Hypervizor.net

Dynamic Memory for Hyper-V R2 goes RC1

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Johnson) — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 03:58:00 +0000

Earlier this year Microsoft announced plans for the first service pack release for Windows Server 2008 R2. Generally, these service packs contain roll-ups of cumulative updates and minor feature enhancements of no major significance. However, Microsoft surprised the IT community with the announcement of two major Windows capabilities that will be made available in the update (Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX). Microsoft made true on their promise and presented the first beta release to the public in July. Rumors of when the highly anticipated service pack would be released was kept under tight wraps until today when Microsoft officially released RC1 to the public with the final release expected within Q1 of 2011.

SP1 will include a new feature called Dynamic Memory which provides enhanced and efficient memory configurations on Windows Server 2008 R2 servers running the Hyper-V role. Unlike today where we have hard, static memory assignments to virtual machines, Dynamic Memory allows memory to be grouped in pools for dynamic distribution based on demand by virtual guest. The new memory configuration will allow better utilization of available host memory, improving VM density ratios and answering a need that many potential VMware switchers state is necessary.

Another feature that will be made available is RemoteFX, which introduces a cost effective enhanced audio/visual remote user experience that enables a rich media environment. RemoteFX also extends the capabilities of existing VDI and SBD environments to support a wide array of USB devices to improve user productivity.

To learn more about Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and to download the release candidate, then visit the Windows Server 2008 R2 site found here.

Dude, Where's My VHD?

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Johnson) — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 03:19:00 +0000

Have you recently found yourself managing a VM using System Center Virtual Machine Manger 2008 R2 to remove a VHD only to find that the VHD has been deleted? Well, your not the first and I thought that this was old news at this point, but I constantly have folks emailing me asking if I have seen this behavior. The answer is yes and there is a fix available.

If you detach a VHD from a virtual machine and find that the VHD has been deleted instead, then you need to visit the link below and obtain a hotfix to correct this behavior.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=976246

This condition only exist with SCVMM 2008 R2 and doesn't exist within the Hyper-V Manager Snap-in.

Change of Scenery

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Johnson) — Sat, 01 May 2010 02:51:00 +0000

Boy have I been busy! So, as you all are aware, I haven't been posting a lot of content in the last month, actually nothing at all...and I am sorry, but there is a reason.

After a very busy couple of years of transforming and optimizing Crutchfields infrastructure with Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization, I have decided it was time to move on. I have turned the page and started a new chapter by accepting a position with SyCom Technologies, an IT services provider and Microsoft partner. With SyCom, I will be working as a Sr. Systems Engineer where I will be privileged enough to work day in and out with customers like yourself, designing and implementing your Microsoft Virtualization, Systems Center and enterprise storage needs.

So, be patient while I complete my relocation and when I return, we will be bringing you a piece I know you are all very anxious to read, "How to Configure NIC Teaming in a Hyper-V R2 Cluster". Yes, its true and it works and I am going to show you how!

Configure Antivirus Exclusions for Improved Hyper-V Performance

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Johnson) — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 02:51:00 +0000

This is a topic that has been discussed in plenty of detail across the web for some time now. But, recently I have noticed an increased number of inquiries regarding the proper configurations of antivirus solutions installed on Hyper-V host and general performance problems tied to improperly configured antivirus agents. I expect this recent surge is contributed to the increased adoption rate of Hyper-V R2 and the incorporation of Live Migration with Cluster Shared Volumes.

I am sure we all understand the importance of running antivirus on any server in the enterprise. It protects us from all the bad stuff that is crawling the web and from time to time creeps its way into our networks. Any good AV solution intercepts calls to local memory and disk and in some cases can even intercept running processes. This interception is by design and is what keeps our systems safe, but can lead to poor performance, especially on a Hyper-V host.

Proper configuration of your AV solution on a Hyper-V host includes exclusions of both processes, directories and file types and not doing so correctly can not only lead to poor performance, but can even lead to your VM’s going offline. So let’s look at what the exclusion configuration should look like.

On any Hyper-V host you will find a couple of core processes that is crucial to host and VM performance. Prevent the following processes from AV scans by excluding the following as part of you Hyper-V AV policy.

VMMS.exe
VMWP.exe

You also want to exclude the root directories where VM configurations and Virtual Hard Disks are stored. Exclude the following directories.

