> NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
>
> For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
> http://www.osr.com/seminars
>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
>
>
> —
> NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
>
> For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
> http://www.osr.com/seminars
>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

—
NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

12

The only Microsoft virtualization solution that supports x64 guests is the hypervisor (Hyper-V). VPC/Virtual Server are a whole different balliwick and have never supported x64 guests to my knowledge.

Hyper-V does support 4 procs per VM, FWIW.

  • S

From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Thomas F. Divine [xxxxx@pcausa.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2009 1:09 AM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: RE: [ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver Development/Debug???

Being a glutton for punishment…

On Intel i7 running Windows 7 x64 I installed Windows Virtual PC. Install
went smooth and the interface for creating and running VMs was pretty simple
to use.

The USB support was fine and the device I need was attached to the VM
without any problem. Haven’t really explored performance yet and my
performance criteria is really pretty crude: can I debug more effectively?

Down-sides, from driver developer perspective, are 1.) they have limited
each guest to only one virtual CPU and 2.) x64 guests are not supported.
Since WS 2008 can support these missing features it was probably a marketing
genius that decided to cripple these capabilities.

I’ll probably re-image this machine and put some sort of virtualization tool
on it. Don’t know what yet, though…

FWIW,

Thomas

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Tim Roberts
Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2009 1:43 PM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: Re: [ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver Development/Debug???

Thomas F. Divine wrote:

I have been a big fan of VMWare for a long time, and am lucky enough to be
working on mainly on hardware-independent NDIS filters and protocols.

I typically make several VMs for each customer for the platforms they are
interested in, the tools that they use, etc. Do a lot of work just on the
VMs, then spend some final test time on real iron.

Always looking for better solutions, however.

Question really is: Any feedback on Windows Virtual PC on the Windows 7
desktop in the context of driver development?

I can relate one experience I had. After turning on Hyper-V, I
installed the Virtual Windows XP addon into my Windows 7 setup. To see
how far things had come, I tried assigning one of my high-bandwidth USB
2.0 cameras to the virtual machine. To my rather great surprise, it
worked perfectly. No dropped frames.

That’s really the first time I’ve seen a virtual machine handle a
high-bandwidth isochronous stream correctly. It makes me think that I
might actually be able to do VM kernel debugging, like the rest of the
world.

Is an i7 Quad good enough?

I’m running on a 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad, and that’s way more than enough.

What is a practical limit on the number of VMs that can run concurrently?
That’s vague… Can I keep three guests running on a host with 6 GB memory
and not be sorely disappointed? Probably only the host or one VM will
really
be doing much work at any point in time.

If only one of them is busy at a time, you can run dozens of VMs
concurrently. In our experience, the biggest bottleneck is disk
bandwidth. CPUs today are more than enough for any application you’re
likely to need in the next 10 years. We’ve started to add dedicated
spindles for our busiest VMs, and that’s been a huge improvement.

If multiple VMs are running, can I associate a different USB device (say,
a
NDIS 6 USB Native Wi-Fi adapter) to each VM?

Yes. You have to assign specific USB devices to specific VMs.

(Basically, I never went for Virtual PC because of its lack of USB
support…).

Me, too. This situation seems to have changed…

–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.

NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

13

Yes, I would use WS 2008 R2 - but by design does not support USB
pass-through - which I need.

No joy for me there. :frowning:

Thomas

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Skywing
Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2009 2:05 AM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: RE: [ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver Development/Debug???

The only Microsoft virtualization solution that supports x64 guests is the
hypervisor (Hyper-V). VPC/Virtual Server are a whole different balliwick
and have never supported x64 guests to my knowledge.

Hyper-V does support 4 procs per VM, FWIW.

  • S

From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [xxxxx@lists.osr.com]
On Behalf Of Thomas F. Divine [xxxxx@pcausa.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2009 1:09 AM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: RE: [ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver Development/Debug???

Being a glutton for punishment…

On Intel i7 running Windows 7 x64 I installed Windows Virtual PC. Install
went smooth and the interface for creating and running VMs was pretty simple
to use.

The USB support was fine and the device I need was attached to the VM
without any problem. Haven’t really explored performance yet and my
performance criteria is really pretty crude: can I debug more effectively?

