Microsoft has released an update for SCVMM 2008 R2. More details on: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978560

How to obtain the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 hotfix rollup package:

Option 1:         This update is available on Microsoft Update.

To obtain the update from Microsoft Update, follow these steps on the Virtual Machine Manager Server:

1. Click Start, and then select Control Panel.
2. In Control Panel, double-click Windows Update.
3. In the Windows Update window, click Check Online for updates from Microsoft Update.
4. Click the important updates are available hyper-link.
5. Select the Update for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 (KB978560), and then click OK.
6. Click Install updates to install the VMM hotfix rollup package.

Note A restart is required if the Virtual Machine Manager service or the Virtual Machine Manager Agent service is running when the rollup is installed on the Virtual Machine Manager server.

Updating the VMM agent on the Hyper-V and Virtual Server hosts

This update requires updating the VMM agent on the Hyper-V and Virtual Server hosts. The hosts will have a status of Needs Attention if the agent has not been updated.

To update the VMM agent on multiple hosts, follow these steps:

1. Open the Virtual Machine Manager console.
2. Click Administration, and then click Managed Computers.
3. Select the hosts, and then click Update Agent.
4. Enter your credentials, and then click OK.

Option 2:         Manual download

To manually download the hotfix rollup from the Microsoft Update Catalog, visit the following Microsoft Web site:

http://catalog.update.microsoft.com/v7/site/Search.aspx?q=978560

 Welcome to the public Release Candidate for Data Protection Manager 2010

 Please download the Release Candidate and try it for yourself. 

 If you have questions or feedback go to the DPM newsgroup here.

The HP Sizer for Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 R2 is an automated, downloadable tool that provides quick and helpful sizing guidance for “best-fit” HP server and storage configurations running in a Hyper-V R2 environment. The tool is intended to assist with the planning of a Hyper-V R2 virtual server deployment project. It enables the user to quickly compare different solution configurations and produces a customizable server and storage solution complete with a detail Bill of Materials (BOM) that includes part numbers and prices.

The HP Sizer for Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 R2 allows users to create new solutions, open already existing solutions, or use other types of performance data collecting tools, such as the Microsoft Assessment and Planning tool (MAP), to build rich Hyper-V R2 configurations based on HP server and storage technology. The tool allows rapid comparison of Hyper-V R2 characterizations using various HP server and storage choices.

HP Sizer for Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 R2: http://g3w1656g-vip.houston.hp.com/sb/installs/Hyper-VR2_Sizer.zip  

Getting Started: Remote Desktop Services

Updated: July 31, 2009

Applies To: Windows Server 2008 R2

The following topics are available in this collection in both a Web version and a download version:

I found a couple of posts that gives some new information about Microsoft plans with the Azure platform.

Project Sydney will create secure ‘virtual network overlay’ for cloud computing

With Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform set to go live on New Year’s Day, the company is looking ahead to later in 2010 when it will unveil a new security structure for multi-tenant cloud environments as well as private cloud software based on the same technology used to build Azure. Hasan Alkhatib, the Azure senior architect, described the Microsoft security project code-named “Sydney” Thursday at an Xconomy forum on cloud computing held at Microsoft’s New England R&D Center in Cambridge, Mass. In addition to embedding greater security into the public cloud, Alkhatib said Microsoft is planning to help customers build private cloud networks within their own data centers, using the same software Azure is based on. “Every customer says ‘where can we get a private cloud?’” Alkhatib said. “We’re building them. Within a short period of time private clouds will be available with the same technology we’ve used to build Windows Azure.” However, Alkhatib said he thinks private clouds lack most of the benefits of public clouds, and focused most of his talk on the Azure services that will be offered publicly over the Web. Project Sydney, unveiled last month at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference, addresses security in virtualized, multi-tenant environments in which customers are typically sharing data center resources. Sydney will provide isolation between customers’ cloud resources with network virtualization, and provide secure connections between an enterprise’s internal data center equipment and what it uses in the cloud, Alkhatib said. Sydney will aggregate “any arbitrary set of endpoints,” including servers and client machines inside the enterprise and resources in a public cloud service like Azure, and create what Alkhatib called a “virtual network overlay” which is secured with IPsec and which can only be accessed by those authorized to do so. “All these elements appear to each other as if they have a dedicated, private network,” Alkhatib said. Regulatory compliance in cloud computing is still a major challenge, however. Alkhatib said the IT industry must lobby agencies to accept new security guidelines that are based on logical, rather than physical structures. Microsoft hasn’t announced a release date for Sydney but is committed to delivering at least a beta version in 2010, Alkhatib said. The private cloud product based on Azure may also come out in 2010, he said. Microsoft today is running Azure out of data centers in Chicago and Texas, and will add four more data centers in January in Dublin, Amsterdam, Singapore and Hong Kong, Alkhabit said.

Is Microsoft is developing its own cloud storage O/S??

Comment from the source: Microsoft’s Azure storage offering suggests it is developing its own cloud storage operating system.

Azure was developed in a Windows Azure Group which was separate from the Windows and Servers Group. The two organisations have now been combined into a new Servers and Cloud Division (SCD) unit, headed up by a senior VP, Amitabh Srivastava. SCD itself is part of Bob Muglia’s Servers and Tools Business unit. The Azure cloud service, based on Microsoft’s own data centres, is dependent on virtualised server instances, child partitions in Hyper-V-speak, using Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Users will access these in a public cloud across the Internet and set up virtual server applications. These applications will access storage that provides three kinds of data store: Blobs, tables and queues. Blobs – binary large objects – are data and metadata in up to 50GB lumps. A Blob could be formatted as a single NTFS volume VHD (Virtual Hard Disk). For more fine-grained storage needs tables hold a simple hierarchy of entities with properties. These are not relational database tables, nor are they accessed by SQL. The idea is to provide for massive scale out across multiple storage boxes, with a table capable of storing several billions of entities constituting terabytes of data. Queues hold Azure infrastructure requests from one Azure application instance to request a service from another or send a message to another. These instances, Hyper-V child partitions, are of two types: web role instances and worker role instances. THe web role instance communicates with users outside the cloud via incoming HTTP or HTTPS requests. Worker role instances are like Windows services or batch jobs.

There is more information on the Azure infrastructure here (pdf) and here (pdf) and here.

Sources:

• http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/121009-microsoft-cloud-computing-security.html
• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/10/azure_storage_boxes/

NetApp Storage Best Practices for Microsoft Virtualization, also known as TR-3702, has been updated for the release of Hyper-V R2 and SCVMM 2008 R2.

In addition to updating the old sections to match the new technology, we have also added new sections covering the following areas:

• Hyper-V Server Networking Considerations
• Hyper-V Cluster Networking Considerations
• Hyper-V Server Storage Provisioning
• Virtual Machine Storage Provisioning
• NetApp FlexClones and Snapshot technology
• Backup and Recovery
• Disaster Recovery and High Availability

 All in all, about 50-60 additional pages were added over the previous version, now containing not just best practices, but additional content provided to educate the reader on how and why we established some of our best practices. I have received lots of great feedback on this document so far, mostly because it’s packed with everything that folks have been asking for to help them with their Hyper-V deployments. The only gaps that exist (in my opinion) cover Storage Layout Recommendations and MetroCluster. I have started a blog series on NetApp Storage Layout for Hyper-V and my team recently released a new Solutions Guide for Microsoft Applications virtualized using Hyper-V and deployed for High Availability with NetApp MetroCluster (TR-3804), which one of my team members blogged about recently here. Many of the recommendations provided in the blog series on Storage Layout, as well as findings from our work on the Solutions Guide and Reference Architectures using Hyper-V and MetroCluster, will be incorporated into the next version of TR-3702 (v3.1) due out sometime February 2010.

