Windows Server Blog

The Private Cloud Blog has combined its efforts with Building Clouds

Kevin Beares - MSFT — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 21:49:00 GMT

Hey everyone,

I wanted to give you an update on things since we have been a little quiet on the Windows Server Blog over the last couple of months. Clearly, we are in the down section of the blog cycle. Once the BIG Stories about Windows Server 2012 have been told, the technology teams pick up the slack and start getting into the nitty gritty of designing, building, deploying and supporting the Modern Data Center.

Speaking of a technology team picking up the slack.... Almost 3 years ago we launched the Private Cloud Architecture Blog. At the time it was pretty heavy on theory and pretty light on details. Over the last year the blog really picked up momentum and started getting much more detailed into what we mean by building a private cloud. Now, that Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 Sp1 are generally available, the balance seriously has shifted to a pretty heavy load of detailed content on building a Modern Data Center.

Earlier this month, we merged the Private Cloud Blog with a newly launched blog called Building Clouds. So, now we have two blogging teams extending our charter from talking just about Private Clouds to talking about Building Clouds whether that involves an all on-premise deployment, Hybrid IT deployment or an all Hosted or Cloud Deployment. We've brought together some of the brightest people across engineering and the field to bring you the latest and up to date thinking on how you can best leverage the Cloud OS and System Center to continue to move your Data Center towards a more robust Cloud Architecture.

I encourage you to put the Building Clouds: Cloud & Datacenter Solutions on your short list of blogs to read. This team has been on fire since the merger and the amount of valuable content has been quite amazing to take in.

Kevin Beares
Senior Community Lead - Windows Server and System Center

Brad Anderson on the topic of Hybrid IT

Kevin Beares - MSFT — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 18:16:06 GMT

Hello again,

As you all know, building the ideal IT infrastructure requires planning for a lot of different performance features (reliability, flexibility, scalability, agility). In our new world of IT, planning needs to also consider what is the right place to host workloads (private cloud, public cloud, hosted cloud, on-premise). In his newest post, Brad Anderson, corporate vice president, Windows Server & System Center, examines a way to think about these questions: Hybrid IT. In this post Brad comments that, “Hybrid IT has become an extremely important topic because IT administrators are increasingly finding their datacenters spanning public, private, and hosted clouds from several different vendors. For this specific reason, one of our primary goals here at Microsoft is to ensure consistency across these clouds.” To learn more about how to best think about deploying and operating a Hybrid IT infrastructure and see a consistent management experience across apps, data, and clouds – please read Transforming the Data Center and Hybrid IT.

You can also follow Brad on Twitter.

Thanks a lot,

Kevin Beares
Senior Community Lead, Windows Server and System Center

Brad Anderson on A Real Cloud OS for the Enterprise Cloud Era

Kevin Beares - MSFT — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 17:13:00 GMT

Hey everyone,

Kevin Beares here... I definitely think you should go check out this latest installment from Brad Anderson. You’ve heard us talk about the Cloud OS before, and, in a new post from the In the Cloud blog, Brad Anderson (Corporate Vice President, Windows Server & System Center), examines how this operating system works, what it looks like, and where to get it. “To really grasp what a major leap forward this is,” he explains, “it helps to stop thinking about IT deployments in terms of the individual servers, and instead think about an OS that runs a datacenter.” Brad sees tools like Windows Server, System Center, and Windows Azure as leading the way to “a new cloud operating system for a new cloud-based era of business.”

So, please check out Brad's post,A Real Cloud OS for the Enterprise Cloud Era and be sure to follow Brad on Twitter @InTheClouddMSFT.

Thanks a lot,

Kevin Beares
Senior Community Lead, Windows Server and System Center

Real World Best Practices for Hyper-V and update on Slow Login Hotfixes from the Premier Field Engineering Platform Team

Kevin Beares - MSFT — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 23:14:00 GMT

Hey everyone,

Thought I would share an article or two from the Ask Premier Field Engineering Platform Team Blog.