Down-sides, from driver developer perspective, are 1.) they have limited
each guest to only one virtual CPU and 2.) x64 guests are not supported.
Since WS 2008 can support these missing features it was probably a marketing
genius that decided to cripple these capabilities.

I’ll probably re-image this machine and put some sort of virtualization tool
on it. Don’t know what yet, though…

FWIW,

Thomas

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Tim Roberts
Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2009 1:43 PM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: Re: [ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver Development/Debug???

Thomas F. Divine wrote:

I have been a big fan of VMWare for a long time, and am lucky enough to be
working on mainly on hardware-independent NDIS filters and protocols.

I typically make several VMs for each customer for the platforms they are
interested in, the tools that they use, etc. Do a lot of work just on the
VMs, then spend some final test time on real iron.

Always looking for better solutions, however.

Question really is: Any feedback on Windows Virtual PC on the Windows 7
desktop in the context of driver development?

I can relate one experience I had. After turning on Hyper-V, I
installed the Virtual Windows XP addon into my Windows 7 setup. To see
how far things had come, I tried assigning one of my high-bandwidth USB
2.0 cameras to the virtual machine. To my rather great surprise, it
worked perfectly. No dropped frames.

That’s really the first time I’ve seen a virtual machine handle a
high-bandwidth isochronous stream correctly. It makes me think that I
might actually be able to do VM kernel debugging, like the rest of the
world.

Is an i7 Quad good enough?

I’m running on a 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad, and that’s way more than enough.

What is a practical limit on the number of VMs that can run concurrently?
That’s vague… Can I keep three guests running on a host with 6 GB memory
and not be sorely disappointed? Probably only the host or one VM will
really
be doing much work at any point in time.

If only one of them is busy at a time, you can run dozens of VMs
concurrently. In our experience, the biggest bottleneck is disk
bandwidth. CPUs today are more than enough for any application you’re
likely to need in the next 10 years. We’ve started to add dedicated
spindles for our busiest VMs, and that’s been a huge improvement.

If multiple VMs are running, can I associate a different USB device (say,
a
NDIS 6 USB Native Wi-Fi adapter) to each VM?

Yes. You have to assign specific USB devices to specific VMs.

(Basically, I never went for Virtual PC because of its lack of USB
support…).

Me, too. This situation seems to have changed…

–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.

NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

14

+1 although I use a x64 host (Win7 but previously Vista) so that I can take
advantage of the +3GB system RAM.

And to further the ‘requirements’ (if MSFT & VMWare are listening) my normal
mode of operation now a days is to have a VM as my primary work environment
as well (where for instance, I can install WDK, VS, other various bits and
pieces needed to get the bills paid). This lets me leverage snap-shots to
ensure against the inevitable heart-ache of trying out a new WDK as well as
maintain isolated ‘environments’ for the various projects with often
conflicting requirements for tools, etc.

The only thing I install on the ‘host’ is VMWare, Office, and
line-of-business applications. This makes life so much easier when moving
to new laptop/workstation or OS. The VMs just work.

It does, however, make debugging a bit more interesting since I use serial
‘between’ two VMs (the host and target). However, I have cobbled together
all sorts of silliness using the remote debugging server.

In the end, however, it ought to just be easier to make all of this work.

Now that I think about it, VMWare runs on MAC. Hmm, maybe … (nope, I like
black laptops since color is about the only distinguishing feature these
days).

The fact that the only high-speed debug transport for a VM environment is a
clever ‘hack’ (and I mean that in the original vernacular, as a compliment)
and not something that MSFT puts out as supported is just a tad silly.

Regards,
Dave Cattley

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Gianluca Varenni
Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2009 1:26 AM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: Re: [ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver Development/Debug???

Personally, I use Vmware workstation running on my XP32 laptop. It allows me

to have x64 guests, USB support is pretty good in the latest versions, and
you can have 2 virtual CPUs.

Just my 2cents

GV

----- Original Message -----
From: “Thomas F. Divine”
To: “Windows System Software Devs Interest List”
Sent: Wednesday, September 02, 2009 10:09 PM
Subject: RE: [ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver Development/Debug???

