Lot of customers have been asking me about booting Hyper-V R2 from a USB drive
There is documentation for that
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee731893(WS.10).aspx
To make this process easier there is a app for that
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/BootHVSR2FromUSB
This session will focus on the key technologies within the Microsoft Product Family that address very real needs that any organisations adopting VWWare Technology has. We will focus on discussing how to manage VMWare and Hyper-V side by side.
Technologies covered include System Center Virtual Machine Manager, Windows Server 2008 R2
Speaker details
Amit Pawar has been with Microsoft Australia for nearly nine years in various roles from Support Engineer, Consultant to currently being the Technology Specialist for Windows Server and Virtualisation. Amit has been involved with many successful proof of concepts, pilots and production deployment of Microsoft virtualisation technologies in both enterprise and small medium business customers in Australia.
View this webcast at http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-AU&EventID=1032416803&CountryCode=AU
| Microsoft Virtualization is a sponsor at this online event, organized by Windows IT Pro. The event is an interactive experience with staffed booths by Microsoft, Citrix, Certeon, and Symantec. The event also includes educational chats to complement each conference session. If you miss the real-time event, the virtual platform will be available on demand for one year. This event is targeted at IT Professionals who want to learn about virtualization and Hyper-V. During the day's presentations, technical experts Michael Otey, Michael Campbell, and John Savill will discuss: · Hyper-V architecture · The differences between Hyper-V and VMware's ESX Server · Hyper-V high-availability features · The capabilities of live migration Microsoft will provide: · Microsoft virtualization booth featuring product information, presentations, and live booth reps during the live event · Keynote participation: Co-presentation with Citrix (Dai Vu and Gordon Mangione) · Virtualization 360 technical webcast with 15 minutes live Q&A (Edwin Yuen) Make sure to join us at this event and invite customers and partners to check it out! Register for this event. |
Now that 6 core processors are available from both Intel and AMD, the virtualisation team at Microsoft have done some analysis on how much it will cost to run Hypervisors from Microsoft and VMware on these new machines.
Refer to http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/06/28/Beware-the-VMware-Core-Tax-and-More.aspx
Microsoft has updated the support policy for running SQL server in a virtual machine that has been clustered.
Refer to Support policy for Microsoft SQL Server products that are running in a hardware virtualization environment
With the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 Microsoft has released a lot of documentation that supports Hyper-V and Failover clustering.
For a consolidated list of these resources head on over to http://blogs.msdn.com/clustering/archive/2009/04/20/9557017.aspx
The past few days there has been an very robust discussion through blogs and videos about how VMware is spreading FUD about Hyper-V.
Refer to
Day 1 - http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/05/09/hyper-v-winning-daily-vmware-fud-reaching-new-heights.aspx
Day 2 - http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/05/09/day-two-of-the-scott-drummond-vmware-fud-fiasco.aspx
All I want to add to this is that customers looking to consolidate their workloads on a hypervisor need to do their own testing to validate that Hyper-V will support their requirements.
This is great new for customers who have been waiting for Microsoft to support Red Hat operating systems on Hyper-V. For details head on over to http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/02/15/Microsoft-and-Red-Hat-Joint-Technical-Support.aspx
Author Mitch Tulloch has teamed with the Microsoft Virtualization Teams to write a free e-book that is aimed at IT professionals who want to learn about Microsoft’s virtualisation solutions from the Desktop to the Datacenter. This book covers technologies like:
1. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V
2. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008
3. Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5
4. Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualisation
5. Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
6. Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services
7. Roaming User Profiles
8. Folder Redirection
9. Offline Folders
To get this book for free head on over to Free e-book offer on Microsoft virtualization
Microsoft is creating a raft of webcasts to cover the Virtualisation 360 story that talks about virtualisation from Desktop to Data centre.
Today, Microsoft's virtualization toolset for the data centre includes:
1. Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, which consolidates server roles as separate virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical machine.
2. On the desktop side, we offer Microsoft Terminal Services, which virtualizes the presentation of entire desktops or specific applications;
3. Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V), which transforms applications into centrally-managed virtual services that are never installed and don't conflict with other applications;
4. Microsoft VDI, which allows customers to centralize the storage, execution, and management of a Windows desktop in the data centre; and Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V, formerly Kidaro) which, with Virtual PC, enables client-hosted desktop virtualization, where you can deploy and centrally manage VMs on Windows desktops while providing a seamless user experience.
5. To simplify management of your entire infrastructure, we offer Microsoft System Center, which lets you manage both physical and virtual assets for clients and servers, including multiple hypervisors, all with the same platform.
The webcasts are designed to cover the Microsoft Virtualisation story from Desktop to Data centre
Session List
- 01/14/2009, TechNet Webcast: Virtualization in a Nutshell
- 01/16/2009, TechNet Webcast: Selecting the Right Candidates for Virtualization
- 01/21/2009, TechNet Webcast: Virtualizing Test and Development Environments for a Quick Return on Investment
- 01/23/2009, TechNet Webcast: Managing the Virtualized Test and Development Environment
- 01/28/2009, TechNet Webcast: If I Virtualize It, How Do I Manage It?