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V
C:\Users\Public\Documents\Hyper-V\Virtual Hard Disks
Custom VM configuration, Virtual Hard Disk and Snapshot directories

Next, you want to create AV exclusions for the following file extensions.

*.XML
*.VHD
*.AVHD
*.VFD
*. VSV
*.ISO

Finally, if you are using Hyper-V R2’s Live Migration feature with Cluster Shared Volumes, then you will need to exclude the CSV path and any sub-directories. The CSV path is as follows.

C:\Clusterstorage

Failure to create this exclusion on hosts using CSV, can not only result in poor performance, but can also result in a missing or corrupt VM configuration. Refer to Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 961804 found at the link below for more information on this issue.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961804

Hyper-V R2 Upgrade Problems When Using Broadcom NetXtreme II 5708 NICs Bound to Virtual Switches

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Johnson) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:05:00 +0000

I have been very busy over the last couple of months upgrading Hyper-V hosts to R2. For the most part, these upgrades have been uneventful, without any issues at all, which is always a good thing. However, I said "for the most part", so lets talk about what happened?

Early in the upgrades, I was seeing some random issues with Virtual Switches losing their bindings with the physical NIC. This caught my attention, but after poking around and with no issues being evident, I just recreated the virtual switch and moved on. However, as I started working more and more larger scale upgrades I started to see a concerning trend. I noticed any Virtual Switch that was bound to a Broadcom NetXtreme II 5708 was losing its bindings. I decided to see if I could reproduce this in a lab and found that I could reproduce this easily.

I am sure there are those of you out there wondering why I would even be using Broadcom NIC's for my virtual networks instead of the good old dependable Intel that we all know and love. The answer is simple. I run all Dell in my data center and all Dell PowerEdge servers come with Broadcom NIC's on-board. I am running some pretty dense Hyper-V configurations with one cluster running over 12 virtual networks, so I need all the NIC's I can get, so not using the four on-board Broadcom's in this configuration wasn't an option. Well, at least it wasn't before, but that has changed.

I decided to reach out to my friends over at the Microsoft Product group and see if they had heard of this problem internally or from feedback for other customers. Apparently, this is a recent issue that has been discovered and is now officially documented as a known issue. Currently, Microsoft doesn't have a work around for this issue and nor is there an ETA for resolution. After all, it may not be Microsoft, but could very well be Broadcom.

So, what do we do? Well, in my configurations I can't afford these little gotchas and I will be working only with my trusted Intel NIC's for my virtual networks. And for my Broadcom NIC's? Well, they can still be used, but in my opinion are well suited for your management and iSCSI connections only.

Improving Linux Performance on Hyper-V

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Johnson) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 06:36:00 +0000

This was a very busy week for my team and I as we were working with Microsoft to develop a video documenting our work and successes with Microsoft Virtualization. I had the pleasure of working with some very hardworking, dedicated folks and you really have to see them in action to appreciate all they give day after day. Part of this process involved a number of interviews outlining our work and experience with Hyper-V, Management Tools, Etc.

Later that evening, the team and I headed to dinner and found ourselves discussing the performance of Linux on Hyper-V. It appeared that most of the team wasn't aware that there was a recent update to the Linux Integration Components. At the end of last month, Microsoft released updated components known as the "Linux Integration Components Version 2" for use with all versions of Hyper-V. After learning my team wasn't aware, I started reaching out to others that I network with and realized that there wasn't as much awareness as expected and felt it was appropriate to post about it in detail.

The updated components are supported on all x64 versions of Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Supported Linux Guest are SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2 (x86 and x64), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (x86 and x64) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4 (x86 and x64), but these guest are only supported when configured with 1 virtual CPU. The updated components provide support for synthetic storage and network drivers allowing them to take advantage of the very fast VMBus. The components also allow the guest to leverage Fastpath boot support, allowing boot devices to leverage the storage VSC (Virtualization Service Client) for enhanced performance. However, the update still doesn't provide mouse support directly and you must leverage a driver made available as part of the Citrix Project Satori.

The certification efforts leading to the development of these components has allowed me to change my thinking from if, to when I will start migrating my production Linux environments to Hyper-V. Every test scenario I have implemented has resulted in a stable well performed virtualized Linux guest which is what every admin strives for.