> Being a glutton for punishment…
>
> On Intel i7 running Windows 7 x64 I installed Windows Virtual PC. Install
> went smooth and the interface for creating and running VMs was pretty
> simple
> to use.
>
> The USB support was fine and the device I need was attached to the VM
> without any problem. Haven’t really explored performance yet and my
> performance criteria is really pretty crude: can I debug more effectively?
>
> Down-sides, from driver developer perspective, are 1.) they have limited
> each guest to only one virtual CPU and 2.) x64 guests are not supported.
> Since WS 2008 can support these missing features it was probably a
> marketing
> genius that decided to cripple these capabilities.
>
> I’ll probably re-image this machine and put some sort of virtualization
> tool
> on it. Don’t know what yet, though…
>
> FWIW,
>
> Thomas
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
> [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Tim Roberts
> Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2009 1:43 PM
> To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
> Subject: Re: [ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver
> Development/Debug???
>
> Thomas F. Divine wrote:
>> I have been a big fan of VMWare for a long time, and am lucky enough to
>> be
>> working on mainly on hardware-independent NDIS filters and protocols.
>>
>> I typically make several VMs for each customer for the platforms they are
>> interested in, the tools that they use, etc. Do a lot of work just on the
>> VMs, then spend some final test time on real iron.
>>
>> Always looking for better solutions, however.
>>
>> Question really is: Any feedback on Windows Virtual PC on the Windows 7
>> desktop in the context of driver development?
>>
>
> I can relate one experience I had. After turning on Hyper-V, I
> installed the Virtual Windows XP addon into my Windows 7 setup. To see
> how far things had come, I tried assigning one of my high-bandwidth USB
> 2.0 cameras to the virtual machine. To my rather great surprise, it
> worked perfectly. No dropped frames.
>
> That’s really the first time I’ve seen a virtual machine handle a
> high-bandwidth isochronous stream correctly. It makes me think that I
> might actually be able to do VM kernel debugging, like the rest of the
> world.
>
>> Is an i7 Quad good enough?
>>
>
> I’m running on a 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad, and that’s way more than enough.
>
>> What is a practical limit on the number of VMs that can run concurrently?
>> That’s vague… Can I keep three guests running on a host with 6 GB
>> memory
>> and not be sorely disappointed? Probably only the host or one VM will
> really
>> be doing much work at any point in time.
>>
>
> If only one of them is busy at a time, you can run dozens of VMs
> concurrently. In our experience, the biggest bottleneck is disk
> bandwidth. CPUs today are more than enough for any application you’re
> likely to need in the next 10 years. We’ve started to add dedicated
> spindles for our busiest VMs, and that’s been a huge improvement.
>
>> If multiple VMs are running, can I associate a different USB device (say,
> a
>> NDIS 6 USB Native Wi-Fi adapter) to each VM?
>>
>
> Yes. You have to assign specific USB devices to specific VMs.
>
>> (Basically, I never went for Virtual PC because of its lack of USB
>> support…).
>>
>
> Me, too. This situation seems to have changed…
>
> –
> Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
> Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
>
>
> —
> NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
>
> For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
> http://www.osr.com/seminars
>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
>
>
> —
> NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
>
> For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
> http://www.osr.com/seminars
>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

—
NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

15

Thomas, it wasn’t a marketing genius. Virtual PC has never has 64-bit guest
support nor multi-processor support. Hyper-V has those. It’s a completely
different code base. Making Virtual PC do those things would have involved
many person-years of work, and furthermore it wouldn’t have added any value
to Virtual PC in its primary mission, which is as an application
compatibility platform. One 32-bit processor is fine when running Windows
XP.

What Hyper-V doesn’t have, which you seem to want, is USB support.
Furthermore, Hyper-V was intended to run on server machines and it doesn’t
support system sleep or hibernate, making it impractical to run on a laptop.

–
Jake Oshins
Hyper-V I/O Architect
Windows Kernel Group

This post implies no warranties and confers no rights.

