Archive for July, 2009

Hyper-V 2.0 has reached Release To Manufacturing (RTM)!

23 July 2009 at 12:07 · Filed under Hyper-V, Microsoft, Tech, Virtualisation ·Tagged , , ,

Yesterday Microsoft made the announcement that Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 (both share the same code-base) have reached the RTM milestone!  Many thought this was tabled for August 6th, however that is when the likes of MSDN & TechNet users will be able to get theor mits on it!

Its all great news of course, but the important bit for us (www.thefullcircle.com), are the changes to Hyper-V, dubbed Hyper-V v2.

This is a major version upgrade to the product, indeed Microsoft is so confident in the robustness of Hyper-V 2.0 that it placed the public www.microsoft.com site on it! (already the whole of the TechNet site had been running on Hyper-V v1 since early 2008).

One of the most important inclusions in Hyper-V 2.0 is Live Migration. Live Migration allows you to move a virtual machine from one physical host to another with no down time, or at least good enough so the users, or even the network stack doesn’t see it!
While the existing release of Hyper-V supported quick migration, there were a few seconds of downtime associated with the move; that has been removed.

Another unheralded feature of Hyper-V 2.0 is Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV). Essentially, if you tried to set up a cluster using Hyper-V virtual machines in the original release, for each virtual hard drive (VHD) you had to carve out a LUN on your SAN where that VHD could reside.

Using Cluster Shared Volumes allows you to place multiple VHDs on a single LUN, while the VMs themselves still act as if each VHD is on its own LUN. All CSV volumes are stored in the ClusterStorage root directory, so navigating the different volumes is as simply as using Explorer.

Hyper-V 2.0 also supports up to 64 logical processors on the host computer and includes the ability to add to a running virtual machine (and remove them) without needing to reboot the OS on that VM. You can also dynamically allocate memory without any interruption of service. Finally, the processor compatibility feature allows live migration across different CPU versions within the same processor family (for example, Intel-to-Intel and AMD-to-AMD), but not across processor vendors (same with VMware).

Hyper-V v2.0 is what Microsoft shops (and maybe even some VMware shops!) have been waiting for.
Hyper-V now offers feature parity with VMware’s enterprise solutions in some scenarios, and in others surpasses it (see how long merging a large snapshot on VMware takes.. ;-) )

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Windows Server 2008 R2 & Hyper-V Cluster upgrades or not…

20 July 2009 at 08:36 · Filed under Hyper-V, Microsoft, Tech, Virtualisation ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Ahh the joys of participating in beta programs! ;-)

 As part of my day job, and as co-founder of IT consulting firm “The Full Circle” www.thefullcirle.com – a Microsoft Gold Partner that likes to keep ahead of the game (or at least stay in it!) by being an early adopter, we are always working with new software and that means building and rebuilding boxes.  Clearly virtualisation can make huge savings, especially in time but not always, especially when working with beta & pre-release software…

Our current journey of discovery is clustering with Windows Server 2008 Release 2 (R2) which is currently in late stages of development (went RC about month ago), and we are delighted to be a UK Early Adopter Program partner! :-)

We have been working with a couple of different builds, the beta build 7000, and recenly the Release Candidate build 7100.  Our own infrastructure was built using the beta, as is our customer EAP project, and following a number of cluster issues we performed an in-place upgrade to the RC code…

However, last week I learnt that in-place upgrades to clusters are not supported across beta/pre-releases to RC, and eventually to RTM - this is often the case as would never be a mass adopter / real-world scenario.

What this means is that from Beta->RC and from RC->RTM, you will have to do the following:

1. Move workloads onto fewest nodes (1 in my case)

2. Using ‘Failover Cluster Manager’ drill-down on Nodes, and right-click on the non-primary node, chose More Actions…, Evict – you’ll get a message warning that evicting a node can cause problems if a clustered application requires that node.. obviously! – click ‘Evict node NODENAME’

3. When it comes to the last remaining node in the cluster, due to Quorum requirements, you will need to destroy the cluster.  Select the cluster, goto More Actions… select Destroy the Cluster

4. Remove the ‘Failover cluster virtual network name account’ from AD Users & Computers

5. Being slightly paranoid, I also disabled the Failover Clustering service from with Hyper-V Configuration and removed the machine from the domain (back to a workgroup)

3. Wipe/Reload with new version of Hyper-V.

4. Create new 1 Node Cluster, join to SAN etc

5. Move VMs, offline, to new Hyper-V host.

a. Upgrade VM’s IC’s

6. Wipe/Reload remaining host

7. Join it to the cluster

8. Smile, before you do the same for RTM… ;-)

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Hyper-V Server R2 RC in-place upgrade from previous beta builds (whilst running your production workloads… ;-)

11 July 2009 at 15:02 · Filed under Hyper-V, Microsoft, Tech, Virtualisation

As part of my work with Microsoft Gold Partner ‘The Full Circle’ (http://www.thefullcircle.com) we are constantly running pre-release software and systems, but in a production enviornment (often scary, sometimes unstable, but always a learning process! – in a good way! ;-) .  Our virtualised Small Business Server 2008 server is no exception and since the beginning of 2009 has been running under Microsoft’s Hyper-V – first under Windows Server 2008 Server Core, and this last few months under Hyper-V Server and recently Hyper-V Server R2 RC.

Our first Hyper-V R2 (aka yper-V V2) beta build was 7000 – the same as the public beta of Windows 7 (Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 share the same code-base).  However, earlier this week I was at our colo facility adding a new Hyper-V Server to our Hyper-V cluster and had forgotten the DVD media (doh!), anyway the benefits of a 100Mbps Internet handoff meant this issue was quickly rectified with a swift 1.23GB download (took almost as long to burn the ISO to DVD ;-) .

When building the box I quickly noticed a couple of differences, namely..
A 100Mb system reserved partition (back down from 200Mb previously)
A few subtle UI tweaks (grey background, Windows logo animation, R2 prominense, etc.)

..closer inspection once built revealed some different menu options in the sconfig (formerly HVconfig – dos style configuration menu) around remote management such as PowerShell (R2 of Hyper-V Server, like server core supports .Net Framework and therefore another level of management and application support).  The biggest tell of course, is in the bottom right hand side of the screen – it no longer says ‘Windows 7 Standard.  For testing purposes only. Build 7000′ but Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard.  Evaluation copy. Build 7100′

Having these new capabilities was great, however it also gave me another job to do – upgrade the existing primary server from build 7000 to 7100.  Yep the one that is running our production SBS 2008 server, as in all of our Email, SharePoint, work, personal, you name it, its on this VM.

1st challenge – you can’t mount an ISO (unless you have an ILO or DRAC/BMC card) so you need to put the disk in the server

2nd challenge – don’t restart and boot from the DVD to perform the upgrade, remember its an in-place upgrade

 

I still rely on JHoward’s great bit of code – HVRemote (run cscript //h:script 1st), although note if you are managing your enviornment with System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) then you’ll get a message advising the tool is Quitting

saved states are not compatible (just like the early Hyper-V beta back in March-April 2008

 

license agreement

compatibility report

copying files

rm

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HP publish a case study of the NMB EBS deployment using the C3000 ‘shorty’

11 July 2009 at 11:34 · Filed under Centro, EBS 2008, Microsoft ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

A couple of weeks ago HP published a great looking case study that The Full Circle (www.thefullcircle.com) and our customer, Newman Martin and Buchan (www.nmbinsurance.com), have been working with HP to produce for this last few months.

If you’re interested the link to the PDF version is http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA2-6324ENW.pdf

We will also be doing something in a little more search friendly HTML! ;-)

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