Today, it seems that virtualization some how makes its way into just about every discussion surrounding the datacenter. This really shouldn't be a surprise given the down economy, shrinking IT budgets and requirements for greener initiatives. Naturally, administrators whom are tasked with cutting IT cost, choose to adopt server consolidation as a way of addressing all these requirements and this can be done easily using virtualization. Virtualization is more affordable then ever with Microsoft finally releasing an enterprise class hypervisor(Hyper-V) that even the small to mid-sized business can afford to implement.
In the large enterprise, we find ourselves adding virtual guest at an exponential rate in order to meet business continuity requirements, while minimizing hardware cost and physical footprint. However, many of the servers today are not providing the resources anywhere near the capabilities that Microsoft Hyper-V R2 can support and this limits the VM density we can achieve. This forces administrator to scale clusters out to many as 16 VM Host to meet business requirements and in some cases many clusters are required. This leads to greater TCO and higher than anticipated physical footprints. But, this could change with the new Dell PowerEdge R910.
The Dell PowerEdge R910 features availability of up to Four Intel Nahalem EX Processors with Eight-Cores each, providing a total of 32 logical processors. It also provides scalability of up to 64 DDR3 DIMM slots for a total 1TB of RAM, which just happens to be the max memory that a Hyper-V R2 host can support. But, it doesn't stop there. On-board you will find 10 PCI-e slots, configuration options for up to 16-2.5" Hot-plug hard drives in both SAS and SSD options and four on-board NIC interfaces available in both 1GBe and 10GBe. The R910 also features Hot-plug, redundant fans for cooling and four 1100 watt power supplies to provide all the power needed on demand. Finally, the R910 is complemented with an excellent Embedded Systems Management Controller and interactive LCD for easy access to monitoring and diagnostic data. All this power and scalability is nicely compacted into a small 4U form-factor.
The Dell PowerEdge R910 is finally that server that we have been waiting for. It provides the power and resource scalability that enterprises require, while still maintaining a smaller host footprint. With all this functionality in a compact configuration it's easy to see why the R910 could very well be the Ultimate Virtual Host.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Microsoft Certifies Red Hat on Hyper-V
Earlier this year Microsoft and Red Hat announced that they had agreed to begin working on a joint initiative to certify each others virtualization and operating system platforms; this was received with much excitement in the technical communities around the web. IT shops need the ability to continue with server consolidation efforts, but were forced to keep RHEL builds on dedicated hardware since it was not supported on Hyper-V. Recently, Red Hat was only certified and supported as a guest when running on VMware and this had an impact on some shops in their virtualization selection criteria since REHL played an important role in their datacenter. However, change is finally here.
Last week Microsoft officially announced that it had completed the certification initiative with Red Had to certify and support RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) v5.2, 5.3 and 5.4 on Hyper-V as a VM guest. Also, Red Hat as part of the initiative has announced they are now supporting Windows Server 2003, 2008 and 2008 R2 running as VM guest on their KVM virtualization solution.
Datacenters running Microsoft Hyper-V were faced with a challenge since only Windows OS's were support and no support for Red Hat was provided. This will provide Hyper-V adopters the ability to maintain business continuity requirements for meeting both Windows and Linux needs in supported guest configurations and maintaining a smaller physical foot print.
Last week Microsoft officially announced that it had completed the certification initiative with Red Had to certify and support RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) v5.2, 5.3 and 5.4 on Hyper-V as a VM guest. Also, Red Hat as part of the initiative has announced they are now supporting Windows Server 2003, 2008 and 2008 R2 running as VM guest on their KVM virtualization solution.
Datacenters running Microsoft Hyper-V were faced with a challenge since only Windows OS's were support and no support for Red Hat was provided. This will provide Hyper-V adopters the ability to maintain business continuity requirements for meeting both Windows and Linux needs in supported guest configurations and maintaining a smaller physical foot print.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Online P2V with Disk2vhd v1.0
Virtualization is one of the hottest topics in IT today and many datacenters are making steps into the space with easy to implement and manage solutions from Microsoft. But, no matter what solution you select, whether its Virtual Server, Virtual PC or Hyper-V, chances are you are going to be faced with the process of P2V (Physical to Virtual) conversion at some point. After all, isn't server consolidation one of the major problems we are trying to solve with virtualization?
But, usually until you have established your virtual environment and proved its value, its usually hard to convince the business to invest in a good management solution like Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager. This usually leads to using solutions that require you to covert the servers while offline making servers or workstations unavailable during the process and often this was painful. These days are finally over!
Microsoft has made a new utility available through Sysinternals called Disk2vhd that will greatly improve this process. This utility will make VHD's based on physical workstation and server disks that can be used with Virtual PC and\or Hyper-V virtual environments. The greatest feature of this utility is the ability to create VHD's with source systems online, meaning no downtime required. Previously, this was done offline or you had to have SCVMM to have this capability available. This is accomplished by leveraging the Windows Volume Snapshot capabilities in the OS. VHD's can even be created on drives being converted, but there will be a performance impact to doing this. Disk2vhd will create the VHD's of the source system disks, but you will still have to create the VM config file necessary to bring the guest online with settings similar to the source.
Disk2vhd runs Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1 and higher and provides support for x64. The utility is less then 1MB in size and can be downloaded or run directly from live.sysinternals.com
Check out the link below for more information and to download the utility for free.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx
But, usually until you have established your virtual environment and proved its value, its usually hard to convince the business to invest in a good management solution like Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager. This usually leads to using solutions that require you to covert the servers while offline making servers or workstations unavailable during the process and often this was painful. These days are finally over!
Microsoft has made a new utility available through Sysinternals called Disk2vhd that will greatly improve this process. This utility will make VHD's based on physical workstation and server disks that can be used with Virtual PC and\or Hyper-V virtual environments. The greatest feature of this utility is the ability to create VHD's with source systems online, meaning no downtime required. Previously, this was done offline or you had to have SCVMM to have this capability available. This is accomplished by leveraging the Windows Volume Snapshot capabilities in the OS. VHD's can even be created on drives being converted, but there will be a performance impact to doing this. Disk2vhd will create the VHD's of the source system disks, but you will still have to create the VM config file necessary to bring the guest online with settings similar to the source.
Disk2vhd runs Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1 and higher and provides support for x64. The utility is less then 1MB in size and can be downloaded or run directly from live.sysinternals.com
Check out the link below for more information and to download the utility for free.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx
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