“Thomas F. Divine” wrote in message
news:xxxxx@ntdev…
> Being a glutton for punishment…
>
> On Intel i7 running Windows 7 x64 I installed Windows Virtual PC. Install
> went smooth and the interface for creating and running VMs was pretty
> simple
> to use.
>
> The USB support was fine and the device I need was attached to the VM
> without any problem. Haven’t really explored performance yet and my
> performance criteria is really pretty crude: can I debug more effectively?
>
> Down-sides, from driver developer perspective, are 1.) they have limited
> each guest to only one virtual CPU and 2.) x64 guests are not supported.
> Since WS 2008 can support these missing features it was probably a
> marketing
> genius that decided to cripple these capabilities.
>
> I’ll probably re-image this machine and put some sort of virtualization
> tool
> on it. Don’t know what yet, though…
>
> FWIW,
>
> Thomas
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
> [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Tim Roberts
> Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2009 1:43 PM
> To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
> Subject: Re: [ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver
> Development/Debug???
>
> Thomas F. Divine wrote:
>> I have been a big fan of VMWare for a long time, and am lucky enough to
>> be
>> working on mainly on hardware-independent NDIS filters and protocols.
>>
>> I typically make several VMs for each customer for the platforms they are
>> interested in, the tools that they use, etc. Do a lot of work just on the
>> VMs, then spend some final test time on real iron.
>>
>> Always looking for better solutions, however.
>>
>> Question really is: Any feedback on Windows Virtual PC on the Windows 7
>> desktop in the context of driver development?
>>
>
> I can relate one experience I had. After turning on Hyper-V, I
> installed the Virtual Windows XP addon into my Windows 7 setup. To see
> how far things had come, I tried assigning one of my high-bandwidth USB
> 2.0 cameras to the virtual machine. To my rather great surprise, it
> worked perfectly. No dropped frames.
>
> That’s really the first time I’ve seen a virtual machine handle a
> high-bandwidth isochronous stream correctly. It makes me think that I
> might actually be able to do VM kernel debugging, like the rest of the
> world.
>
>> Is an i7 Quad good enough?
>>
>
> I’m running on a 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad, and that’s way more than enough.
>
>> What is a practical limit on the number of VMs that can run concurrently?
>> That’s vague… Can I keep three guests running on a host with 6 GB
>> memory
>> and not be sorely disappointed? Probably only the host or one VM will
> really
>> be doing much work at any point in time.
>>
>
> If only one of them is busy at a time, you can run dozens of VMs
> concurrently. In our experience, the biggest bottleneck is disk
> bandwidth. CPUs today are more than enough for any application you’re
> likely to need in the next 10 years. We’ve started to add dedicated
> spindles for our busiest VMs, and that’s been a huge improvement.
>
>> If multiple VMs are running, can I associate a different USB device (say,
> a
>> NDIS 6 USB Native Wi-Fi adapter) to each VM?
>>
>
> Yes. You have to assign specific USB devices to specific VMs.
>
>> (Basically, I never went for Virtual PC because of its lack of USB
>> support…).
>>
>
> Me, too. This situation seems to have changed…
>
> –
> Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
> Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
>
>
> —
> NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
>
> For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
> http://www.osr.com/seminars
>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
>
>

16

Ok. I see.

Since so much of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are in common it seems
a shame for Microsoft not to capitalize on Hyper-V on the desktop as well.

USB support is required because that is the only way to get 802.11 and other
USB devices into a VM.

My work laptops are always in the “always-on” mode anyway, so sleep or
hibernate is a non-issue.

Thanks for your input!

Thomas

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Jake Oshins
Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2009 4:15 PM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: Re:[ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver Development/Debug???

Thomas, it wasn’t a marketing genius. Virtual PC has never has 64-bit guest

support nor multi-processor support. Hyper-V has those. It’s a completely
different code base. Making Virtual PC do those things would have involved
many person-years of work, and furthermore it wouldn’t have added any value
to Virtual PC in its primary mission, which is as an application
compatibility platform. One 32-bit processor is fine when running Windows
XP.

What Hyper-V doesn’t have, which you seem to want, is USB support.
Furthermore, Hyper-V was intended to run on server machines and it doesn’t
support system sleep or hibernate, making it impractical to run on a laptop.

–
Jake Oshins
Hyper-V I/O Architect
Windows Kernel Group

This post implies no warranties and confers no rights.

