HyperVoria

Combining Hyper-V R2, Intel Ethernet, Intel 5500’s and iSCSI Storage…

Kenneth van Surksum — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 15:33:00 GMT

Matt McSpirit: This is a combination of technology that I’m starting to see on a pretty regular basis. People looking at virtualisation, are typically weighing up new hardware, and from a server perspective, it makes sense to go for the latest and greatest CPUs (from both Intel and AMD) because of their virtualisation optimisations. When it comes to storage however, more and more customers are learning to appreciate the performance that iSCSI can bring, yet at a great price point when compared with Fibre implementations. This isn’t obviously correct for all scenarios, but, typically the rule holds. Stephen’s got a great example of this here. Stephen’s also got a link to a test performed back in March last year where Microsoft and Intel, combining the technologies above, pushed over 1 million IOPS.

Hyper-V Linux Integration Components V2.0 With RedHat Support

Kenneth van Surksum — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 15:12:00 GMT

Microsoft released version 2.0 of the Linux Integration Components for Hyper-V on the 29th of January. They include support for installing on not only SUSE Enterprise Linux (10 SP1 and 10 SP2) but also RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.

Hyper-V ActiveX RDP Control

Kenneth van Surksum — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 15:08:00 GMT

Ben Armstrong: The Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for Hosters project have just put up the sample code for a Hyper-V ActiveX RDP control, available here:

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ddc/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=3833

What this allows you to do is to create a Remote Desktop connection directly to the virtual machine (not to the guest operating system) in exactly the same manner as when you are using the Virtual Machine Connection window in the Hyper-V Management Console.

As this is an ActiveX control you can even use it in a web page if you wish to.

Increase VMBus buffer sizes to increase network throughput to guest VMs

Kenneth van Surksum — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 07:02:00 GMT

Traffic jams happen every day, all across the world. Too many vehicles competing for the same stretch of road, gated by flow control devices like stop signs and traffic lights, conspire to ensnare drivers in a vicious web of metal and plastic and cell phones. In the technology world, networking traffic is notoriously plagued by traffic jams, resulting in all sorts of havoc, including delayed web pages, slow email downloads, robotic VOIP and choppy YouTube videos. (Oh, the humanity!)

Under load, the default buffer size used the by the virtual switch may provide inadequate buffer and result in packet loss. We recommend increasing the VM bus receive buffer from 1Mb to 2Mb.

Leaked screenshot reveal dynamic memory option for next version of Hyper-V

Kenneth van Surksum — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:34:00 GMT

Softpedia released a story yesterday giving more detail about the screenshots of the leaked Windows 8 server screenshots by the WZOR website.

One screenshot concerning Hyper-V is quite interesting, because it includes the option for Dynamic memory. Dynamic memory would allow you to specify the amount of RAM a VM will start, and a maximum amount of memory the VM could use.

Keep in mind though that there is no guarantee that this feature will make it into the final version of Windows 8 Server.

Comment: Nice armour for the VMWare v.s. Hyper-V discussions...

Edit: Alessandro Perilli from Virtualization.info mentions that the screenshots could also mean that this functionality will be released with the next Service Pack and not with Windows Server 8. (read more here)

Converting HyperV Snapshots to Dumps

Kenneth van Surksum — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:20:00 GMT

Microsoft has had a tool internally for a while that would convert a saved state or snapshot of a HyperV virtual machine into a dump that you could open with the Windows debugging tools. This is really pretty handy sometimes when troubleshooting. The good news is this tool is now publically available here.

9 reasons why the whole Hyper-V vs ESX debate is a waste of time

Kenneth van Surksum — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:48:00 GMT

Alessandro Perilli:Tracking the virtualization industry for more than six years (virtualization.info was launched in September 2003) has been a challenging, time-consuming and sometimes tiring task. But there always are fun moments.

The best ones come from the never ending skirmish between VMware and Microsoft marketing departments (and their allies), that in turn highlight the negative aspects of the competitor.
The VMware solution is too expensive and doesn’t manage anything but the virtual infrastructure, says Microsoft.
The Microsoft solution is not mature enough, it’s full of bugs (because it comes from Windows) and has hidden costs too, says VMware.

Security best practices for Microsoft Hyper-V installations

Kenneth van Surksum — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:51:00 GMT

It's no secret that in today's interconnected world, servers require extra security. Now Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization adds another layer of concern, since you are running a host operating system where multiple servers run virtually.

The attack surface is widened from many physical machines to a single one with multiple virtual machines (VMs). Not only do you need to follow your standards for those VMs as if they were standalone servers, but you also have to consider the hosts they are sitting on.

One can argue the virtues of security features between the various hypervisor implementations, but let's focus on what you should be doing when it comes to Hyper-V installations, specifically.

