Hyper-V

P2V Migration for Software Assurance uses the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit and Sysinternals Disk2VHD to convert a user's existing Windows XP or newer client environment to a virtual hard disk then automates the delivery of an updated and personalized Windows 7 operating system containing a virtual machine with the user's previous Windows environment, applications and Web browser. The user's previous virtual desktop retains its existing management components, domain membership and policies. The process also publishes applications and the browser for the user to access them seamlessly within Windows 7's start menu.

Download: P2V Migration for Software Assurance beta

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Jaap Wesselius: One of the discussions when designing a Hyper-V server is about the pagefile settings.

The pagefile is used for:

    * Supply Virtual Memory to the operating system (i.e. the parent partition). Traditional guidance states ~1.5x the amount of physical memory, although this doesn’t make sense anymore on a >64GB host;
    * Crash dump purposes, but on a hosts with lots of memory (more than 64GB) do you want to have a full memory dump? Look at the number of hours this memory dump will take and you’re convinced that for 98% of all cases a kernel dump is sufficient.

Normally the parent partition uses around 2GB of memory (recommendation) so I usually recommend a manually managed pagefile of approximately 4 ~ 6 GB. Why not a system managed pagefile? Because it will grow to the amount of physical memory.

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VMware customers attending VMworld are taking a look at Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization software, but say the Microsoft technology falls a bit short and that it would be problematic to start over after investing heavily in VMware.

The investment in VMware involves not only money but also the time and training it takes to build institutional knowledge about the IT world's most-used x86 virtualisation platform.

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Hyper-V clustering is a pretty rock solid thing, and Live Migration (introduced as we all know with Server 2008 R2) is virtually identical to VMWare's long-available VMotion technology - pick up a running VM, and move it to another host in the cluster without users noticing. Generally speaking you might see a small hiccup - one ping lost as the machine stops on one host and starts on another.

But if you shut down a cluster host, say, because you're deploying a Windows update, or a new version of a backup or monitoring client, the situation is different. Windows will use Quick migration to move the virtual machines from one host to another - and Quick Migration is nothing like VMotion and Live Migration.

Instead of copying the VM memory and processor state across the network, the virtual machine is saved (to your SAN) on one host, then restored from that saved state on another. The difference is obvious..

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Use the following steps to resolve a name mismatch error when viewing the remote desktop connection of a VM on a Hyper-V host through VMM (using the Virtual Machine Viewer application). The VMM server in this case is running as a virtual machine.

When you execute the "Connect to virtual machine" action from the VMM Administrator Console, you will get the following error: "The remote computer could not be authenticated due to problems with its security certificate. It mabe be unsafe to proceed". In this case, the popup with the error will give you the Name mismatch parameters

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Ben Armstrong: Most people I know who have spent a lot of time with Hyper-V have had the experience of accidentally taking too much memory away from the parent partition.  This happens when they start too many virtual machines – and all of a sudden the performance and responsiveness of the parent partition goes down significantly.

The response from people who hit this is usually to stop the last virtual machine that they started, to reduce its memory, and then start it up again.

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Ben Armstrong: With Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 we have added a number of new performance counters for dynamic memory.  These counters allow you to get some extra insight into what is actually happening with memory on your Hyper-V server.  The counters are grouped in two categories.

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Ben Armstrong: Jeff has discussed this at some length over on the virtualization team blog, but as a general rule of thumb we believe that it is much better to have paging occur inside the guest operating system rather than at the virtualization layer (if paging is needed).

The simple reason for this is that the guest operating system has far better understanding of which are the best sections of memory to page out – where as all the virtualization layer can do is to guess at what should be paged out.

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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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