HyperVoria

Microsoft’s Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track Accelerates Private Cloud Deployment

Bink — Sun, 22 May 2011 22:39:59 GMT

What an exciting week at Tech Ed for Private Cloud solutions from Microsoft and our great partners! It started with the announcement of NetApp and Cisco joining the Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track program and bringing their solution to market immediately. We had a session where Alex Jauch from NetApp did a very cool demo. He showed provisioning of Cisco UCS blades via an Opalis workflow and PowerShell. He followed that with a Disaster Recovery scenario – bringing down a private cloud in Seattle and bringing the infrastructure back up in Tacoma without losing connectivity to the hosted applications.

Next, HP’s private cloud offering in the Fast Track program provided an incredible display of power – supporting thousands of VM’s on just a 16-node configuration. It was amazing to see this system in action, specifically the quick provisioning and de-provisioning of virtual machines, automating the process of workload balancing and the ability to keep the infrastructure available through advanced monitoring and automation. This live Fast Track implementation clearly demonstrates the benefit of shared resources pools with advanced automation and management.

And to top it all off, Fujitsu announced on Wednesday that their Fast Track offering is coming to market. Fujitsu’s is based on their Fujitsu PRIMERGY BX900 blade server system and ETERNUS storage systems.

Keep looking here for updates on how to implement private clouds in your organization – today - with Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track offerings from partners around the globe.

Announcing Enhanced Hardware Virtualization Support for Exchange 2010

Bink — Sun, 22 May 2011 13:21:46 GMT

The Microsoft Exchange team is enhancing positioning by including additional supported scenarios regarding Exchange Server 2010 running under hardware virtualization software. As of today, the following support scenarios are being updated, for Exchange 2010 SP1, and later:

The Unified Messaging server role is supported in a virtualized environment.

Combining Exchange 2010 high availability solutions (database availability groups (DAGs)) with hypervisor-based clustering, high availability, or migration solutions that will move or automatically failover mailbox servers that are members of a DAG between clustered root servers, is now supported.

Due to improvements we made in Exchange Server 2010 SP1, along with more comprehensive testing of Exchange 2010 in a virtualized environment, we are happy to provide this additional deployment flexibility to our customers. The updated support guidance applies to any hardware virtualization vendor participating in the Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP).

In addition, we are also releasing the Best Practices for Virtualizing Exchange Server 2010 with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V whitepaper. This whitepaper is designed to provide technical guidance on Exchange server roles, capacity planning, sizing and performance, as well as high availability best practices.

Complete system requirements for Exchange Server 2010 running under hardware virtualization software can be found in Exchange 2010 System Requirements. Also, the support policy for Microsoft software running in non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software can be found here Support policy for Microsoft software running in non-Microsoft hardware virtualization softwareare

Announcing Enhanced Hardware Virtualization Support for Exchange 2010 - Exchange Team Blog -

Re published due to server switch

Best Practices for Virtualizing Exchange Server 2010 with Windows Server® 2008 R2 Hyper V

Bink — Sun, 22 May 2011 13:19:19 GMT

The purpose of this paper is to provide guidance and best practices for deploying Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010 in a virtualized environment with Windows Server® 2008 R2 Hyper V™ technology. This paper has been carefully composed to be relevant to organizations of any size.

Many organizations today rely on some degree of virtualization. Whether it is a few virtual machines running on a single physical computer or a whole server farm across multiple root servers, virtualization optimizes investment in hardware and network infrastructure by:

• Increasing the utilization of underused hardware.

• Improving server availability.

• Reducing IT costs. The purpose of this paper is to provide guidance and best practices for deploying Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010 in a virtualized environment with Windows Server® 2008 R2 Hyper V™ technology.

This paper has been carefully composed to be relevant to organizations of any size.

Download details Best Practices for Virtualizing Exchange Server 2010 with Windows Server® 2

Reposted due to server switch

Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Component Architecture (with Service Pack 1)

Bink — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 12:08:41 GMT

This poster provides a visual reference for understanding key Hyper-V technologies in Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1. It focuses on architecture, snapshots, live migration, virtual networking, storage, RemoteFX and Dynamic Memory.

You can use this poster in conjunction with the previously published Windows Server 2008 Hyper-v Component Architecture, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 component posters (see http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=5567b22a-8c47-4840-a88d-23146fd93151 , http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=193499 and http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=179116 ).

This poster has been updated for Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 with Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX.

part of the updated poster

Download PDF Download details Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Component Architecture (with Service Pack 1)

Solutions for Virtualizing Domain Controllers (Part 5)

Kenneth van Surksum — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 13:19:00 GMT

Brien M. Posey: So far my discussion of domain controller placement within a virtual datacenter has revolved primarily around preventing them from being a single point of failure within your domain infrastructure. There are however, some additional considerations that I have yet to touch on. In this article, I want to talk about some of the steps that are necessary for preserving the integrity of the Active Directory in a virtualized environment.