For more information or to download the Linux Integration Components v2, then please visit the link below.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c299d675-bb9f-41cf-b5eb-74d0595ccc5c&displaylang=en

Destination.......Microsoft Tech-Ed North America 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Johnson) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 20:49:00 +0000

One of the things that I look forward to every year is attending Microsoft's annual meeting of Tech-Ed North America. Every year I wait in anticipation of the announcement of location and open registration like an eight year old boy on Christmas morning waiting to see if he got the Red Ryder BB gun he wanted. I love this conference because its the only venue like it where I can get information on all of the latest Microsoft and partner solutions, speak with engineers and meet with other folks like myself and see how others are implementing Microsoft solutions in their environments.

This year is a going to be a little different for me as not only will I be attending, but I have been invited to participate as a speaker as well. I will be presenting on vSphere vs. Hyper-V, giving a real world approach to migrating a data center from VMWare to Microsoft. Using my own data center as an example, I will show how we completed this transition successfully and achieved greater VM density then VMWare states is possible and few data centers are achieving. I always look forward to meeting my readers and fellow Hyper-V users, so please reach out to me if you are attending.

I mentioned before that Tech-Ed is also a great forum for meeting the excellent Microsoft partners out there. Some would say that Microsoft make the products, but partners make them work. Now, that is up for interpretation, but you get the point. I posted a blog a little over a week ago about a new Microsoft partner, Virsto Software, that was developing a product to compliment Hyper-V virtualization by significantly improving server provisioning time, I/O performance and managing VM sprawl. Well they have arrived and today they officially announced the launch of their new solution Virsto One. Starting today you can obtain lots of great product information on the Virsto website and even request a 30-day evaluation copy of their software, so you can test it for yourself.

Virsto will be attending and demonstrating their product at many of this years technical shows to include Microsoft Tech-Ed, Microsoft Management Summit and EMC World, so stop by and check these guys out. I would love hear about others experience with the new Virsto One solution, so please let me know what you think.

If you are interested in an eval copy of the Virsto One solution or want more information on any of the conferences I mentioned, then visit the links below.

http://www.virsto.com/

http://www.microsoft.com/events/techednorthamerica/

http://www.mms-2010.com/public/home.aspx

http://www.emcworld.com

Hyper-V Denial of Service Vulnerability Discovered

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Johnson) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 03:57:00 +0000

For those of us managing IT infrastructure, we have adapted to the constant surprises that Murphy's Law imposes on us. But, the one thing that we can always count on is a security announcement from Microsoft on the second Tuesday of every month also known as "Patch Tuesday".

However, this month we were informed of a new vulnerability (977894) discovered in Hyper-V that could cause a denial of service if an authenticated user were to run a sequence of malformed machine instruction from within a virtual guest. This vulnerability can only be exploited if a user has valid logon credentials and logs on locally to the virtual guest and can not be exploited remotely or by anonymous users. This security update applies to all x64-based editions of Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V Server 2008 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. The security bulletin doesn't make it clear that this update applies to versions of Hyper-V Server, but is buried within the FAQ. This update is to be installed on the host only and not on the virtual guest. Environments that are configured with Automatic Updates enabled will apply this update automatically.

For more information on this security bulletin or to download the security update, then please visit the link below.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS10-010.mspx

Overcoming the VM I/O Blender?

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Johnson) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:48:00 +0000

Last week I was invited to come out and visit with a new company in

the virtualization space called Virsto Software. Virsto is based out

of Sunnyvale, CA and they have developed a new software solution

that will solve a lot of the inefficiencies known to virtualization.

When considering virtualization in the data center a couple of goals

that come to mind are reducing physical footprint, gaining higher CPU

utilization and reduced provisioning time. Hyper-V has provided

affordable options to address these requirements, but limiting factors

still exist. One of the biggest problems that we are faced with as we

start loading up VM's on the host is the I/O blender effect. When you

have a single OS to disk relationship the I/O is smooth, but as you

add additional VM's the hypervizor has to manage all these different

I/O loads and this causes the streams to not flow smoothly anymore and degrades I/O performance. Then there is VM Snapshots that so severely degrade I/O that most data centers have a policy against using them in production.

