Having a swift shift of the world towards new technology, there raise different terminologies, which really gains its importance in no mean time; One such term is this Hyper-V Integration Service. Let’s discuss more it in detail.
What is Hyper-V and why is it so important?
Hyper-V is a type-1/native hypervisor (virtualized platform over which multiple VMs are created with different operating systems) of Microsoft Windows, which was included from the Windows Server 2008 version.
It recently gained its momentum after the shift of SMBs and Enterprise class businesses to the new virtual world.
What is Hyper-V Integration Services?
The number of utilities encapsulated in a Suite of Hyper-V to enhance the performance of VM’s guest operating system (OS).
This gained its fame because the integration services help in optimizing the drivers of the virtual environments to ensure best User-Experience (UX) to the end line users.
How Hyper-V Integration Services ensure a better User experience?
The best UX is ensured by replacing the generic Operating System(OS) driver files with that of the Hyper-V drivers; i.e. By replacing the generic SCSI controller, mouse, keyboard, video, network component drivers with that of the hypervisor’s native drivers.
The Integration Services of Hyper-V are relatively similar to that of the Tools package of VMware. They both are used to bring out a better interaction between the guest OS and respective hypervisor infrastructure.
This Hyper-V Integration Services includes not only service package but also driver package.
There are 3 main sets of driver packages and 5 services in the Integration Service Suite of Hyper-V. The following chart will reveal the packages in the Suite.
Why are these 3 sets of drivers given importance?
Generally, drivers are used to establishing a connection between the hardware and software, both in a physical and virtual environment. Accordingly, in Hyper-V Integration Services the following three drivers are given utmost importance for establishing a communication access.
As we already know the 3 main sets of drivers; i.e. Virtualization Service Provider (VSP), Virtualization Service Client (VSC) and VM Bus drivers.
The VSC cannot communicate directly to VSP, because the VSC is in the child partition and VSP is on the parent partition of the Hyper-V architecture.
Before understanding the process it is necessary to know about Client and Parent partitions
Client partition :
The partition that hosts a guest Operating System (OS) in a hypervisor is termed to be the child and it has no direct access to the physical memory.
Parent partition – Also called Root partition. This partition has direct access to the physical memory and some attached devices. It mainly manages and controls the machine level functions like managing drivers and system power management.
Generally when a VM has to communicate to the VSP, then it first communicates to the VSC, we all know that VSCs cannot communicate to the VSPs directly thus for that, we need a medium for communication, for which VM Bus drivers come into play as a mediator.
According to the architecture; when the Virtualization Service Client (VSC) of the child partition sends the data to the VM Bus drivers in the parent side, this VM Bus driver operates in the host Kernel space, thus having direct access to the hardware; from there without any data loss a direct access is established to the Virtualization Service Provider (VSP) on the parent side of the partition.
As far as VMs are concerned they can establish an effective communication link with hypervisor through VMBus and VSC drivers; VMs can also communicate without the above-mentioned drivers but in this case, the VMs will be comparatively slower.
What about the services offered?
As the name reveals the Hyper-V Integration Service has its roots spread to provide better services to enhance the user experience, hence various services offered by the Hyper-V Integration Services are as follows:
- OS Shut-down – The Operating System shut-down service permits the hypervisor (in this case it is Hyper-V) to set foot on the guest OS, to have a proper shutdown process of the VMs without any loss.
All the VMs can be shut-down at the host level with the help of Integration Service through the Hyper-V manager.
- Time Synchronization – For any services to perform in rhythm the synchronization of a clock is most important; those services that rely on Kerberos (its an authentication protocol that authenticates requests of trusted hosts in untrusted networks) such as security authentication services mainly rely on clock synchronization.
Thus the Time Synchronization Integration service of the Hyper-V provides the ability to synchronize the clocks of VMs to that of the host.
- Data Exchange – This integration service manages the host OS to share or retrieve pieces of information from the guest OS, through the VM’s OS registry.
- Heartbeat – It mainly helps to check that the VM is running or idle. This integration service of Hyper-V will have a regular check on the status of the VM similar to a heartbeat check of a human by an ECG.
- Backup – The backup of your running VM at preferred consistency is enabled with the help of this backup integration service of Hyper-V; this service helps to take backup of the running VM from the host. This makes the backup job more simple.
All the above-mentioned services of the Hyper-V Integration Service are enabled by default in order to have a better performance of VMs and to have the performance streamlined without much complexity at the host level.
Apart from the above-mentioned services which are enabled by default, there are services that must be disabled, one such service is the Guest services.
The Integration service of the Hyper-V disables the Guest services by default; this is because if enabled the guest services ensures that the hyper-v administrator has the ability to copy files to the VM without any network connectivity, this could raise some security issues.
Thus, to have a better environment the windows has the guest services disabled by default.
Thus the need for Integration Service in Hyper-V is to provide the end users with better User Experience. Generally, a hypervisor is a complete package that serves the requests of VMs in an agile model.
Refer link: Docs.microsoft.com/Hyper-V Integration Services
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