TN and MSDN blogs now have Bing search in the search box. How cool is that? my blog is bingified.
BEFORE
AFTER
Of course, I’m nothing special, its not just my blog. You can now Bing search all TN/MSND blogs, give these a try:
Better? You tell me – leave comments and I’ll pass along to the platform-ninjas.
Recently a customer asked how to find and subscribe to a list of patches and hotfixes for Hyper-V. You can find them here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd430893.aspx
To subscribe to the RSS Feed for comments on this page (new patches are listed in comments before they are updated on the page through the publishing process), click the Annotations button
…and then click Subscribe to this feed.
NOTE: Patches that *may affect Hyper-V admins for Windows, SCVMM, DPM, etc. are listed in the comments section, since the page is for Hyper-V patches only…
I’ve been dogfooding Microsoft Security Essentials for quite awhile now and recommend it to everyone one I know. Download it free today here.
Did I mention that it is free-as-in-beer?
Event though I use remote assistance and PSR to help friends and family troubleshoot their machines, step 1 on my list? Install MSE.
And it is free, and auto-updating. And free.
By default, IPv6 is enabled in Windows Server 2008. If you want to disable IPv6 for any reason – perhaps you have some VMs you want to exclude for testing, you have to use Registry Editor to completely disable IPv6.
For those who prefer not to muck about in the Registry, or who’s organizations have sensible policy forbidding such things, just get Microsoft to FixIt:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929852/
The Windows Server Virtualization guide 2.0, a.k.a. the IPD guide for Windows Server Virtualization (updated for Windows Server 2008 R2) has been re-released with updates to include Windows Server 2008 R2.
“The reader is guided through the nine-step process of designing components, layout, and connectivity in a logical, sequential order. Identification of the Microsoft Hyper-V server hosts required is presented in simple, easy-to-follow steps, helping the reader to design and plan virtual server data centers.”
Read more about it on the Virtualization Team blog.
Launch the download of the entire Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide series.
Visit the Download Center to select another guide in the Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide series.
This guide also includes some handy job aids for your virtualization planning, including:
For example:
Over-committing CPU resources can adversely affect all the workloads on the same host server, causing significant performance issues for a larger number of users. Because CPU resource use patterns can vary significantly, measure the CPU demand for each workload over a period when usage will be high. The table below illustrates the Windows Performance Monitor (Perfmon.exe) statistic to collect CPU usage over time.
Table B-1. Performance Monitor Statistics
Object
Counter
Instance
Processor
% Processor time
_Total
Workloads that do not have sufficient memory will experience frequent disk page faults, resulting in decreased performance and additional disk resource use. In contrast, allocating too much physical memory leaves physical hardware resources unused, leading to lower overall host server utilization.
Collect memory use information when the system is running at peak load to ensure that the appropriate amount of memory is allotted. Table B-2 shows the Windows Performance Monitor statistics that should be collected. For each machine being virtualized, add approximately 24 megabytes of memory to provide enough memory needed by the virtualization host.
Table B-2. Performance Monitor Statistics for Required Memory
Memory
Committed bytes
Every workload requires disk space to store files such as:
· Operating system storage, including binaries and the paging file.
· Application-related storage space.
· User data storage.
· Databases and other required files.
Planning disk space use is similar for physical and virtual workloads. For existing systems, record the total disk space in use and add a factor for future growth. Record the total amount of disk storage capacity required for each workload.
To determine the actual disk performance, measure the IOps over a period of time—that is, the total number of I/O operations that occur per second, and plot this over the time period to determine requirements at peak usage.
By using Windows Performance Monitor, what the current system is actually using in terms of IOps can be measured. However, that number does not indicate whether the system has a bottleneck in the disk subsystem. To see whether the system is disk-bound, look at the queue length of the physical disk. The queue length should be zero on a well-performing system.
Table B-1 provides the Windows Performance Monitor statistics that should be collected. Total the Physical Disk counters from Table B-3 to calculate the I/O usage for each system.
Table B-3. Performance Monitor Statistics for Disk Performance
Physical disk
Disk Reads/sec
Disk Writes /sec
Most workloads require access to one or more networks to ensure communication with other applications and services and to communicate with users. The workload may also require more than one network adapter for any of the following:
· Public network access
· Networks for performing backups and other maintenance tasks
· Dedicated remote-management connections
· Network adapter teaming for performance and failover
· Connections to the physical host server
· Connections to network-based storage arrays
The network connections must provide the required throughput for the traffic that the workload will generate.
However, that number does not indicate whether the system has a bottleneck in the network interface. To check that, look at the queue length of the network adapter. The queue length should be zero on a well-performing system.
The table below provides the Windows Performance Monitor statistics that should be collected over time and graphed to record peak usage.