Virsto's new solution has answers to all these problems and more.

Their solution is also vendor-agnostic, so its works with any storage

solution. Virsto has integrated their software into the native Hyper-V

Manager snap-in, so the footprint is very small on the Host. This

integration allows an administrator to manage their VM deployment,

Snapshots, golden VHD's and Clones all from a single pane of glass.

They have even built their solution to be cluster aware giving data

centers options to improve performance and managements of all their Hyper-V environments.

To address the I/O blender effect they have incorporated a new file

structure that presents Hyper-V disk files as native VHD's to the VM,

but are stored on disk in a format they call vDisk. This newly

developed file structure allows I/O to remain smooth as VM density is

increased and regains a lot of the lost I/O performance from VM's hosted on native file systems. In my own testing I was able to show I/O performance gains between 20-30% over native Microsoft VHD's when benchmarking 1 -25 VM's. But, the biggest improvement was post snapshot with I/O performance with Virsto being as great as a 50% improvement in cases up to 25 VM's. This results in greater VM density and greater storage savings.

Virsto has also addressed concerns with storage sprawl and cloning. In most production environments we work with a number of golden fixed VHD's, many of which may not be used and take up valuable space. Provisioning is time consuming since its based on a file copy process. Virsto implements fixed VHD's same as Hyper-V, but the Virsto provisioning solution commits only the required disk space without having to fully expand the VHD, saving valuable disk space. This same concept applies to provisioning clones from Virsto's built-in cloning feature. When compared to Hyper-V native provisioning of a 70GB fixed VHD this process could take between 5-15 minutes, but in every cloning test case I performed I was able to create the clone and have the VHD ready for boot in just seconds, a tremendous time savings.

Given the potential for drastic storage savings and provisioning improvements, I believe Virsto is a solution that Hyper-V administrators will be adding to their host deployment checklist.

If you would like to learn more about Virsto Software, then check out the link below.

http://www.virsto.com/

NVSPBind: NIC Management from the Command Line

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Johnson) — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 07:46:00 +0000

Hello all.....here it is 2010 already and I am just getting back in the saddle after being away on a long break. I lost my father suddenly at the end of last year, so I had to step away from the blogging for a bit. But, I am back and boy do I have a lot of great things to share with you folks over the next couple of weeks. So, lets get started with a new utility that was just released, that I am sure we all will be really excited about.

Keith Mange from the Microsoft Hyper-V team has developed a new utility called NVSPBind, that address a major management headache when working with Hyper-V Server 2008, Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 and server core installations of Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2. When working with these installations, there wasn't a utility or process provided that allowed for the administration of the bindings or protocols for installed network adapters. Unlike the full installation of Windows that leverages the network connections applet.

NVSPBind now gives administrators the ability to enable or disable specific NIC bindings, Hyper-V network switch protocol and query and change NIC connection order. Best of all, this can all be done from the command line.

For instructions on usage and to download the utility, visit the link below.

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/nvspbind

Deleting a Hyper-V Virtual Switch using WMI and Powershell

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Johnson) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0000

For those of you who don’t know, I work for a company called Crutchfield who is an online and mail order consumer electronics retailer providing products for the home and car. It is that time of year again when we are very busy finishing up all systems and application work that is necessary to support our sales operations during the holiday season. This year, one of our final tasks is to complete the upgrades to our nine Hyper-V hosts to Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2.

Last week, we performed upgrades on our Hyper-V Server 2008 hosts to R2 that serve our Test\Dev environments. The upgrades were very straight forward and uneventful, which is what anyone hopes for when performing any upgrade. However, after the upgrade was complete, it appeared that either a virtual switch had either lost its configuration or failed. It turned out that it was one of those problematic Broadcom NIC’s that we all love so much that failed. So, I unbound the virtual switch that was configured to use the NIC from all VM’s and attempted to delete the switch. I was complimented with a nice error message, informing me that it couldn’t be deleted. So, I did what any good admin would do when the GUI fails us and turned to my trusty command line.

So, when administering Hyper-V using powershell, I use the Hyper-V library that is available from codeplex. Unfortunately, the powershell library doesn’t provide a cmdlet for deleting a virtual switch, so I leveraged a WMI class called “MSVM_VirtualSwitchManagementService”. Then, I used the “Choose-VMSwitch” powershell cmdlet to select the virtual switch for deletion and then deleted the switch. I searched online and found plenty of info on creating a virtual switch using powershell, but nothing regarding how to delete it, so I will walk you through deleting a virtual switch I created called “Demo Virtual Switch”.