- 01/29/2009, TechNet Webcast: Consolidation and Rapid Provisioning
- 02/04/2009, TechNet Webcast: Building on Your Existing Virtual Environment
- 02/06/2009, TechNet Webcast: Virtualization Solutions for High Availability
- 02/11/2009, TechNet Webcast: Client-Side Virtualization
- 02/13/2009, TechNet Webcast: Using Presentation Virtualization
- 02/18/2009, TechNet Webcast: Scaling Terminal Services Out (1/2)
- 02/20/2009, TechNet Webcast: Scaling Terminal Services Out (2/2)
- 02/25/2009, TechNet Webcast: Running Legacy Applications with Virtualization (1/2)
- 02/27/2009, TechNet Webcast: Running Legacy Applications with Virtualization (2/2)
- 03/04/2009, TechNet Webcast: Creating a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
- 03/06/2009, TechNet Webcast: Securing the Virtual Environments
- 03/11/2009, TechNet Webcast: Virtualization with Centralized, Policy-Based Management
- 03/13/2009, TechNet Webcast: Virtualization Solutions in Branch Offices
- 03/20/2009, TechNet Webcast: Road Map for the Future of Virtualization
- 03/24/2009, TechNet Webcast: Managing Virtual Solutions
Microsoft has just announced the availability of Virtual Machine Manager Configuration Analyzer 2008 (VMMCA). Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Configuration Analyzer (VMMCA) is a diagnostic tool that you can use to evaluate important configuration settings for computers that either are serving or might serve Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) roles or other VMM functions.
To download VMMCA 2008 head to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=02d83950-c03d-454e-803b-96d1c1d5be24&displaylang=en
If you are getting
VMM is unable to complete the request. The connection to the agent <Agent Managed Host> was lost. Ensure that the WS-Management service and the agent are installed and running and that a firewall is not blocking HTTP traffic. If the error persists, reboot <Agent Managed Host> and then try the operation again.
ID: 2916. Details: Unknown error (0x8033810f)
Make sure you have configure the Virtual Machine Manager Server is configured to have a proxy server and the Bypass proxy server for locall addresses ticked (refer to screen shot )
There is quite a lot of documentation (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794762.aspx) and blogs on how to get the best peformance from Hyper-V. Here are some of my thoughts.
1. Disk: allow separate disks for the parent partition (ie 2008/Hyper-V)
For the VM’s, if you can spread them across multiple disks you will have less contention per VM – something like 4 pairs of RAID1 (1 for OS and 3 partitions for VM’s) might give you better performance than 2 disks in RAID1 (for OS) and 6 disks in RAID5 (for VM’s)
2. Fix Disk (not the default) will give the VM better performance than dynamic as there will be less operations and fragmentation when expanding the disks as they grow.
3. Memory: Ensure the parent partition has sufficient RAM to cope with the workload. Recommend minimum is 500MB, but if you perfmon it’s usage you can see if this is sufficient. Keep perfmon running on the parent partition from the first day, gathering stats every 5 minutes and fixed at 500MB. This will give you a baseline of the server over a 1 to 2 week period. As you grow the VM numbers you can see how the load is impacting the hardware.
4. Processor: ensure you look up the correct logical to virtual processor ratios, also ensure the guest VM’s run with the correct maximum virtual processors
5. Network: Again, it is best to allow the Parent Partition to have its own dedicated NIC, then have another NIC for every 4 VM’s, again perform counters can help determine this ratio of VM's to NIC.
Use the perfmon counters that come with the Vital Signs course, plus add in the Hyper-V counters as stated here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc768535.aspx
Some of the other resources that will assist with getting the most from your Hyper-V server
HW Sizing Help
To find the list of supported server configs:
Go to http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/ .
Select the Certified Servers on the right hand side.
Select Windows Server 2008 (x64) on the left hand side.
Select Hyper-V on the left hand side.
The Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2008 has been updated to include perf guidelines for virtualization servers: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/Perf_tun_srv.mspx
Joeelway's blog links to a handy Hyper-V RAM Calculator you can use to plan your Hyper-V deployment: http://cid-2095eac3772c41db.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/Hyper-V%20RAM%20Calculator.xls
Storage Resources
Webcast:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032364834&CountryCode=US
Whitepaper:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/B/5/3B51A025-7522-4686-AA16-8AE2E536034D/WS2008%20Multi%20Site%20Clustering.doc
Jose Barreto's blog post: http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2008/02/14/storage-options-for-windows-server-2008-s-hyper-v.aspx
Hyper-V How To: Shrink a VHD File
Jeremy Hagen's blog post describes some implementation workarounds for shrinking VHD sizes.
http://blogs.technet.com/tonyso/archive/2008/10/09/hyper-v-how-to-shrink-a-vhd-file.aspx
Hyper-V How To: Plan HA VMs
Jeremy Hagen's blog post details some planning considerations for high availability VMs.
http://blogs.technet.com/tonyso/archive/2008/10/10/hyper-v-how-to-plan-ha-vms.aspx
Running SQL Server 2008 in a Hyper-V Environment - Best Practices and Performance Recomme...
This white paper describes a series of test results, configurations represented a variety of possible scenarios involving SQL Server running in Hyper-V. It also presents best practice recommendations for configuration.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/d/9/4/d948f981-926e-40fa-a026-5bfcf076d9b9/SQL2008inHyperV2008.docx
Planning considerations for AD on Hyper-V
Considerations when hosting Active Directory domain controller in virtual hosting environ...
KB 888794 is from 2006, but discusses considerations when a Microsoft Windows 2000 Server-based domain controller, a Windows Server 2003-based domain controller, or a Windows Server 2008-based controller runs in a virtual hosting environment. Virtual hosting environments include the following, among others: Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual PC, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, EMC VMware.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888794/en-us
