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...

The Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) for Windows 7 SP1 are now available for download. These include the latest version of Hyper-V Manager which supports both Dynamic Memory (DM) and RemoteFX. Here's the link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=7d2f6ad7-656b-4313...

Today we released an update to the Hyper-V BPA (Best Practice Analyser). This fixes some issues in the previous BPA and also correctly handles the new Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX features in SP1. No new rules have been added. To install the update, you must already have the Hyper-V BPA installed ( http...

Hyper-V uses a role based authorisation model for access checks. This series of articles takes a look at the model; defines the available primitives; and walks through a couple of examples. (Oops, a post I meant to publish back in October last year , only just realized I didn't make it live!) Quick...

A new version (2.1) of the Linux Integration Services for Hyper-V have just been made available. This new version has some significant improvements. From the driver side, new optimized storage and networking drivers have been introduced (aka “Synthetic” drivers which utilize VMBus, a key...

An interesting question was posed to me a couple of days back about why when starting Hyper-V Manager, you get a UAC prompt, yet you don't with most other Microsoft Administrative MMCs. You should note that the workaround in here only applies to Windows 7/Windows Server 2008 R2, and is not a supported...

A quick post to announce the availability of a new utility written by a colleague of mine in the Hyper-V team, Keith Mange. NVSPBind (Network Virtual Service Provider Bind) overcomes a shortfall that many people hit in server core installations of Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft...

Hyper-V uses a role based authorisation model for access checks. This series of articles takes a look at the model; defines the available primitives; and walks through a couple of examples. (I actually wrote most of this many months ago – only finally found the time to post it up!). Quick links: Part1...

Hyper-V uses a role based authorisation model for access checks. This series of articles takes a look at the model; defines the available primitives; and walks through a couple of examples. (I actually wrote most of this series many months ago – only finally found the time to post it up!). Quick links...

Hyper-V uses a role based authorisation model for access checks. This series of articles takes a look at the model; defines the available primitives; and walks through a couple of examples. (I actually wrote most of this series many months ago – only finally found the time to post it up!). Quick links...

Hyper-V uses a role based authorisation model for access checks. This series of articles takes a look at the model; defines the available primitives; and walks through a couple of examples. (I actually wrote most of this series many months ago – only finally found the time to post it up!). Quick links...

Hyper-V uses a role based authorisation model for access checks. This series of articles takes a look at the model; defines the available primitives; and walks through a couple of examples. (I actually wrote most of this series many months ago – only finally found the time to post it up!). Quick links...

After the Windows 7 RTM release was published last week, it was joined by Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM for Technet and MSDN subscribers this morning. Woo hoo! Have fun with Hyper-V and all the great new features and improvements. Cheers, John.

The Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) for Windows 7 RTM have been released to microsoft.com. These include the Hyper-V tools for remote management of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. You can download them from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID...

So after some 22,000 downloads (thank you) in the 8 months since first released, HVRemote has undergone a refresh to make it even easier to configure Hyper-V Remote Management and diagnose issues. The major change in version 0.7 is the ability to perform some verification of the configuration and...

Yesterday, we announced that the Linux Integration Components for Hyper-V have been released under a GPL v2 license for inclusion in future versions of the Linux kernel. More information on this can be found in the presspass article here . The second announcement is that today, we released RC2 (Release...

In May , I mentioned that we introduced a checkbox in the Hyper-V UI for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 which determines whether a virtual NIC is created in the parent partition for External Virtual Networks. (To get a better understanding of Hyper-V networking and what this means, take a look...