In the steps that follow I will show you how to create the WMI object reference, select the virtual switch and finally deleted the selected switch. For this demo I am running the scripts local to the host with the virtual switch that I want to delete. With that said, let’s get started!

1. You need to start Powershell and set the execution policy to unrestricted to allow the scripts that follow to execute.

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

2. Load the Hyper-V powershell library if it hasn’t already been done.

3. Now, like I said before, there isn’t a Powershell cmdlet for deleting a virtual switch. So, we will need to create an object reference to the WMI Class “MSVM_VirtualSwitchManagementService” so the switch can be deleted. Use the following syntax.

$HVSwitchObj = Get-WMIObject –class “MSVM_VirtualSwitchManagementService” –namespace “root\virtualization” –computer “.”

4. Now, we need to select the virtual switch that we want to delete. There is a powershell cmdlet called Choose-VMSwitch that will allow us to make this selection. The following syntax will provide a list of all the virtual switches that exist on the host and provide the ability to select the switch that is to be deleted. Enter your switch selection by typing the associated ID number from the list and hit enter.

$HVSwitch = Choose-VMSwitch

5. Finally, we delete the switch. The final syntax uses the WMI class to delete the virtual switch selected by the powershell cmdlet.

$HVSwitchObj.DeleteSwitch($HVSwitch)

If you now pull up "Hyper-V Manager" and select “Virtual Network Manager”, you will see that the virtual switch has been removed and problem resolved. At this point I was able to replace my failed NIC, create a new virtual switch and bind the new switch to my virtual machines.

I hope this helps!

Guide to Upgrading to Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Johnson) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:37:00 +0000

It has been several months now since the release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, but it has been my experience that folks haven't been rushing to upgrade their production environments. However, with the recent release of Windows Server 2008 R2 and the requirement to manage all the new Hyper-V features, I have been very busy helping folks with their upgrade task to VMM 2008 R2. Microsoft did a great job on creating a very clean upgrade with little post installation steps required.

In the steps that follow, I will be focusing on the in-place upgrade from VMM 2008 RTM to VMM 2008 R2 RTM. We will be looking at this in three parts, Pre-Upgrade, Upgrade and Post-Upgrade Tasks.

Pre-Upgrade:
1. Make sure that any jobs that are currently running, have completed before attempting the upgrade. All jobs that ran prior to the upgrade will appear in the job history, but can not be restarted.

2. Make a back up of the VMM database to insure you can restore VMM 2008 in the event of a failure during the upgrade. VMM includes the built-in ability to perform this backup. Go to the "Administration" View and then select "General" or "Managed Computers" and on the right side of the screen you will see an option for "Backup Virtual Machine Manager". Select this option and you will be prompted to provide a path to store the backup.

Upgrade:
3. On the server hosting VMM, run setup.exe with "ELEVATED PRIVILEGES" from the VMM 2008 R2 installer location. The setup will start with a splash screen presenting options to install different components including (VMM Server, VMM Admin Console, Self-Service Portal, Local Agent and Configure Operations Manager.

If you select any of the options that are currently installed, then the installer will automatically detect those bits and then proceed by asking if you would like to upgrade those components. If you select yes, then the install will start the upgrade process. Should you choose one of the options not currently installed, exp. PRO or Self-Service Portal, then the upgrade will proceed with upgrading the currently installed components and once completed, it will install the additional feature(s).

After the upgrade is complete and the server has been rebooted you will have to perform a few manual steps to insure that your host and library servers are properly communicating with the new VMM 2008 R2 instance. Part of the upgrade to VMM 2008 R2 was an update to the VMM database and this requires an update to the agents to insure the hosts and libraries can be properly managed from VMM.

4. Start the VMM Admin Console and open the "Hosts" view. Under "All Hosts" you will see that all hosts and libraries are now reporting a status of "Needs Attention". If your agents haven't been updated and you don't see this message, then you can do a couple of things. First, you can wait for the normal host refresh window to occur that will update the status. Second, you can Right-Click on the host and select "Refresh" forcing the host agent to report to the VMM server.

