Hyper-V

Posted By Kenneth van Surksum about 2 days ago with no comments

Ben Armstrong: In Windows Server 2008 R2 we have made some surgical changes to the way virtual machine snapshots work and how they are exposed in the system in order to address some key customer pain points.  Changes include:

    * You can now export a single snapshot from a virtual machine.  This works by selecting the snapshot in question and then selecting Export… from the Action pane.  We will merge all the snapshot disk data into a single new virtual hard disk – and the resulting exported virtual machine will look like a virtual machine with no snapshots that is identical to the snapshot you selected.  Note that the virtual machine needs to be turned off in order to perform this operation.
    * Snapshot AVHD files are now created in the same directory as their parent VHD files.  Their names have also been updated to include the name of the parent virtual hard disk.  Both of these changes make it easier to identify and group snapshot files.
    * When you open the settings for a virtual machine snapshot and look at the hard disk settings – you will see the name of the AVHD that is associated with that snapshot.  This helps you to map AVHD files to specific snapshots.
    * You can now edit AVHD files in the edit VHD wizard.  This means that if you want to manually merge AVHD files to a new VHD to give to someone else – you can (note: be careful as you can cause problems if you merge back into the parent in this case).
    * You can now directly attach an AVHD file to a virtual machine.  This is very handy if you have lost your virtual machine configuration and need to get data off of a snapshot file.

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum about 4 days ago with no comments

Server virtualization enables multiple operating systems to run on a single physical server as virtual machines. With server virtualization, you can consolidate the workloads of multiple servers onto a smaller number of fully utilized servers. Fewer servers can reduce hardware, energy, and management costs. By using the Microsoft® Hyper-V™ technology in the Windows Server® 2008 operating system, you can run a virtualized instance of Windows® Essential Business Server on a single server or several servers.

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum about 4 days ago with no comments

Edwin Yuen: As you may have seen, we recently released the Release Candidate for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2. One of the most anticipated features of SCVMM 2008 R2 is Quick Storage Migration (QSM) which enables the migration of the storage of VM from one location to another. For example, suppose you have virtual machines on a leased SAN (SAN 1). The lease runs out and you decide to upgrade to a new SAN (SAN 2) with more capacity, better performance and additional capabilities. Quick Storage Migration allows you to move the virtual machine which resides on SAN 1 to SAN 2. I have had a number of request for more details on how this works so we've written this brief guide to QSM. (In addition, we wanted to make this technology broadly available, not just the biggest enterprises.

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum on June 24 2009, 7:36 PM with no comments

Adam Fazio: In my first post on Hyper-V VLANs, I talked about the most common scenario for VLANs with Hyper-V, which is using VLAD IDs on the Virtual Machines or the Hyper-V Virtual Switch. Now that I’ve been around the block a few times working with enterprise customers on some more sophisticated scenarios, I think it’s time to touch on other uses for VLANs on Hyper-V Hosts.

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum on June 24 2009, 7:15 PM with no comments

Over the course of a year, the engineers at Nissan's vehicle manufacturing plants in Smyrna and Decherd, Tenn., have implemented virtualization to consolidate 159 servers used in assembly and component manufacturing down to 28.

The consolidation is impressive, not only for its scale, but for the fact that it's been carried out by manufacturing and quality-assurance specialists outside the regular Nissan IT department. None of the servers involved was considered part of the business information services function, said Phil D'Antonio, department manager over conveyors and controls engineering in Nissan's Smyrna plant.

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum on June 22 2009, 9:05 PM with no comments

In the months ahead many virtual machines will have to be migrated to Windows Server 2008 R2 clusters. If a VM is now on a traditional shared cluster disk, the migration process can be executed by Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2. This process is called storage migration.

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum on June 21 2009, 1:21 PM with no comments

This management pack supports monitoring of Windows Server Hyper-V systems. This includes monitoring coverage of Hyper-V host servers, including critical services and disks, and Hyper-V virtual machines, including virtual components and virtual hardware.

Feature Summary
This management pack provides the following functionality:

    * Management of critical Hyper-V services that affect virtual machines and host server functionality
    * Management of host server logical disks that affect virtual machine health
    * Full representation of virtualization in a single Hyper-V host server, including virtual networks, virtual machines, and guest computers
    * Monitoring of virtual machine hardware components that affect availability

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum on June 21 2009, 12:51 PM with no comments

Aidan Finn: Microsoft’s big differentiator from the competition is management.  Most people have never experienced System Center so they’ve no idea by what I mean by management.  They’ve seen things like HP SIM, IBM Director or VMware Virtual Center.  For me, those are incomplete point solutions but they’re better than some of the freeware or “cheapware” solutions I’ve seen on some sites.  When I say management I mean knowing what is where, how it’s performing, automation of deployment & configuration, backup/recovery from cradle to grave and from hardware to application inclusive of virtualisation.  Sounds like science fiction?  Nope, it’s a reality for some of us who’ve gone down the System Center route.  Even back in the early days, I had this sort of thing running in 2005.  Me and my team of 2 others managed 173 worldwide servers and were 3rd line support for the desktops.  That included doing all the AD management, PC image builds, patching and software deployment.  That sounds like we must’ve worked 24 hours a day?  Nope, outside of project/development work, we did around 3 hours a day between us.