Planning an Upgrade to Hyper-V 2008 R2 (Part 1)

Kenneth van Surksum — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:46:00 GMT

Brien M Posey: Microsoft’s Hyper-V was nice as first generation products go, but Hyper-V 2008 R2 is far superior to the original release. A new feature called Live Migration allows you to move virtual servers from one host to another with no down time. In addition, Microsoft has made some tremendous improvements to Hyper-V’s performance and scalability. For example, the original Hyper-V release supported 16 virtual processors, but Hyper-V 2008 R2 supports 32!

If you are already using Hyper-V, you probably can not wait to take advantage of these, and all of the other new features. In order to do that though, you will have to upgrade your existing host servers. In this article series, I will explain what your options are for upgrading from Hyper-V to Hyper-V 2008 R2.

Benchmarking Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2 x64

Kenneth van Surksum — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:42:00 GMT

This article presents relative benchmark results for Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 after the Hyper-V role is installed and how the guest virtual machines perform in relation to the host depending on various logical CPU combinations exposed to the virtual machine.

Comparing Hyper-V R2, vSphere and XenServer 5.5 pros and cons

Kenneth van Surksum — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:35:00 GMT

When comparing Hyper-V R2, vSphere and XenServer 5.5 pros and cons, customers are often confused about which option is best. Solutions providers will find that their customers' ignorance serves as a valuable opportunity to seal new business deals. The virtualization market is very competitive, and knowing about the big players in this segment will give you a key advantage over other solutions providers. In this tip, you'll learn about the various features included in Microsoft's Hyper-V R2, VMware Inc.'s vSphere and Citrix Systems Inc.'s XenServer 5.5, and how each product can impact a customer's virtual environment.

Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 VHD's available for download

Kenneth van Surksum — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:19:00 GMT

This download contains a two Virtual Machine set for evaluating and demonstrating Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

Hyper-V Best Practices Analyzer is now available for Windows Server 2008 R2

Kenneth van Surksum — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 07:19:00 GMT

In Windows management, best practices are guidelines to configure a server as defined by experts. For example, it is considered a best practice for most server technologies to keep open ports that are required for the technologies to communicate with other networked computers and also block unused ports. Whereas best practice violations, even very important best practice violations, are not necessarily problematic, they indicate server configurations that can result in poor performance, poor reliability, unexpected conflicts, increased security risks, or other potential problems.

Announcing NVSPBind

Kenneth van Surksum — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 07:46:00 GMT

John Howard: A quick post to announce the availability of a new utility written by a colleague of mine in the Hyper-V team, Keith Mange. NVSPBind (Network Virtual Service Provider Bind) overcomes a shortfall that many people hit in server core installations of Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Hyper-V Server.

In a full installation of Windows, it is possible to enable or disable protocols from a network adapter using the network connections applet in the control panel (aka ncpl.cpl) by simply checking or unchecking protocols as necessary.

Hyper-V Live Migration and Linux VM’s

Kenneth van Surksum — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 07:38:00 GMT

Aidan Finn:Let’s get this out of the way quickly. Yes, you can run Linux virtual machines on a Hyper-V cluster and you can Live Migrate them. I have SUSE Enterprise Linux 10 SP1 VM’s running on our cluster. I can live migrate them from one host to another and not lose a ping packet during the move.

There’s a configuration that you must to to ensure this stability. I first read about it online and it is in the Microsoft documentation for the Linux integration components.

Hyper-V Manager

Kenneth van Surksum — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 07:30:00 GMT

Jerry Orman: Wrote this tool when I was setting up my laptop to run Hyper-V. I didn't want to have to open the Hyper-V manager and have a window running all the time, and was planning on using Remote Desktop Client to connect to the VM's so I could map drives and copy/paste in teh VMs. The idea was to have something that sits in the System Tray that allows you to Start, Stop, Save State, and Pause the VMs running on the box.

Understanding Microsoft’s Virtualization Technologies

Kenneth van Surksum — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 06:32:00 GMT

Virtualization has always been a complex technology, but somehow Microsoft has found a way to further complicate it by releasing its various virtualization products with similar-sounding yet nondescript names such as Hyper-V, App-V, and MED-V. To understand the role of each of these solutions and how you might use them in your business, you need to know how to navigate the maze of Microsoft virtualization terminology and methodology. Let's get started.

Microsoft helps Visual Studio 2010 developers to fully automate their labs with VM Factory

Kenneth van Surksum — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 20:06:00 GMT

Microsoft is finally approaching the .NET developers with a virtualization-friendly edition of its upcoming IDE Visual Studio 2010.