5. Now that the agents are reporting a status "Needs Attention" you need to update the agent. In order to update the agent you can do this two ways. First, you can Right-Click your hosts while in "Hosts" view and select "Update Agent". Second, you can go to "Administration" view and select "Managed Computers", then Right-Click your hosts and select "Update Agent". You can select multiple hosts at a time for agent updates, but I generally limit this to 10-15 hosts at a time. After a few moments the job will complete and the agent will be updated with a status of "OK" letting you know the agent version is consistent with the database.

6. Finally, you will need to repeat these steps on any additional VMM 2008 servers you may have and you will need to update any VMM Admin Consoles with the R2 version.

So, thats it, upgrade complete!

If you need additional information regarding Virtual Machine Manager 2008 or Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, then please refer to the VMM TechNet site that provides lots of great information on VMM Planning, Deployment, Operations and Security.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc917964.aspx

Dell PowerEdge R910 - The Ultimate Virtual Host?

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Johnson) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:00:00 +0000

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.

Microsoft Certifies Red Hat on Hyper-V

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Johnson) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 02:00:00 +0000

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.

Virtual Machine Manager P2V vs. Disk2vhd Survey

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Johnson) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 20:17:00 +0000

Online P2V with Disk2vhd v1.0

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Johnson) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 02:05:00 +0000

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

Hyper-V vs. vSphere Survey

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Johnson) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:56:00 +0000

Is Microsoft Hyper-V Ready for the Enterprise?

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Johnson) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:54:00 +0000

While I was at VMWorld last week, a question that I was asked over and over was, “Do you think Microsoft Hyper-V is ready for the enterprise?”, and I said yes. Now, I am not saying that Hyper-V and VMware are equal; anyone who has done their homework knows that this is not the case. However, I will say that they are pretty close and that gap will continue to close now that Microsoft is finally doing a good job of listening to their customers and delivering on those requests.

What features are important when selecting a hypervisor? Well, as a customer I can say that features of Hyper-V pretty much sum that up. So, to support my ever growing VM population as I scale back my physical sprawl, I would say high availability along with improved network through-put and control of LUN populations top my list. Oh, and I can’t forget about my shrinking IT budget to make this happen. This is where Microsoft has delivered.

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 gives me the ability to implement virtualization with little cost while still maintaining my business continuity needs. I able to meet my hardware redundancy needs by utilizing failover clustering which allows for the automatic failover of VM’s should a hardware failure occur. This provides the ability to implement a greater number of VM’s on fewer LUNs with the use of CSV (Cluster Shared Volumes). This allows the ability to store a greater number of VM’s on a single LUN instead of the 1:1, VM to VM service configuration that’s available in Hyper-V V1. Now, the feature that I think has the greatest amount of attention is Live Migration; giving the administrator the ability to move a running virtual machine from one VM host to another without any downtime to the end user. VHD performance has also been significantly improved as well with fixed disk VHD’s running at near native disk speed and Dynamic VHD’s running at 95% of native disk speed. This is a major improvement and one a lot of current Hyper-V sites will be very happy with.

Now, we all have to agree that these features are what most are seeking in their hypervisor solution or at least they are highlighted the most, but what about the other great benefits. A couple that I am pretty excited about surround networking. I work with a tremendous amount of data that puts extra strain on my host, so I am looking forward to implementing VM Chimney and/or VMQ (Virtual Machine Queuing). Keep in mind that these features are only supported in your configuration if you are running one of a handful of supported network cards, but if you are, then you get the ability to take a lot of those CPU cycles used to process the network load and hand it off to the NIC’s. Keeping in mind that even thou there are network cards that support both, there aren’t any that can support both at the same time yet. Jumbo Frames support is awesome and speaks for itself, but for those of you who don’t know let’s take a second and talk about it. Jumbo Frames provides a larger packet windows size allowing more data to be added. This allows data to be sent quicker and more efficiently.

What else is great about R2? Well, how about the ability to hot add or remove storage from your VM. I can’t tell you how many times I have needed to address my VM storage configuration, but would have to schedule a downtime to address them, but not anymore. Hyper-V host capabilities have been greatly improved with the support up to 64 logical processors, 1TB of memory and support for up to 384 running VM’s. This will greatly improve the Hyper-V VM density that VMware is so vocal about Microsoft not having.