I think everyone love's checklists that you can just run through to make sure you didn't miss anything and that your environment is good to go, right? Well, how about this, Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Best Practices (In Easy Checklist Form)? A checklist that uses real world best practices for Windows Server 2012 on Hyper-V Replica, Cluster Aware Updating (CAU), Network Virtualization and the Hyper-V Extensible Switch? They promise to keep the list fresh and will be posting updates when they have them. So, try to make sure you subscribe to the feed for their blog.

As you know or maybe not, we have written about the issue about Slow Login and Slow Boot numerous times over the last year in an effort to address numerous tiny little issues that can impact a systems time to startup. Well, the Supportability Team has put together a collection 90 hotfixes for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Systems. This is a huge accomplishment and I believe will address a lot of the issues that customers have had with their Boot times. Here is the link to the post from the ASK PFE Platforms team, Slow Boot Slow Login (SBSL) Hotfix Rollup for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 Available Today!

You can also go read the KB from the support team directly here, An enterprise hotfix rollup is available for Windows 7 Sp1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1.

Hope you find these article helpful.

Kevin Beares
Senior Community Lead
Windows Server and System Center Group

Server Performance Advisor (SPA) 3.0

Jeffrey Snover Windows Server — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 16:00:00 GMT

Servers can be expensive so we spend a lot of time and effort figuring out how to get the best performance out of them. Windows Server 2012 had quite a few features to increase the performance and scale of servers. There are things that we can do and then there are things you can do. In today’s post Ahmed Talat, a Senior PM lead in the Windows Performance team talks about a great tool that you can use to understand what is going on with your servers and how to tune them to get maximal performance out of them.

Cheers!
Jeffrey

Starting with Windows Server 2008, we have published a server tuning guide each release designed to help system administrators and IT professionals get the best performance out of their server deployments. For Windows Server 2012 we published the Windows Server 2012 Tuning Guide, but this time there is a twist. This time we harnessed our performance knowledge from the tuning guide and embodied some of it as part of a newly redesigned Server Performance Advisor (SPA) tool.

SPA 3.0 helps IT administrators collect metrics to diagnose performance issues on Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Server 2008 for up to 100 servers unobtrusively without adding software agents or reconfiguring production servers. It generates comprehensive performance reports as shown in figure 1 below and historical charts with recommendations.

Introduction

In this post we discuss how SPA works and some of the unique features available at your fingertips once you download the tool.

Figure 1: A snapshot of a SPA performance report with two warnings

At a high level, SPA is composed of two parts. The first is a management console or dashboard for the user to pick which servers they plan to collect data on, the corresponding role of the server, how long they need to collect data for, and how often collections happen. The console has a set of requirements listed on the download page.

The second part of SPA is the Advisor Packs or “APs”. APs contain a set of performance rules. An AP serves two purposes; first it defines what data gets collected from the server when that AP is instantiated. Second, the AP rules are used for assessing the server’s behavior. For example if data from a server shows more than 10% packet retransmit rate for any network adapter and that network adapter has a lot of send activity on it per system counters, then a warning is logged in a report.

How it Works

Now let’s step back and give you a visual representation of the end to end process so you have a better understanding for the role each SPA component plays and how they interact with each another. The different steps in the flow are numbered 1 through 6 with each step described in greater detail below.

Figure 2: SPA workflow collecting data from remote servers

1. Setting up the data collection sessions

The user installed SPA and chooses which APs they want depending on the target server role. SPA ships with some built in APs like the Core OS AP, IIS AP, and the Hyper-V host AP. The Core OS AP is a generic AP covering the fundamentals like I/O and resource utilization, while the other 2 are role specific. The APs are imported into SPA to help define what data is collected and later used to assess the servers’ performance and generate the report. Users can choose and run multiple APs in a single data collection session.

2. Starting data collection on the target servers

The user defines how long they want to collect data for and chooses if they want a onetime collection or if they want to collect data at regular intervals. Keep in mind that the longer the collection the more data there will be to process and send back to the console machine. The console then sends a data collection request to the target servers over the Performance Logs and Alerts (PLA) service used by tools like Perfmon and SPA starts collecting the data.

3. Data collection on servers

Each target server receives a request from the console machine to start collecting a predefined set of data. SPA collects data from Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) events, Windows Management Infrastructure (WMI), performance counters, configuration files, and registry keys.

