HyperVoria

It’s only one win. But for Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization push, it could be a key victory in the global virtualization war vs. VMware. Specifically, CH2M HILL expects to save a projected $3.2 million over the next several years by switching from VMware virtualization solutions to Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor. Here’s the story.

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Microsoft's Hyper-V is finding a home in the SMB market, but will it grab more second-tier enterprise servers, as virtualization and licensing costs expand? Some analysts say yes, despite VMware's superior management and automation tools.

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Earlier today, the Hyper-V team released several Hyper-V updates as a single update package via Windows Update. These updates have been publicly available for some time now, but now they are available packaged together as a single roll-up for the convenience of customers.

There are three issues resolved with this update:

• Compatibility with Intel Nehalem Processors
• Compatibility with Intel Westmere Processors
• A network issue when, under extreme network load, the VM network connection is lost.

For specifics on the issues resolved with this update, please see this KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2264080

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Jeff Alexander: About 4 years ago myself and Kleefy were frustrated at how slow it was to do all the demo’s we do on laptops computers.  Sure laptops are fast enough these days and you can do some things to trick them out and make them faster.  Back in 2006 though we decided to build our own shuttle PC’s and to be honest they served us well for many years

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For the second straight year Microsoft   won't bother showcasing its primary virtualization technology at VMworld, because it believes the conference's sponsor and exhibitor agreement prevents vendors from demonstrating products that compete against VMware.

Microsoft appears to be the only major vendor taking this stance, as even its partner Citrix has decided to step up its presence at VMworld and will showcase XenDesktop, which competes directly against VMware's desktop virtualization software.

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The following table shows changes in storage.  Some of the changes are performance related like hot add of storage.  This helps performance by reducing the time it takes to add new storage.  The big things to note are increases in IO Sizes passed from VM’s and huge improvements in Dynamic VHDs.

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Ben Armstrong: I got asked this question a couple of weeks ago – and I did not know the answer.  After a bit of investigation – I now know the answer – and thought I would take the time to share it with the world (if you do not know what Sysprep is – go and read this first).  The short answer is:

Everything just works.

The long answer is as follows:

Prior to Window Server 2008 R2 (namely in Windows Server 2008) you could run into a couple of problems.  In Windows Server 2008 R2 we have implemented a Sysprep provider to ensure that everything goes smoothly.

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Brien M. Posey: In the first part of this article series, I talked about the roles of the physical network adapter and the virtual network adapter within a Hyper-V parent partition. I also briefly discussed the virtual switch. In this article, I want to continue the discussion by talking about the role of the virtual switch in more detail. As I do, I will also show you how child partitions fit into the picture.

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Disaster recovery has become table stakes in the world of server virtualization. Any good virtualization platform these days will find a way to restart a virtual machine in the event of a hardware failure. But which vendor excels more than any other at getting critical applications back online after failures, and making sure the most important virtual machines are given priority in the restart process?

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Ben Armstrong: Last week I received the latest support call statistics for Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2 – and it seems that a number of you are hitting problems that we know about – and have hotfixes “ready to go” for.  So I would like to take a moment to bring these hotfixes to your attention.

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After installing the service pack 1 beta on Windows Server 2008 R2 you will see that virtual machines have a new setting for memory.  The Memory priority...

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For any physical server running Windows 2008, you might as well enable Hyper-V. This way, you can get more use out of that one server by running multiple servers on it, and utilize unused CPU and RAM. So once you enable Hyper-V, how are you going to manage it from your desktop PC? You do not want to have to use Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to connect to the server and launch the Hyper-V manager, every time that you want to administer Hyper-V. Thus, you need the Hyper-V tools for remote management up and running whenever you need them.

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Ben Armstrong: Here is a good question – what happens if you install Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 beta, open the settings on a virtual machine, enable dynamic memory – but the guest operating system does not support dynamic memory?

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This blog discusses running a Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) in a Virtual Machine (VM) on top of a Hyper-V host. Running a cluster in a virtualized environment is commonly referred to as "Guest Clustering".