Finally, what about cost? You can’t beat it. With VMware I have to invest in vSphere and then I have to purchase any of the extra features that I may require in my enterprise, ex. vMotion, HA, DRS, and then I still have to purchase my Microsoft CALs on top of that. This can get very expensive very quick. Microsoft Hyper-V is included with the Windows Server 2008 R2 CAL and depending on the solution you implement; it comes with a number of guest licenses as well. The best bet for most enterprises that are planning on implementing a large number of VM’s is in build Windows Server 2008 Datacenter into their design plan. DC is priced per a processor, but includes an unlimited guest CAL. This means that you can host an unlimited number of virtual machines with no additional licensing cost and I don’t need to tell anyone what a great deal that is.

So, like I said Hyper-V is not the complete apples to apples hypervisor that VMWare is giving we are missing features like memory overcommit and Storage vMotion. But, these are not important to my enterprise today and I hear the same voices by others. The well thought-out feature set that Hyper-V R2 gives me, I would have to say to completely disagree with the Burton Group and say that I would completely agree with users like me who say that Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V are very ready for the production enterprise.

VMware Prohibits Hyper-V Demonstrations at VMworld 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Johnson) — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 02:42:00 +0000

This week in San Francisco, CA was the annual virtualization conference VMworld; a gathering for virtualization enthusiast hosted by VMware. The conference has been known for years as the select industry conference where all things virtual come to play and show how virtualization is shaping technology as we know it and how it plans to transform IT in the future.

I had the pleasure of participating in the conference as a guest of Microsoft working side-by-side with members of the Microsoft Virtualization Product Team. Members of this team are well known through-out the industry as the best and brightest on topics surrounding virtualization. I along with Ben Armstrong, Edwin Yuen, Vijay Tewari and others had the opportunity to speak to attendees about the capabilities and benefits of using Microsoft virtualization, especially Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager in the virtual datacenter. However, this year was much different than before as VMware decided that it would prohibit Microsoft from demonstrating any demos of any Microsoft virtualization product at the conference. VMware stated that this was a result of “shenanigans” demonstrated by Microsoft during last year’s VMware conference in Las Vegas, NV. If this is the case, then why was Citrix prohibited as well? They didn’t participate in the so called “Microsoft shenanigans”. I have a different view; I expect this may have something to do with the recent reports of Microsoft taking 24% of the virtualization market share by the IDC earlier this year, showing that Hyper-V is indeed a real competitor and/or threat in the virtual enterprise. Even thou there were no demo’s of any of the Microsoft virtualization products, we were available to answer many questions by attendees and in many cases found that attendees felt mislead in the functionality currently available in Hyper-V and VMM by others when comparing VMware to Hyper-V.

Beyond the restrictions enforced on Microsoft and Citrix during this year’s event, I felt the let down’s continued beyond the exhibit hall. I didn’t see anything presented at any of the sessions that I felt really gave any VMware customers anything new to look forward to. But, fortunately for Microsoft customers there is a lot to be counting on with the RTM’s of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Systems Center Virtual Machine Manger 2008 R2. I could be wrong, but I think with all the good things that Microsoft is doing in the virtualization space; we could be reading future reports by the IDC that Microsoft has gained a much greater percentage of the virtualization market share in the near future.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Released to Manufacturing

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Johnson) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 05:15:00 +0000

The long anticipated release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 has been released to manufacturing and is now available for evaluation download. VMM 2008 R2 is the latest release in the Microsoft Systems Center family and is used to manage the virtualized enterprise including management of Hyper-V, Virtual Server and VMWare ESX hosts.

VMM 2008 R2 includes support of the new line of Hyper-V virtualization features available in the release of Windows Server 2008 R2. The new version of the Microsoft hypervisor includes some very exciting features that some would suggest provide an equal replacement of VMWare in the enterprise.

Some of the most highlighted new features that are supported by VMM 2008 R2 are Live Migration which provides the administrator the ability to migrate virtual machines between host with no downtime experienced by the end-user. Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV), which provides support for multiple virtual machines to exist on the same LUN. Live Migration Host Compatibility Check, which verifies that a Host is capable of supporting Live Migration of VM's. Additional features include the ability to add additional storage to a VM while it is running, ability to migrate storage of running VM's and template based provisioning.

