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BizTalk in virtual environment

For reasons that may be economic or simplicity in the daily management of systems, server infrastructure are increasingly based on virtual environments. No matter whether on premise or on the Cload, the important thing is to virtualize.

A valuable document which speaks of the effects of virtualization infrastructure BizTalk is “http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/dd722834 (v = BTS.10). Aspx”.

However, we must consider that in virtual environments is not very important what is virtualized, but who virtualizes.

So no matter which version of BizTalk or the version of the operating system that hosts it, but the virtualization system that hosts the virtual machine.

In this sense, in environments where the virtualizer is Microsoft Hyper-V, it is important to know that the 2012 version has made ​​tremendous strides from a performance point of view and it is good to consider an upgrade to this version.

In particular, it was changed the architecture of virtualization from Type 2 to Type 1.

From Wikipedia

In their 1974 article “Formal Requirements for Virtualizable Third Generation Architectures” Gerald J. Popek and Robert P. Goldberg classified two types of hypervisor:

Type 1 (or native, bare metal) hypervisors run directly on the host’s hardware to control the hardware and to manage guest operating systems. A guest operating-system thus runs on another level above the hypervisor.

This model represents the classic implementation of virtual-machine architectures; IBM developed the original hypervisors as bare-metal tools in the 1960s: the test tool, SIMMON, and CP/CMS. CP/CMS was the ancestor of IBM’s z/VM. Modern equivalents include Oracle VM Server for SPARC, Oracle VM Server for x86, the Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX/ESXi.

Type 2 (or hosted) hypervisors run within a conventional operating-system environment. With the hypervisor layer as a distinct second software level, guest operating-systems run at the third level above the hardware. VMware Workstation and VirtualBox exemplify Type 2 hypervisors.

In other words, Type 2 virtualization involves that hypervisor runs on top of a host OS as shown in the following picture.

Type 1 virtualization (Windows 2012), involves that hypervisor is an abstraction layer that interacts directly with the computer’s physical hardware, that is, without an intervening host OS, as shown in the following picture.