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum on June 21 2009, 12:42 PM with no comments

Isaac Roybal, technical product manager on the Windows Server team covering Hyper-V: It’s been 3 weeks since the release of Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2) and we’re seeing great adoption. From a Hyper-V point of view, we’re excited because the final Hyper-V release is an integrated feature in SP2 making it easier and faster to deploy Hyper-V. If you recall, when Windows Server 2008 was released, Hyper-V Beta was included. This meant to get the final Hyper-V release, you needed to go to Windows Update, download and go through the update process.

With Windows Server 2008 SP2, Hyper-V final bits are included so there’s no need to pull down individual downloads which speeds up deployments. There are also some notable updates in SP2, including scalability enhancements for running on systems with up to 24 logical processors which enables support for up to 192 running virtual machines, update for Hyper-V when managed with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and updates for backup/restore of virtual machines with the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum on June 16 2009, 2:12 PM with no comments

If you have read about Windows Virtual PC and Windows XP mode, you may mistakenly think that Windows Virtual PC can only be used for running applications in Windows XP mode.  While this is one of the major features, Windows Virtual PC allows you to create multiple virtual machines and use them for multiple operating systems.

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum on June 11 2009, 8:08 PM with no comments

Ben Armstrong:We recently published KB2000048 which outlines that if you try to run a Windows Server 2008 virtual machine, with beta integration components, on a Windows Server 2008 SP2 system – the virtual machine will fail to boot.

Ordinarily this would not be a big issue, but the real concern is that any virtual machine created with Windows Server 2008 RTM install media will automatically have the problematic beta integration components.

The best way to avoid this problem is to ensure that you install the RTM version of the Hyper-V integration components in all virtual machines prior to installing SP2 on the physical computer, and after installing SP2 you should use installation media with SP2 integrated into it to create new virtual machines.

If you cannot do this the article above provides you with a list of possible workarounds.

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum on June 11 2009, 8:06 PM with no comments

A VMware employee has fallen on his sword and apologised, after VMware’s marketing department attempted to be sneaky and anonymously posted a clip of Microsoft’s Hyper-V crashing onto YouTube.

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum on June 10 2009, 8:06 AM with no comments

With the release candidate version of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 we have added a new feature called “Processor Compatibility”.  The purpose behind this feature is to allow you to live migrate virtual machines between different processor types (from the same manufacturer) without any downtime.

This functionality is configurable through a simple check box on the processor settings page for the virtual machine. If you select to  enable your virtual machine to Migrate to a physical computer with a different processor version then we make sure that the virtual machine can be migrated.

We do this by hiding advanced processor features from the virtual machine, so it can run on any version of the processor.

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum on June 9 2009, 7:41 PM with no comments

Bryon Surace: The recent announcement by AMD regarding the 6-core AMD Opteron processor (codenamed ‘Istanbul’) marks another milestone in AMD’s continued mission to create processors designed to provide performance, efficiency, and value.

The newly announced 6-core AMD Opteron processor will provide a total of 24 logical processors (cores) on a 4-socket system and 48 logical processors (cores) on an 8-socket system.  In a non-virtualized IT environment, there aren’t many apps/services that are designed to utilize these large system resources.  However, with Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2, it’s a natural fit.   WS08 R2 Hyper-V provides support for these new processors allowing large resources to be used to consolidate potentially hundreds of virtual machines on a single host.

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum on June 9 2009, 3:31 PM with no comments

The few vendors busy in the virtual lab automation space (which include VMware, Surgient, VMLogix, Skytap and the almost died StackSafe) may soon have a big, big problem called Microsoft.

After wasting years not leveraging its huge developers community to spread virtualization in every corner of the world, the company is finally moving on.

Announced in November 2008, the integration between Visual Studio 2010, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 and Hyper-V 1.0/2.0 for virtual lab automation scenarios is now a reality called Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management.

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum on June 9 2009, 3:25 PM with no comments

Jeff Woolsey: Virtualization Nation,

If you've been following the VMware FUD fiasco, I just wanted to provide a quick update.

In the last post, we finally reached a point where VMware provided some basic information about their configuration and we immediately began working to reproduce the test. As I mentioned in the last blog, the Hyper-V team is fanatical about the stability of Hyper-V. If there's an issue, we're not going to hide. We will address the issue and provide a fix. Period. We are 100% customer focused and committed to world class support. We've still got some more work to do, but I told you that I'd provide an update in early June so I want to do just that.