Table B-4. Performance Monitor Statistics for Network Performance
Network interface
Bytes Total/sec
(Specific network adapters)
Check out the new free-as-in-beer CodePlex Foundation, an independent legal entity designed to facilitate contributions to open source projects, both from Microsoft and other software vendors and users.
Codeplex.com has more than 10,000 free-as-in-beer projects hosted on the site. The CodePlex Foundation is an extension of the CodePlex brand. The Foundation is aiming to bring open source and commercial software developers together in a place where they can collaborate, independent from the “dotcom” site.
The Enterprise Proving Ground blog http://www.microsoft.com/eec compiled some useful Perf and Load tools for virtualization:
Thanks to Kevin Engman!
You don’t.
Chances are you found this blog post by searching for some combination of the words in the bag “set processor affinity Hyper-V”.
As Ben explains in his blog post: Processor Affinity and why you don’t need it on Hyper-V, there is no way to set VM processor affinity in Hyper-V. Instead, you use the “virtual machine reserve” to 100. Turn off the VM, get an account with local admin perms, then:
To configure memory or processors for a virtual machine
Open Hyper-V Manager. Click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Hyper-V Manager.
In the results pane, under Virtual Machines, select the virtual machine that you want to configure.
In the Action pane, under the virtual machine name, click Settings. Then, in the navigation pane, click the appropriate hardware setting as described in the following steps.
To configure the memory, click Memory. On the Memory page, specify the new amount of memory.
To configure the processor, click Processor. If multiple processors are supported by the guest operating system, specify the number of processors to assign to the virtual machine. Then click OK.
To set processor affinity, click Processor, and configure the Virtual machine reserve (percentage) to “100”:
This ensures that Hyper-V will dedicate the whole processor (or multiple whole processors – depending on how many virtual processors the virtual machine has) whenever the VM is running.
FYI the rest of the *important* stuff on this page relates to:
While you are on this page, if your VMs are highly-available (and why wouldn’t you want that?), then you need to review the settings in the Processor Compatibility section:
Note
If the physical computer has multiple processors and uses non-uniform memory architecture (NUMA), we recommend that you do not assign more processors or memory to a virtual machine than are available on a single NUMA node. For example, do not assign 4 processors to a virtual machine if each NUMA node has only two processors. For more information about the processor architecture of the physical computer, see the documentation that came with the computer.
Now, if your VM requires a specific CPU feature, then you have already determined that all the virtualization servers (hosts) in the cluster support the same feature, right? If not, then it is possible that the VM will not live or quick migrate. If the OS/and/or application you are running on a VM require a specific CPU feature, and that feature is not supported on the new host, then Hyper-V won’t migrate the VM.
The download for the Operations Manager 2007 Management Pack for Windows Server 2008 (and 2003) is available at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=3529d233-5e3e-4b51-8f66-5d6f27005ec3
A colleague recently shared some good advice for managing MAC address conflicts on your VMs: Best Practice = Prevent.
There is a standard for MAC addressing whereby OEMs get prefixes (i.e. the first couple pairs of the MAC address range) registered to them. The help file in VMM R2 for "How to Set the Static MAC Address Range for Virtual Network Devices" includes the list of the reserved prefixes registered to Microsoft, VMware, and Xen.
Host: Setting MAC ranges on a Hyper-V host by host level only ensures no duplication within the host. This means if you configured the same range on another Hyper-V server (host), you would likely have conflicts.
SCVMM has a MAC range setting and it will create unique MACs for any VM across all hosts managed by VMM. However, in some environments you cannot ensure that virtual NICs are only ever created/assigned using VMM. In that case, you should make sure that your configured in each Hyper-V host and in VMM do not overlap.
The default MAC range on a Hyper-V host consists of the first three pairs being the same across all Hyper-V hosts (because they are registered to Microsoft). The next two pairs are the Hex of the last two octets of the server’s IP address. The last pair is 00 to FF in hex for 256 possible MACs on the host. This can be increased via the Registry in Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or the UI in R2 Hyper-V.
SCVMM uses a different prefix and range.
SO, if you are getting MAC address conflicts, to guarantee uniqueness:
Inside Microsoft we’ve had a social media solution in place (described in this YouTube Video as “combining concepts from FB and YT”) for P2P sharing audio and video for a while now. This video was initially posted on the Academy Mobile internal site, and is now available on YT.
I’ve been working with this platform since the beta, and am known on my team now as the “Social Media Guy.”
AM now has >20K active internal users and >2K “social media guys and gals” producing content. You can get the Beta of the Podcasting Kit for Sharepoint (PKS) for free at http://www.codeplex.com/pks
The avatar shown is an homage to a favorite artist from the 70’s Michael Bedard.