Right about now, you might be wondering how the simple act of virtualizing a domain controller could threaten the integrity of the Active Directory. There are actually a few different things that could potentially lead to Active Directory corruption if your virtual domain controllers are implemented improperly.

The Case of the Pending VM Snapshot Merge

Kenneth van Surksum — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 12:54:00 GMT

Jeremy Hagan: Recently I had a virtual machine stop responding. Upon investigation I noticed that the machine was paused. This usually happens when the underlying disk has run out of space and it was the case in this instance as well. I thought this was unusual since I have followed the Microsoft recommendations in my production Hyper-V environment by having one LUN per VM and using fixed-size VHD files, so there was nothing that should grow to fill up the disk. Digging further I found that the machine was actually running on a differencing disk, not a fixed size VHD and that this differencing disk (AVHD) was there because there had been a snapshot in the past that was still waiting to merge into the parent VHD file.

Time Synchronization in Hyper-V

Kenneth van Surksum — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 19:28:00 GMT

Ben Armstrong: There is a lot of confusion about how time synchronization works in Hyper-V – so I wanted to take the time to sit down and write up all the details.

There are actually multiple problems that exist around keeping time inside of virtual machines – and Hyper-V tackles these problems in different ways.

Server Virtualization Validation Program

Bink — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 17:44:35 GMT

Anyone who has worked with virtualization software knows that sometimes the hardest question to answer is “but is this configuration supported?”. This is a question that Microsoft has spent a lot of time trying to answer – and a while ago we started the Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP for short) to provide a way for Microsoft server software to be fully supported on a variety of virtualization platforms (those from Microsoft and from other virtualization vendors).

Recently the SVVP team updated their website to make this question even easier to answer – by adding the Support Policy Wizard. This is a simple three step wizard. On the first page you select the Microsoft server software that you want to run:

Continue at source:

Am I supported (now you know) - Virtual PC Guy's WebLog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Virtual Networking for Hyper-V (Part 5)

Kenneth van Surksum — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 21:09:00 GMT

Brien M. Posey: So far, my primary focus in this article series has revolved primarily around the interaction between the physical and the virtual networks used by Hyper-V. In this article, I want to turn my attention to another aspect of virtual networking – VLANs.

Although VLANs have been around practically forever, they are one of those networking concepts that a lot of administrators don’t understand. Don’t get me wrong though, there is nothing overly difficult about setting up a VLAN. It’s just that VLANs aren’t one of those things that everyone uses. As such, the only exposure that many network administrators have had to VLANs is what they have received while studying for certification exams.

In spite of the fact that VLANs are usually optional in the world of physical networking, they are actually very important in virtual datacenters that are using Hyper-V. Before I explain why this is the case, I want to give you some background about VLANs.

Updates to Dynamic Memory UI in SP1 RC - Part 1

Kenneth van Surksum — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 20:11:00 GMT

In the release candidate build of service pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 we have updated some parts of the Dynamic Memory user interface. There were some top-level goals that we had with the Dynamic Memory user interface in the Hyper-V Manager (our MMC interface). Specifically we wanted users to be able to: * Quickly see if their Hyper-V server was “in a good state” * Quickly identify if specific virtual machines did not have enough memory * Know how much memory was being used by each virtual machine * Know how far away from “good” a given virtual machine was

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 Release Candidate

Kenneth van Surksum — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 07:31:00 GMT

Improve the efficiency and availability of IT resources and applications with the new virtualization innovations provided in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 RC. Dynamic Memory and Microsoft RemoteFXTM, to help businesses further optimize their datacenter and desktops. Dynamic Memory lets Hyper-V administrators pool available memory on a physical host and dynamically distribute it to any virtual machine(s) running on that host.

Using Quick Storage Migration in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2

Kenneth van Surksum — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 19:40:00 GMT

In this article, you will learn how to deploy a Hyper-V virtualization environment that uses System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 to provide the ability to migrate a virtual machine between two domain-joined, unclustered servers with different storage devices, using a feature called Quick Storage Migration. This feature is useful in the case where you do not deploy a Windows Failover Cluster (which is a requirement for Quick Migration or Live Migration) with shared storage, but still desire a managed process to move a virtual machine between Hyper-V servers while minimizing downtime.

Using Hyper-V Differencing Disks with VDI

Kenneth van Surksum — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 19:39:00 GMT

On the Virtualization with Hyper-V Technical Resources page, we’ve posted the “Virtual Hard Disk Performance White Paper.” This paper contains information about the performance implications of operations that use a differencing disk with Hyper-V, as well as the pro and cons of using differencing disks. All the information in this document is relevant to using differencing disks within a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environment. In this post, we cover the specifics of implementing differencing disks within the Microsoft VDI system.