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum on June 9 2009, 3:20 PM with no comments

Given the youth and feature set of Microsoft Hyper-V, the question is, how does it rate when compared to more seasoned hypervisors from VMware and Citrix?

In this videocast, senior enterprise IT architect Nelson Ruest breaks down VMware ESX Server, Citrix XenServer and Hyper-V, providing details on what each product has to offer. You'll also learn more about what you can and can't do with Hyper-V, with insight into some of the key memory management features that Microsoft's technology does not yet support.

Other topics covered include:

    * A look at typical Hyper-V configurations
    * Virtualization management tools - comparing VMware, Microsoft and Citrix
    * A breakdown of the best lab management tools on the market today

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum on June 5 2009, 8:50 PM with no comments

Brien M. Posey: Although backing up and recovering a server is often simple and straightforward, virtualization can bring an extra layer of complexity into the picture. In this article series, I will discuss your options for disaster recovery within a Hyper-V environment.

Although there are many benefits to server virtualization, there is no denying that virtualization also adds an extra layer of complexity to server management. Perhaps nowhere is this more true than when it comes to backup and restore initiatives. What is even more frustrating is that there is a lot of misinformation on the Internet regarding backups and disaster recovery for virtual servers. In this article series, I am going to try to set the record straight by explaining the various disaster recovery options that are available to you in a Hyper-V environment.

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum on June 3 2009, 8:35 PM with no comments

The Hyper-V Snapshot feature(Checkpoint in SCVMM) is a very useful feature for Support Engineers. This allows us to revert the VM to a previous state irrespective of the local* changes you’ve made after the snapshot was taken. Working with customers on a daily basis necessitates having a system on which you can mirror the customer’s setup.

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum on June 3 2009, 8:32 PM with no comments

You may have seen some of the recent news articles that have started to roll out around the RTM and General availability dates of Windows 7.  As Windows Server 2008 R2 is a joint development effort with Windows 7 we are aligned with the same RTM and General Availability (GA) dates.

With that – Windows Server 2008 R2  RTM code is on track to be available to our partners sometime in the 2nd half of July. Windows Server 2008 R2 will also be broadly available about the same time as the Windows 7 GA date of Oct 22.

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum on June 3 2009, 8:11 PM with no comments

The Hyper-V snapshot feature allows you to capture the configuration and state of a virtual machine (VM) at any point in time, and return a VM to that state without noticeable interruption. When you take a snapshot of a running VM, Hyper-V briefly pauses the VM to create a new automatic virtual hard disk (AVHD) which is essentially a differencing disk, attaches it to the VM to store changes to the VM data, saves the processor state into a file (.bin), then resumes the VM. Hyper-V also makes a copy of the VM configuration file (.xml), and saves the contents of the VM memory into a file (.vsv). Snapshots can also be created when a VM is turned-off, in which case Hyper-V does not need to capture VM memory or processor state data.

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum on June 3 2009, 8:01 PM with no comments

With Hyper-V™ live migration, you can move running VMs from one Hyper-V™ physical host to another without any disruption of service or perceived downtime. Live migration is integrated with Windows Server 2008® R2 Hyper-V™ and Microsoft® Hyper-V™ Server 2008 R2. Since Hyper-V™ live migration can move running virtual machines without downtime, it will facilitate greater flexibility and value: • Provides better agility: Datacenters with multiple Hyper-V™ physical hosts will be able to move running VMs to the best physical computer for performance, scaling, or optimal consolidation without impacting users. • Reduces costs and increase productivity: Datacenters with multiple Hyper-V™ physical hosts will be able to service those systems in a more controlled fashion, scheduling maintenance during regular business hours. Live migration makes it possible to keep VMs online, even during maintenance, increasing productivity for both users and server administrators. Datacenters will be also able to reduce power consumption by dynamically increasing consolidation ratios and powering off un-used physical hosts during times of lower demand.

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum on June 1 2009, 8:40 PM with no comments

There have been multiple customers who have voiced concern that the Configuration-only export feature is gone. It has not. Configuration-only export is still very much present in Hyper-V in R2. It just so happens that we have taken the option out from the UI. The user can still utilize this capability via the API.

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum on May 29 2009, 8:03 PM with no comments

Defragmentation specialist Diskeeper has begun shipping V-locity, a new optimisation and defragmentation tool designed for virtualised machines, but specifically targeted at maximising server speeds for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V environments.

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Posted By Kenneth van Surksum on May 29 2009, 8:02 PM with no comments

While working with snapshots that are attached to a highly available VM in a Cluster, you may notice after deleting a snapshot, it does not merge as expected. You'll notice the merge process almost immediately ends and the VM begins to restart.

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