The product will be called Visual Studio Team System 2010 Lab Management, and will integrate Hyper-V R2 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 to offer a virtual lab automation platform that competes against products like VMware Lab Manager, VMLogix LabManager, Surgient Virtual Automation Platform and others.

Microsoft took forever to leverage its huge MSDN community to let Hyper-V slip into new customers’ sites.
Ironically, the company is doing it right now that VMware, who rules the developers world thanks to Workstation, seems to have lost interest in it.

Microsoft Volume Licensing Brief: Licensing Microsoft Server Products in Virtual Environments

Kenneth van Surksum — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 20:03:00 GMT

This white paper describes Microsoft licensing models for the server operating systems and server applications under virtual environments. It can help you understand how to use Microsoft server products with virtualization technologies, such as Microsoft Hyper-V technology, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, or third-party virtualization solutions that are provided by VMWare and Parallels.

Although much of the information in this white paper also applies to licenses that are purchased from channels other than Microsoft Volume Licensing, some differences exist. If you acquired licenses through a means other than a Microsoft Volume Licensing agreement, we recommend that you review the license terms that accompanied your software.

HP plans LeftHand iSCSI storage-area network virtual storage appliance for Microsoft Hyper-V

Kenneth van Surksum — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 09:23:00 GMT

Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co. and Microsoft Corp. say there will be storage elements and products involved in their collaboration alliance, including a new HP LeftHand iSCSI storage-area network (SAN) virtual appliance for Microsoft Hyper-V and storage management integration with System Center.

HP and Microsoft have pledged to spend $250 million for collaborative research and development, engineering, hiring salespeople and creating new incentives for channel partners. The deal was announced Wednesday in a webcast with CEOs Mark Hurd of HP and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, similarly to the way the CEOs of Cisco Systems Inc., EMC Corp. and VMware Corp. hailed their own Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition in November. The HP-Microsoft deal is widely seen as an answer to VCE and other recent competitive alliances

Making sense of virtualization availability options

Kenneth van Surksum — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 08:30:00 GMT

With the recent release of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and vSphere 4.0, I thought it was a good time to review some of the options available when considering the availability of your virtual servers and the applications running on them. I also will take this opportunity to describe some of the features that enable virtual machine availability. I have grouped these features into their function roles to help highlight their purpose.

The Truth About Hyper-V Memory Overcommit

Kenneth van Surksum — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:44:00 GMT

The ability to assign more memory to virtual machines than physically available on a host is called memory overcommit and is a major factor that contributes to higher VM density — running more virtual machines per host increases efficiency and reduces cost. VMware ESX has provided this feature for multiple generations, giving it an advantage over competing hypervisors.

Cloning Hyper-V Virtual Machines the Right Way (Part 3)

Kenneth van Surksum — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:40:00 GMT

Brien M. Posey: Although Microsoft’s System Center Virtual Machine Manager automates the process of cloning a virtual machine, you can perform the cloning process manually without the aid of additional software. This article starts with the explanation of the manual cloning process.

In my previous article in this series, I showed you how you could use SYSPREP to prepare a virtual machine for cloning. Once we prepared the system image, we used System Center Virtual Machine Manager to perform the actual cloning process. Although this technique works really well, I realize that not everyone owns a copy of System Center Virtual Machine Manager. That being the case, I want to show you a cloning method that you can perform using only native Windows tools.

Going Overboard with Microsoft Virtualization can get you into trouble

Kenneth van Surksum — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:59:00 GMT

So, what happens when a customer decides they love Microsoft virtualization and high availability technologies so much, they want to virtualize their entire infrastructure? And, suppose they want to be sure it’s highly available so they create a multi-node Failover Cluster to host the virtual machines. When the customer completes the project, they are so very proud of what they have done because now they can retire their old hardware and save tons of money on power and cooling costs in their datacenter. Everyone is happy and celebrations abound. And, then it happens…..someone decides that they need to shutdown the cluster(s), for whatever reason, it does not matter, and, after awhile, when they decide it is OK to bring the cluster(s) back online…they cannot. Oh, and one more thing…..the clusters are running on Windows Server 2008 R2 CORE. Trust me…this is a true story and has already happened more than once, hence the impetus behind this blog.

Hyper-V iSCSI performance numbers

Kenneth van Surksum — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 16:24:00 GMT

Tony Voellm: I’ve seen a number of threads and questions recently around iSCSI performance in virtual machines. If you are looking for Hyper-V information I suggest you check out the following paper:

iSCSI 10 Gigabit Ethernet Performance Tuning With Windows Server® 2008, Hyper-v and the NetApp FAS® 3070

http://download.microsoft.com/download/F/B/3/FB38CA2C-6694-4D25-8452-4A28668A87F2/MSFT-NetApp-10G.docx

This paper has a really good overview of storage solutions and performance comparison graphs.