“Thomas F. Divine” wrote in message
news:xxxxx@ntdev…
> Being a glutton for punishment…
>
> On Intel i7 running Windows 7 x64 I installed Windows Virtual PC. Install
> went smooth and the interface for creating and running VMs was pretty
> simple
> to use.
>
> The USB support was fine and the device I need was attached to the VM
> without any problem. Haven’t really explored performance yet and my
> performance criteria is really pretty crude: can I debug more effectively?
>
> Down-sides, from driver developer perspective, are 1.) they have limited
> each guest to only one virtual CPU and 2.) x64 guests are not supported.
> Since WS 2008 can support these missing features it was probably a
> marketing
> genius that decided to cripple these capabilities.
>
> I’ll probably re-image this machine and put some sort of virtualization
> tool
> on it. Don’t know what yet, though…
>
> FWIW,
>
> Thomas
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
> [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Tim Roberts
> Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2009 1:43 PM
> To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
> Subject: Re: [ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver
> Development/Debug???
>
> Thomas F. Divine wrote:
>> I have been a big fan of VMWare for a long time, and am lucky enough to
>> be
>> working on mainly on hardware-independent NDIS filters and protocols.
>>
>> I typically make several VMs for each customer for the platforms they are
>> interested in, the tools that they use, etc. Do a lot of work just on the
>> VMs, then spend some final test time on real iron.
>>
>> Always looking for better solutions, however.
>>
>> Question really is: Any feedback on Windows Virtual PC on the Windows 7
>> desktop in the context of driver development?
>>
>
> I can relate one experience I had. After turning on Hyper-V, I
> installed the Virtual Windows XP addon into my Windows 7 setup. To see
> how far things had come, I tried assigning one of my high-bandwidth USB
> 2.0 cameras to the virtual machine. To my rather great surprise, it
> worked perfectly. No dropped frames.
>
> That’s really the first time I’ve seen a virtual machine handle a
> high-bandwidth isochronous stream correctly. It makes me think that I
> might actually be able to do VM kernel debugging, like the rest of the
> world.
>
>> Is an i7 Quad good enough?
>>
>
> I’m running on a 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad, and that’s way more than enough.
>
>> What is a practical limit on the number of VMs that can run concurrently?
>> That’s vague… Can I keep three guests running on a host with 6 GB
>> memory
>> and not be sorely disappointed? Probably only the host or one VM will
> really
>> be doing much work at any point in time.
>>
>
> If only one of them is busy at a time, you can run dozens of VMs
> concurrently. In our experience, the biggest bottleneck is disk
> bandwidth. CPUs today are more than enough for any application you’re
> likely to need in the next 10 years. We’ve started to add dedicated
> spindles for our busiest VMs, and that’s been a huge improvement.
>
>> If multiple VMs are running, can I associate a different USB device (say,
> a
>> NDIS 6 USB Native Wi-Fi adapter) to each VM?
>>
>
> Yes. You have to assign specific USB devices to specific VMs.
>
>> (Basically, I never went for Virtual PC because of its lack of USB
>> support…).
>>
>
> Me, too. This situation seems to have changed…
>
> –
> Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
> Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
>
>
> —
> NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
>
> For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
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>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
>
>

—
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17

Jake Oshins wrote:

What Hyper-V doesn’t have, which you seem to want, is USB support.
Furthermore, Hyper-V was intended to run on server machines and it
doesn’t support system sleep or hibernate, making it impractical to
run on a laptop.

Wait a minute. When I installed the Windows 7 Virtual XP Environment
thingy, it said it would only work on a Hyper-V-compatible platform, and
I had to enable hypervisor features in the BIOS before it would launch.
The Win 7 Virtual XP Environment thingy does USB surprisingly well.

Is that not actually Hyper-V?

–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.

18

Jake is obviously just a slightly better source than me on this topic, but I thought that I read that ‘XP Mode’ was based on Virtual PC.

As long as we’re on the topic (more or less), I noticed earlier today that there are two other hypervisor products available under ‘Applications’ on msdn:

Hyper-V Server 2008
Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

These are termed ‘stand alone hypervisors,’ but they also at least on the surface of things (which is all I know) sound like perhaps the more or less the same idea the ‘core’ versions/installations of the 2K8/2K8R2 products.

Anyone have any experience/thoughts with these?

mm

19

That should have read "‘XP MODE’ requires Virtual PC.’

20

“XP mode” ~= preinstalled XP guest under Windows Virtual PC (next version of VPC).

  • S

From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of xxxxx@evitechnology.com [xxxxx@evitechnology.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2009 5:00 PM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: RE:[ntdev] Hardware Virtuilization for Driver Development/Debug???

That should have read "‘XP MODE’ requires Virtual PC.’

NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer