Archive for the 'Server Virtualization' Category

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  

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..

The Windows Server Migration team’s been cooking…no, not cranberry sauce and stuffing, but a new Windows Server Migration Utilities download package that lets you use the Windows Server Migration Tools to migrate Hyper-V and Routing and Remote Access Services (RRAS). Brand-spankin’-new beta migration guides are available for both Hyper-V and RRAS, with detailed, step-by-step guidance about how to use the Windows Server Migration Tools (after the Utilities package is installed, of course) to migrate to servers that are running Windows Server 2008 R2.

Still not feeling the love? We’ve got new beta migration guides for Health Registration Authority (HRA), Network Policy Server (NPS), and Windows Server Update Services 3.0 SP2 (WSUS). HRA, NPS, and WSUS don’t even require the Windows Server Migration Tools; you can migrate from prep to production, just by following the guides.

Download tools: https://connect.microsoft.com/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?SiteID=468&DownloadID=15664

Supported role configurations and settings

This section identifies the configurations and settings that can be migrated by using the migration tools, and the configurations and settings that must be migrated manually. The following table provides a summary:

The following configurations and settings can be migrated automatically:

• Most virtual machine configurations. Virtual machines and their data are moved as part of the migration, but some configurations require manual intervention, as described below.
• Hyper-V settings. These include the system-wide settings and the authorization store.
• Internal and private virtual networks.
• Virtual network adapter settings in the management operating system. When Hyper-V is configured to use a physical network adapter as a bridge that virtual machines can use to access a physical network, a virtual network adapter is created in the management operating system (which runs the Hyper-V role). For this virtual network adapter, the migration process automatically migrates the IP settings, bindings, and MAC address of this virtual network adapter. However, the connection between the virtual network adapter and the physical network adapter must be re-established manually, as described in the migration steps.
• Virtual machine queue (VMQ) and chimney settings for networking.

The following configurations and settings require manual intervention after the migration tools are used:

• Firewall settings. Firewall settings are recreated on the destination server using the default values that Hyper-V is installed with. If you have modified any of the firewall settings from these default values, you will need to make the same modifications on the destination server.
• External virtual networks. The migration tool recreates the virtual networks on the destination server, but recreates external virtual networks as internal virtual networks. You will need to modify each of these networks to connect it to the appropriate physical network adapter on the destination server, as described in the migration steps.
• VFD and ISO files. These files are not migrated because they are not required for the virtual machine to operate and are not supported by the Import and Export cmdlets. To make them available to a migrated virtual machine, manually copy these files to the destination server and then reattach them to the virtual machine after it is migrated.
• Connections to physical disks directly attached to virtual machines. These connections are not migrated because the disk references might not be valid on the destination server. To make a physical disk available to a migrated virtual machine, connect the disk to the destination server and then to the virtual machine after it is migrated, as described in the migration steps.
• Customized remote administration settings. If you have customized Hyper-V for remote access, you will need to perform some additional procedures to recreate the DCOM and WMI Namespace settings. The migration steps identify the point at which you should take perform these procedures, as well as provide a recommended tool or script to complete the procedure.

Migrating Multiple Roles

The Hyper-V role is not dependent on any other roles. As a best practice, we recommend that no other roles are installed on a server running Hyper-V.

Migration scenarios that are not supported

The following migration scenarios are not supported:

• The saved state of a virtual machine under one of the following conditions:
  • When moving from Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 to Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2.
  • When moving between physical computers that have different processor steppings or vendors—for example, migrating from a computer with an Intel processor to a computer with an AMD processor.
• Virtual machine configuration under one of the following conditions:
  • When the number of virtual processors configured for the virtual machine is more than the number of logical processors on the destination server.
  • When the memory configured for a virtual machine is greater than the available memory on the destination server.
• Consolidation of physical servers to virtual machines, or consolidating multiple instances of Hyper-V to one instance.

The Windows Server Migration team is collecting feedback about the beta guides and the Utilities download package through the end of 2009. You can use the following methods to speak your mind about Migration Guides and the Windows Server 2008 R2 Migration Utilities Beta package. Share your migration experiences; they’re critical to the quality of the Migration Guides, Windows Server 2008 R2 Migration Utilities, and the whole Migration solution for WS08 R2!

• Take the Windows Server 2008 R2 Migration Utilities Beta Survey. Nothing goes better with a cup of coffee.
• Got an earful about how to improve Migration guides or utilities? Reply to the Windows Server 2008 R2 Migration Utilities release announcement on the Windows Server Migration forum.
• Found a bug in our migration guides? Send e-mail to smcpe at Microsoft.com. Include a description of your migration scenario (especially the operating systems that are running on your source and destination servers), and any workarounds that you used to resolve the problem. Unless the problem defied workarounds, of course; in that case, you can just send us a hard luck story and/or flame mail, we still want to hear from you.
• Found a bug in the tools? Send e-mail to smcpe at Microsoft.com. Include a description of your migration scenario (especially the operating systems that are running on your source and destination servers), the steps to reproduce the bug, and the following logs:
  • %windir%\Logs\SmigDeploy.log
  • %windir%\Logs\ServerMigration.log
  • On Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2: %localappdata%\SvrMig\Log
  • On Windows Server 2003: %userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\SvrMig\Log

 Visit the Windows Server Migration Portal on TechCenter to see the complete collection of Windows Server 2008 R2 Migration Guides, and a truckload of other migration resources, too.