I have summarized here all the steps you need to take in order to deploy an Azure VM. Step 1: Get your certificates I assume that you have an active Azure subscription and you have installed visual studio 2010, the azure sdk and tools and activated...

The recommendation for people setting up live migration clusters is to isolate different kinds of traffic on their own networks: Public network to access the cluster and the virtual machines running on it “Private” cluster heartbeat network “live migration...

I use hyper-v on my laptop. When I know I don't need VMs for the day, I can squeeze a bit more performance out of the machine by turning hyper-v off with: bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off and a reboot. To turn it back on: bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype...

Azure Connect is a service that lets you establish a vpn tunnel (for want of a better word) between a virtual machine running in Azure and another running on premises. The connection is point-to-point, meaning that you will need to configure it on every...

With Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 you get the opportunity to boot directly from a vhd file. The operating system in the vhd file will have direct access to the machine hardware. It will not run as a virtual machine with synthetic or emulated adapters...

Microsoft has recently published a set of guides to build your own private cloud solution using Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager and its Self-Service Portal 2.0 They cover planning, deployment and operations. You can find them here. ...

It is no secret that HPC Server 2008 will offer the option to make the head node of a HPC cluster highly available. This feature is not in beta 1, but it is being developed. It will exploit fail-over mechanisms provided by Server 2008 (enterprise edition...

The software previously known as Compute Cluster Server v2 is now available in beta 1 on http://connect.microsoft.com HPC Server 2008 contains some pretty significant innovations. I'll summarize them here and then produce some more detailed entries on...

Note that Excel 2007 is able to use multiple threads to parallelize calculations on the workstation. Previous versions were not. When you hit “recalculate”, Excel will identify independent areas in your spreadsheet and allocate computations in those to...

In the past few weeks I had the pleasure of working with UGS, a division of Siemens that develops engineering product lifecycle management solutions. They were looking for a way to dual-boot an existing Linux cluster into Windows. The process we came...

I have been investigating some more in the area of Green IT, S+S. Some ideas and a lot of questions have come to mind. Please read on and let me know if they make any sense. By the way, Part 1 is here :-) 1. How do you understand the status quo...

Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions from Microsoft Press is available as a FREE download.   This 15MB E-Book gives an overview of all current Microsoft Virtualization technologies: Hyper-V, the Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization...

System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) has been offering a relatively simple way of doing physical-to-virtual migrations (P2V) for a while. You just click on the “Convert Physical Server” icon and off you go. Despite the name, it also works with...

On a Windows HPC Server 2008 head node, that is... 1. No Infiniband on the head node In many cases people want to save themselves some money by not installing an Infiniband adapter on the head node, thereby also sparing a port on that expensive...

Did you think that High Performance Computing was boring? Well, think again: we spent most of our time last week on a videogame :-) At our last HPC Lab we had CCP Games, maker (and hoster) of Eve-Online (http://www.eve-online.com/), a massive multi-player...

With general availability of Windows Server 2008 Microsoft ships the beta 1 release of Windows Virtualization or Hyper-V (aka. Viridian). Customers, partners, developers, IT Professionals, everyone buying a copy of Windows Server 2008 will have the opportunity...

I have received a few questions about upgrades from the evaluation version that you can download from microsoft.com/hpc to a full version. The good news is that the evaluation version is fully functional, so you won't need a complete re-installation....

Ever played with the "game of life"? Well, here's an example of the real thing: HPC used to study evolution and cellular dynamics. Bioinformatics is an interesting - if unusual - field of application. Computation and visualization go hand in hand, as...

When you set up a Microsoft compute cluster, you have a choice of five supported network topologies: 1. All nodes on public network only 2. All nodes on public and private network 3. Compute nodes isolated on private network 4. All nodes on public, private...

I have finally updated my notes on the installation of Infiniband on Windows Server 2008. They now cover the released version 2.0 of Mellanox WinOF stack. You can find the document in my skydrive public folder . Let me know if you find it useful. ...

There are some quite interesting improvements in Windows Server 2008 R2 (what was wrong with W7 as a name?) that help us progress toward a dynamic infrastructure. Three of them are worthy of highlighting: live migration of virtual machines in hyper-v...

So, you've installed your infiniband cards, but got limited performance improvement for your MSMPI application. Before you look at the code again, you may want to have a look at whether the winsock direct providers were installed as well. In some cases...

So, here are a few hints for those willing to try infiniband on Windows: Install Server 2003 SP2: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=08fec2f5-6e3b-4e0d-9314-646414d0a421&displaylang=en Install Server 2003 SP2! Did I mention 2003...

I found a good article by John McRae on deploying Compute Cluster with Windows Deployment Service here. Although we shipped WDS in Windows Server 2003 SP2 and we use in compute cluster pack SP1, we use it in legacy (RIS) mode. This article describes...

To many people HPC is like UFOs: We there's somebody somewhere, but we don't really know what they're doing and where they fit in the grand scheme of things. Here's my attempt at explaining them (UFOs AND HPC). Happy reading . If you think I've...