Well, it’s not actually the beloved start of the WnG movies (show below)…. it is two servers named Wallace and Gromit used by UKDPE in their 5 minute video that shows how to setup and LM in R2.
Not only does this video show how easy/quick it is to set up LM, it shows the filecopy operation on the VM that gets migrated continuing right through the migration, so that the viewer easily “gets it.”
Kudos UK team. Keep the videos coming.
To find more in this series, see http://blogs.technet.com/jamesone/archive/2009/09/12/for-your-viewing-pleasure.aspx
UKDPE – contact me if you need help posting these on http://video.msn.com as well.
The Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2020 (MDT) is live. Enjoy.
MDT helps you automate desktop and server deploymens, including:
Resources from our friends in customer support that will help you as you begin your design of failover clusters for Hyper-V:
Quorum: Guide: Configuring the Quorum in a Failover Cluster
Multi-site Clusters
John Howard has a 3-post series on his blog that explains the Hyper-V authorization model, and shows you how to achieve delegated VM administration with AzMan, the engine and toolset for making role based access checks and defining authorization policy that you use in Hyper-V.
If the Authorization Manager Team Blog had some amusing image of a super-hero (cue vo.o. “AZZZ-MANNNN!”), I’d use it here, for grins. They don’t. Instead, they share lots of good info about Hyper-V auth for Role Based Access Control (RBAC).
NOTE: If you manage your Hyper-V environment with SCVMM, see their documentation about authorization, because SCVMM replaces the default Hyper-V authorization store. See this post for the upshot.
For more info see:
Jon Brodkin on Network World reports some bumps in the road at VMworld 2009 in his article VMworld 2009: Virtualization, controversy and eating your own dog food.
“ …the data center didn't work as well as intended, with attendees reporting continuous technological problems during a vSphere boot camp Sunday and during hands-on lab sessions on Monday. "It was rather unpleasant," said attendee Jay Weinshenker, a database administrator for Luminex Corp., in Austin. "The labs I really look forward to. There is huge demand for them and they're good to get a lot of hands on experience. They talk to you a little bit and then you get to click around, try actually messing around with some of it, and you couldn't really."
He also seems to object to booth babes, the mark of a dedicated IT Pro. Well, it’s the mark of something or other…
“…"Booth babes" were not absent from the conference show floor, with PHD Virtual Technologies displaying two young ladies dressed as nurses. BlueCat Networks one-upped the competition with their well-traveled reps clad in skintight silver spandex, as also seen at Interop Las Vegas.
However, the disturbing factoid was
“…even among VMworld attendees most customers are not putting the majority of business-critical applications on virtual servers. Nearly 7 out of ten respondents are virtualizing fewer than 50% of business-critical apps, according to a survey of 200 VMworld attendees by the vendor Virtual Instruments. Concern about performance is the main roadblock limiting adoption of virtualization for critical workloads.”
Wow. I wonder how many of those businesses have read any of the case studies about Microsoft running it’s global enterprise on virtualized infrastructure for the last several years?
See:
Any questions? Leave feedback.
Some good virtualization videos on the web for your Labor-day viewing.
TN Edge Videos : 5 pages, lots of good stuff
MSN.COM Hyper-V Videos:
· Hyper-V Architecture Demonstration
· Getting to Know Hyper-V
· Introduction to server virtualization
· Hyper-V Part 1 - The Architecture 1/2
· Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Installation
· Hypervisor is not running error: How to fix
· Hyper-V R2: Building a Hyper-V R2 Cluster
· Hyper-V Live Migration - Windows Server 2008 R2 Demo Screencast 1 of 4
· Hyper-V and NetApp Storage Part 1: Storage Configuration
· Hyper-V and NetApp Storage Part 2: Cluster Building
· Hyper-V R2: Making Highly Available VMs
· Hyper-V R2: Introducing Cluster Shared Volumes
· Ben Armstrong on Hyper-V Snapshot Issues
· Microsoft System Center Management for Virtualization
· Microsoft Solution Accelerators and Virtualization Projects
· Microsoft Virtualization Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 at MMS
Bing Hyper-V Videos:
· Virtualization at TechEd09 2/2
· Hyper-V 2008 R2 – Configuring Hyper-V
· Hyper-V Installation Integration Testing
· Hyper-V: PowerShell Management
· Windows 2008 - Hyper-V
MSN.COM Microsoft Hyper-V Server Videos:
· First Look: Microsoft Hyper-V Server
· Hyper-V Server 2008 R2: Bare Metal to Live Migration (In about an hour!)
Bing Microsoft Hyper-V Server Videos:
· How Do I: Install & Configure Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008?
· Understanding and Using Hyper-V Server
· Hyper-V Server Install on Dell PowerEdge R805 Demo Video