For those of you interested in learning more about the new inbox capability for NIC Teaming (aka LBFO or Load Balancing/Failover) in Windows Server "8" Beta, there's an excellent whitepaper which has just been published. It covers pretty much everything you need to know from the feature overview, the...

This part of the series is all about determining why SR-IOV may not be operational. As you will discover, there are several reasons, some of them obvious if you’ve followed all the parts so far, some more subtle. By the end of this part, you will be an expert! Assuming you have a switch in SR-IOV mode...

Only a few more topics in this series remain uncovered. This part of the series looks at resiliency with SR-IOV. By resiliency, I mean, of course, NIC teaming, otherwise known as Load Balancing/Failover (LBFO), the ability to aggregate network links or fail over should a link fail. I won’t get...

Summarising the series so far, we’ve answered “Why SR-IOV?”, looked at hardware and firmware dependencies, and run through the user interface and PowerShell cmdlets to configure SR-IOV. Next on the agenda is how SR-IOV and Live Migration co-operate. In addition, there’s a video...

In parts 1 through 4 , I covered the external dependencies and the “why” of SR-IOV. So it’s about time I showed you how to setup SR-IOV and what it looks like in a little more detail from a configuration perspective, both through the user interface in Hyper-V Manager, and from PowerShell...

So far in this series, we have discussed the “why” question, and identified three dependencies for SR-IOV in Hyper-V in Windows Server “8” beta: System hardware support in the form of an IOMMU device A PCI Express networking device which has SR-IOV capabilities A driver...

So far in this series, we’ve looked at the “why” question, and the hardware aspects of SR-IOV, and identified that to use SR-IOV in Hyper-V it is necessary to have system hardware support in the form of an IOMMU device, and a PCI Express device which has SR-IOV capabilities. Now it’s time to start taking...

In part 1 , I discussed why Microsoft has been investing in SR-IOV for device I/O from virtual machines. The key points were to reduce latency, increase throughput, lower compute overhead, and for future scalability. Part two takes a look at SR-IOV from a hardware perspective. For those who didn’t take...

Now that the veil of silence has been lifted with the release of Windows Server “8” beta , I’m able to tell you a little more about what I’ve been working on for 5 years now. An inside joke is that it’s a feature with two checkboxes in the UI of Hyper-V Manager, so about...

A quick note to say that Windows Virtual PC has reached RC (release candidate) and is available for download . Ben has lots more information here , and I'm really pleased to see that Prasad has started a WVPC team blog where you can learn more about its features and capabilities. Cheers, John.

Our Virtual Switch got smarter in Windows Server 2008 R2. In Windows Server 2008, VMs are susceptible to MAC spoofing. MAC spoofing is where a (generally) malicious machine pretends to be another machine on a network (there are legitimate applications which do spoof MAC addresses though – Network Load...

I had a couple of emails overnight asking whether it is possible to use Hyper-V Manager "v1" (as in KB952627 for Windows Vista SP1, or part of RSAT in Windows Server 2008) pointing to a machine running Windows Server 2008 R2 RC or Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 RC. The short answer is yes, this works...

Today, the last of the download links for the Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008 R2 RC (Release Candidate) release, Windows 7 client and the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) for Windows 7 RC have gone live. Windows Server 2008 RC Download If you have an MSDN or Technet...

A cautionary note for those of you performing an in-place upgrade of a machine running Windows Server 2008 with the Hyper-V role enabled, to Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate. During the installation, you will see the following compatibility report message stating that you should turn off the...

I thought I’d start a series of posts highlighting some of the smaller changes in Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2. There’ll be plenty of people covering the larger features such as Live Migration, so I figured someone needs to cover the other fun stuff! Many of the improvements are not visible from...

The simple answer is a definite yes. However, it's sometimes useful to have a "finger in the air" gauge of how much. I therefore did some very unscientific measurements using my watch to compare timings for some basic functions. Of course, before reading any further, please read and understand the blog...

Once you install Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Beta 1, you'll notice a check box on the properties page for a virtual machine as shown below - it's as simple as checking the box (on by default). Have fun - and remember, this is Beta code - only install it on your test machines. Cheers, John.

Although on the Windows virtualization team here, it's heads down working on the next generation of virtual machine support to be built into Windows Longhorn server with a " hypervisor " architecture, we're absolutely not sitting still on the Virtual Server 2005 R2 product which became free a couple...

I received an email from David Solomon - author of Windows Internals this morning. By amazing coincidence, I happened to have a copy of it open and reading it just as the email came in. David & his colleage, Mark Russinovich regularly give courses to folks in the Windows Core OS Division here in...

Just seen the list of webcasts for next week - there's a couple on the list worth mentioning. All times are PST (add 8 hours for UK time) Top 10 Things You Need to Know About Windows Vista for the Enterprise (Level 200) Wednesday, April 12, 2006 - 9:30 AM - 10:30 AM Pacific Time Glenn Fincher, Senior...

So I've been a little light on blogging over the past couple of weeks while I've been over in Redmond for a house-hunting trip before moving over in a couple of weeks, so there was a fair bit of post waiting for me back in the office. The March TechNet Plus subscription was among the pile, complete with...

http://www.microsoft.com/isaserver/2006/default.mspx is worth checking out - you can download the beta of ISA Server 2006. I can't download it myself as I'm off-site, but will be sure to install it at home in the next couple of weeks...

I have to share this one with you - in around three weeks time, there's a series of webcasts on Exchange 12 running over 4 days. The better news is (I'm guessing for US attendees only though) is that if you attend all four webcasts (can be viewed on demand, not necessarily live) and you submit your evaluations...

Just thought it was worth mentioning this - another "R2" joins the fold, hot on the heals of Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Windows Server 2003 R2. This time it's SMS which gets a refresh. SMS isn't really a product I can hold my hand up and say I know well, but I'm installing the R2 beta in a virtual machine...

For those among you with access to CTP builds or are looking at early adoption of Windows Vista when it releases, there are a growing number of documents in the Technical Library on TechNet including Evaluation, Planning & Architecture, Deployment, Security & Protection, Operations, Product Help...