But that’s not all – TR-3702’s sibling document, the NetApp Implementation Guide for Microsoft Virtualization (TR-3733), has been updated as well. 

While TR-3702 is focused on just providing guidelines and best practices for integrated architectures and implementations of Microsoft® Hyper-V with NetApp® storage solutions, TR-3733 is focused on providing step-by-step guidance on deploying Microsoft® Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) with NetApp® storage solutions. Therefore, we have included not just step-by-step directions, but screen shots as well on many of the processes to assist newcomers to NetApp, Hyper-V, and SCVMM with deploying an integrated solution. All of the step-by-step guidance follows the best practices established in TR-3702 and most of the best practices are represented. There are some gaps, but I am working to cover those in upcoming blog posts for the month of December, as well as working them into the next version of TR-3733 (v3.1), which should be published in February sometime.

One stop Hyper-V Technical Information and Resources page released. 

For all your information about Hyper-V visit the website below. Information regarding the following  subjects can be found there:

• Plan
• Install
• Best Practices
• Deployment
• Pre-Deployment Tools
• Management
• Performance
• Workload Specific Guidance

Microsoft now has one page that lists these resources http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/dd565807.aspx

The CoreConfig Team is pleased to announce the latest version of Core Configurator built and designed for Windows Server 2008 R2 Core edition!

It is completely open source so it can be amended and change to fit your requirements, this version has been a year in the making and has been written in powershell with a reference to Winforms so that a GUI format is displayed.

The primary focus of this project is to try and get feedback and contributions back from the community to make this a tool the best/ free tool everyone will want in there toolkit, so if you have some code or features that you might want included then please leave a comment and we will get in touch.

Core Configuration tasks include:

• Product Licensing
• Networking Features
• DCPromo Tool
• ISCSI Settings
• Server Roles and Features
• User and Group Permissions
• Share Creation and Deletion
• Dynamic Firewall settings
• Display | Screensaver Settings
• Add & Remove Drivers
• Proxy settings
• Windows Updates (Including WSUS)
• Multipath I/O
• Hyper-V including virtual machine thumbnails
• JoinDomain and Computer rename
• Add/remove programs
• Services
• WinRM
• Complete logging of all commands executed

Please Download the latest release and run Start_CoreConfig.wsf.  Download: http://www.codeplex.com/CoreConfig

If you require the previous release for Windows Server 2008 R1 then please see the download section for Core Configurator 1.1 as Core Configurator 2.0 requires Powershell 2.0 and NetFx.

Physical overview of the hardware:

 When you add the legacy adapter to a Hyper-V virtual machine to do an PXE boot and you notice that you don’t get an IP address something is wrong. The following needs to be checked.

BIOS startup order

Is the legacy adapter added to the VM

The basis settings are now checked. You will get an IP if everything else is set up good within DHCP and RIS.

But what if you see that the boot process is disturbed because the network drivers can’t be loaded. Let’s take a look at the version of the RIS server. If it is Windows Server 2003 SP2, then you probably will be fine. If you’re running RIS on Windows Server 2003 SP1 and you do a PXE boot to this system from a Hyper-V based VM then there is a change that you will not be successful. The cause is a missing network driver. Similar problem in this post: http://blogs.technet.com/raghavan/archive/2009/05/12/3239838.aspx. The solution could be the following.

• Extract the dc21×4vm.inf and dc21×4vm.dll from a Vista based OS and inject them into the RIS RemoteInstall directory. The following path is an example: “D:\RemoteInstall\Setup\[language]\Images\[OSFolder]\i386”
• Restart the RIS service.

(or you could upgrade to WDS on Server 2008 R2..  J  )

Now boot the VM again and see of the RIS process continues.

Don’t forget to remove the legacy adapter and add the Synthetic NIC again.

Happy RISsing..