OpenStack cloud platform to get Microsoft Hyper-V integration

Kenneth van Surksum — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 20:27:00 GMT

The OpenStack project — an open-source cloud-computing platform created by RackSpace, NASA and a growing list of partners — is getting some support from Microsoft. Microsoft officials said on October 22 that they are partnering with Cloud.com to provide “integration and support” for Windows Server 2008 R2’s Hyper-V hypervisor with OpenStack. Cloud.com is one of the current OpenStack contributors and participants.

Virtual Hard Disk Getting Started Guide

Kenneth van Surksum — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 20:18:00 GMT

This guide provides an introduction to virtual hard disks (VHDs) in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. It includes an overview of technologies that you use to configure VHDs, as well as procedures to help guide you through deploying VHDs.

Virtual Networking for Hyper-V (Part 4)

Kenneth van Surksum — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 20:02:00 GMT

Brien M. Posey: In the previous article in this series, I showed you the role that virtualized network switches play in a Hyper-V environment. Although virtual switches are the backbone of any virtual network, physical network adapters are nearly as important. That being the case, I want to turn my attention to the way that physical network adapters are used by a Hyper-V server.

How Well Does Hyper-V Take On VMware?

Kenneth van Surksum — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 18:34:00 GMT

Microsoft has been busy refining the latest version of its virtualization hypervisor, Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. The product now supports live migrations, a clustered virtual machine file system, 64-bit operating systems, and machine specs similar to those of comparable VMware offerings. With those heavy-duty features in place, it's a good time to look at how viable Hyper-V is as an alternative to VMware's market-leading ESX server virtualization platform. Below, we compare ESX with Hyper-V feature sets in eight critical categories

How Hyper-V responds to disk failure

Kenneth van Surksum — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 18:29:00 GMT

Ben Armstrong: I have talked to a handful of people over the years who have had to deal with Hyper-V servers that have suffered disk failure. This can be quite problematic to diagnose and troubleshoot – so I wanted to spend some time digging into what happens and what you should look for. To simulate this scenario; I create a virtual machine with two virtual hard disks. The first virtual hard disk was stored locally, while the second virtual hard disk was stored on a flash USB stick. I then put the operating system on the first virtual hard disk, and an application on the second virtual hard disk (yes – the application was Plants vs. Zombies). Once it was up and running – I pulled the flash USB stick out of the server – and recorded what happened.

Tips for building a Hyper-V high-availability cluster

Kenneth van Surksum — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 18:06:00 GMT

Eric Beehler: As you might expect, the first thing IT managers notice about virtualization is the way it lowers costs. Systems administrators, however, are usually more interested in how it can save on downtime. If you are considering Microsoft Hyper-V for your production environment, you’ll want to know how to take advantage of its high availability option. To that end, let’s take a look at some of the best practices for high availability with Hyper-V

Virtual Networking for Hyper-V (Part 3)

Kenneth van Surksum — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 17:49:00 GMT

Brien M. Posey: In my previous article in this series, I showed you how a child partition was able to access the external network through a virtual network switch located on the parent partition. Toward the end of that article, I alluded to the fact that a parent partition can contain multiple virtual switches. In this article, I want to explain the benefits to this type of architecture.

Effects of offline System Partition on Hyper-V cluster node

Kenneth van Surksum — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 20:13:00 GMT

Hans Vredevoort: One of my colleagues noticed rather strange behavior with one of the Windows Server 2008 R2 servers which is part of a 7-node Hyper-V cluster built with HP BL460c G6 blade servers. This behavior showed up during host level backups of Hyper-V virtual machines.

Configuring Native Hyper-V VLANs with HP NIC Teams and HP Virtual Connect

Kenneth van Surksum — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 13:07:00 GMT

Hans Vredevoort: In my previous blog I promised to publish my findings of implementing Native Hyper-V VLANs with HP NIC Teams created by HP Network Configuration Utility v10.10.0.x which was released in September.

Transparent Hyper-V VLANs now supported with HP NIC Teams

Kenneth van Surksum — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 19:48:00 GMT

Hans Vredevoort: Using VLANs in Hyper-V virtual machines has always been a bit messy with HP’s teaming sofware, aka HP Network Configuration Utility for Windows Server 2008 R2. Until now a lot of steps had to be taken

Virtual Machine Servicing Tool 3.0

Kenneth van Surksum — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 19:20:00 GMT

This Solution Accelerator provides automated tools and guidance that IT professionals can use to update offline virtual machines, templates, and virtual hard disks efficiently and without exposing them to security risks. Virtual Machine Servicing Tool 3.0 helps you reduce IT costs by making it easier to update your offline virtual machines, templates, and virtual hard disks with the latest operating system and application patches—without introducing vulnerabilities into your IT infrastructure.

P2V Migration for Software Assurance Beta 2

Kenneth van Surksum — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 19:19:00 GMT

P2V Migration for Software Assurance can now be implemented using System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Operating System Deployment as well as native Lite Touch Installation with the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010. Computer refresh, replace and restore task sequence templates for Configuration Manager are included and documented in this Beta release.