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With the release of Data Protection Manager 2010, DPM adds significant scalability, reliability, and manageability enhancements such as:

• Up to 100 servers, 1000 laptops, or 2000 databases protected by a single DPM server

• Significant auto-protection, auto-healing, and reduced alerting for a more “fire and forget” experience

• Enhanced disaster recovery options for long-distance data protection and business continuity initiatives

Of course DPM 2010 offers key new capabilities when used with Hyper-V R2 such as:

• Protection of Live Migration-enabled servers running on CSV in Hyper-V R2

• Flexibility to protect virtual machines from Windows guests or from the hypervisor host

• Ability to restore virtual machines to an alternative host

• Host-based backups will now enable item level recovery (ILR) from within the VHD

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Ben Armstrong:If you have not tried out dynamic memory yet – here is a handy step-by-step guide for how to get it setup.

The first thing you need to do is to install the Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 beta release.  To do this you should:

1. Download the beta from here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/sp1.aspx
2. Shutdown any virtual machines before installing the service pack in the parent partition
   • Saved states and snapshots from Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM are compatible with the SP1 beta release – so there is no need to discard them.  Note – this may not be the case with the SP1 RTM release.
3. Apply the service pack
4. Reboot the physical computer

 

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One of the major advantages that DirectAccess has over traditional remote access solutions is that it enables IT to always be connected to their managed clients. This allows you to make sure your managed clients are always up to date and meet your desired configuration requirements. This is a far cry from the VPN client, where the VPN might never connect to the corpnet and then finally connect months later when visiting the home office and share all the worms and viruses it collected during its sojourn away for the corpnet.

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Aidan Finn:This morning I read an article on Network World that I thought I’d write about.  It reported a claim by the Burton Group (yes; them again) where it was claimed that:

• You should virtualise Exchange
• You should not use Hyper-V to do it: because it does not have ordered virtual machine start-ups.

Let’s take these two, one at a time.

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Jaap Wesselius: In an earlier article, based on the full version of Windows Server 2008 R2, I explained the new Live Migration option in Hyper-V R2. For security reasons it is recommended to use Windows Server 2008 R2 Server Core (or Hyper-V Server) for your Hyper-V needs but, from a management perspective, using Server Core can be painful, as I recently experienced at a customer. Not only is the setup of the server itself a different process, but setting up the iSCSI Shared Storage and Remote Management are also subtly different. Time for some guidance...

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We are entering an age of IT with tremendous overlap between technologies and virtualization is no exception, as today's siloed IT departments just don't scale well to changing technology. For instance, when you approach a new Hyper-V virtualization project, system administrators often have specific worries related to servers such as having enough processing power for a specific number of machines or determining how to respond to the storage I/O requests of an overtaxed system—but we haven't concerned ourselves too much with the network.

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In addition to this new content, learners will gain the knowledge needed to perform basic installation and configuration tasks. Through online simulations, students will install and configure key features and explore product capabilities, such as virtual storage management, provisioning services, lifecycle management and workflow studio.

Course Details:

Language: English

Type: Self-paced online

Length: 6 hours

Cost:  Free!

Get Started! Take Training Now 

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We are really excited to announce the availability of the Hyper-V Linux Integration Services for Linux Version 2.1. This release marks yet another milestone in providing a comprehensive virtualization platform to our customers. Customers who have a heterogeneous operating system environment desire their virtualization platform to provide support for all operating systems that they have in their datacenters. We have supported Linux as a guest operating system on our virtualization platform from the days of Virtual Server and continue to enhance our support in that regard.

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Hans Vredevoort: In an HP Storage Works EVA Best Practices document published in February 2010, we were advised not to use the HP MPIO DSM with Cluster Shared Volumes, but as an alternative to use Microsoft Native MPIO only. This was unfortunate because the HP MPIO Full Featured DSM allows for better visibility and control of the multiple paths between Hyper-V R2 host and its storage.

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Mitch Tulloch has updated his free ebook of last year; it’s now updated for Windows Server 2008 R2. You can now download Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions, From the Desktop to the Datacenter in XPS format here and in PDF format here.

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