Microsoft did an good job with the first edition of the Virtual Machine Manager, but really listened to their customers feedback and came back with a excellent second edition. System Center Virtual Machine Manger 2008 R2 has proven to be an excellent virtualization management application, that in my opinion, proves Microsoft deserve to be in the virtual enterprise datacenter.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager R2 Eval, http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=292de23c-845c-4d08-8d65-b4b8cbc8397b&displaylang=en

Improve Performance of Network Interfaces Configured for iSCSI Traffic

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Johnson) — Fri, 29 May 2009 01:43:00 +0000

Recently, I was called to assist with a newly created Hyper-V cluster that was experiencing slow read\writes to SAN attached storage using iSCSI. I started poking around verifying drivers, NIC and virtual switch settings and then I realized that the hosts were missing the iSCSI performance registry hack.

The performance registry hack improves through-put by configuring the NIC to immediately acknowledge TCP packets allowing more data to be processed more effeciently.

Caution

The following section contains information about modifying TCP/IP registry settings. Before you modify the registry, make sure you back it up and understand how to restore the registry if a problem occurs. For information about how to backup, restore, and edit the registry, click the following link to the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/256986/

The following configuration is to be used on Windows Server 2003 SP1 or later and is to be used at your own risk.

1. Determine the IP address of the NIC configured for iSCSI traffic
2. Start the Registry Editor. Select Start > Run, Type Regedit and click OK.
3. Locate and select the following registry sub-key.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>SYSTEM>CurrentControlSet>Services>Tcpip>Parameters>Interfaces

Under interfaces you will find a series of automatically generated GUIDs.

Ex. 0388F9B2-3557-4574-A0D7-D553A213A5CB

There will be one GUID for every network interface that is installed in the system. Select the GUID that contains the IP address of your iSCSI interface.

4. Select the IPAddress or DhcpIPAddress parameter that is used for iSCSI traffic.
5. Select Edit > New > DWORD value.
6. Name the new value TcpAckFrequency and assign it a value of 1.
7. Exit the Registry Editor
8. Restart Windows. A restart must take place before the changes are effective.

Once the system reboots improved iSCSI performance should be experienced.

Microsoft Announces Release of Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Johnson) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 20:41:00 +0000

This past Wednesday Microsoft announced the release of the long anticipated Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta 1. Late last year when Microsoft released their Hypervisor product "Hyper-V" it came with much anticipated excitement. However, for those of us who were use to the high availability solutions from VMWare there was some work that still needed to be done.

Microsoft provided the ability to create highly available virtual machines by using Windows Failover Clustering and Quick Migration, but it lacked the live migration functionality that VMWare offers. Microsofts solution provides reducdancy between virtual host, but during failover guest virtual machine would experience a period of time without connectivity until the failover was complete. This isn't practicial for the needs of some high demand enterprises and their applications, but those days will soon be over.

Microsoft has introduced a lot improvements to their first release of Hyper-V. One of the most important features is the release of CSV (Clustered Shared Volumes) to be used with Failover Clustering. This shared volume concept allows multiple cluster host to access the same LUN and provide the cluster with the ability to give control of the VM over to different clustered host without interrupting access to the guest machines. This provides a great cost effective solution for large enterprises who demand live migration and looking to replace VMWare. Another great feature of the CSV architecture is improved node connectivity fault tolerance. Fault tolerance has been improved with the implementation of Dynamic I/O Redirection, allowing I/O to be redirected within the Failover Cluster based on connection availability.

Other enhancements include a new Cluster Validation Tool, improved management of virtual machines with the Hyper-V Management Console and new Powershell cmdlets. There are also new performance enhancements including SLAT (Second Layer Address Translation), which takes advantage of new processor features to reduce processing load. Added enhancements in networking performance by providing support for TCP offload, providing the VM the ability to offload to the virtual hosts physical NIC and support of Jumbo Frames allowing up to six times larger data packets.

In all Microsoft has done a great job with it second release of its Hyper-V product. For those interest you can download the beta version at the address below.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=85cfe4c9-34de-477c-b5ca-75edae3d57c5&displaylang=en