4. Saving the data for post processing

Each server writes the performance data to a pre-defined file share. We expect administrators to specify a file share on the console and avoid disk impact on the target server, but they can also choose where to create the file share from within SPA’s menu options.

5. Storing the data for generating a report

When the console pulls the data from the file share, it stores it in a SQL database. Because the data is stored in a database, SPA provides historical charts that help with trending performance behaviors over a period of days or hours. Users can also delete older reports from the database.

6. Generating the Performance report

SPA analyzes results based on the AP rules. It summarizes the findings in a report, identifies issues with some possible mitigation and lets the administrator decide if they want to make changes. NOTE: There is an expectation that this tool is used by experienced administrators that understand the intent of an implementation and are knowledgeable enough to determine whether a suggested mitigation is appropriate for the target system.

SPA Features

Now that you have an idea of how the process works end-to-end, let’s shift our focus to what users should come to expect from using SPA 3.0 in terms of installation, data collection, and report viewing.

Zero agent installation on the server To use SPA, you just need to install it on a console machine meeting the requirements. SPA can collect performance data locally or from remote servers. Because SPA uses PLA for remote data collection, a user can point SPA at a remote server and start collecting performance data immediately (while the workload is running). A user can also have data collections on multiple servers going in parallel. Of course, the console machine needs to have the right authentication and ports open to ensure success. NOTE: The collection overhead is typically minimal with no impact to most workloads. The exceptions are extreme low latency workloads where the collection can alter a workload’s behavior.

Extensible scriptable APs The APs is where all the performance knowledge is embodied and captured. The APs define what data is captured and what gets used to assess the server’s performance. Because it’s written in T-SQL, composing an AP is simple. We encourage you to check out the AP development guide to help you write a custom AP to help you expedite diagnosing performance issues.

Multiple data sources for a cohesive view of system performance Windows has a very rich set of instrumentation points and APs can take advantage of this. The built-in APs certainly do! SPA collects data from a number of different sources mentioned previously, which makes it a very powerful tool. It correlates all of this data together, draws causality between the data points, and presents the user with a rolled up view of how their system is behaving with actionable recommendations addressing any reported issues. The user can then act on the recommendations which provide good insight into some key performance metrics like latency, scalability, and throughput.

Side by side comparison of performance and server configuration data This new feature in SPA 3.0 allows users to compare data collected at two different points in time for the same server, collected at two different points in time for different servers, or collected for two different servers at the same time. The ability to compare how the server was behaving before a certain date or before applying a certain patch is very useful in narrowing down the point in time at which a change happened and correlating that with a drop in performance. The report uses triangles with a yellow exclamation mark to represent warnings and uses check marks inside of green circles to indicate no action is necessary.

Figure 3: Side by side comparison report for the same machine at 2 different points in time

Charting and historical trending Charting the performance characteristics and metrics of a server over a specified period of time helps users recognize patterns and anomalies associated with specific days of the week where a certain activity takes place. For example, an administrator may have a scheduled indexing task kicking in and impacting system performance. In this case it can increase disk latency because of the incurred disk I/O writes from the indexing service kicking in and spinning the media. The following figures show some of the cool capabilities built-in SPA 3.0 for charting and trending data.

Figure 4: Historic trending chart showing performance metrics over time

Figure 5: Trend for the minimum file write throughput achieved over a period of 7 days

Built-in APs for key server roles like Hyper-V and IIS To help users get started with using SPA 3.0, we provide three built-in APs as part of the download package. The first is the Core OS AP that focuses on basic resource characteristics like CPU utilization, network traffic, memory consumption, and storage related events. The IIS AP which has Web server specific rules like the top 10 URLs accessed and some of the common configuration parameters in IIS. The third is the Hyper-V host AP that focuses on a server hosting multiple virtual machines and provides virtualization specific diagnostics for performance issues.

Configurable sampling intervals and durations for collecting data Some users want the ability to collect data on demand, while others would like to have a predefined collection interval. The latter can be helpful if you are trying to isolate a performance behavior that doesn’t happen on a regular basis and are trying to catch it by setting up frequent data collection intervals for a specified period of time. There are also users who want to manually kick off a data collection especially if they just downloaded an update or a patch, or they just did a hardware or firmware upgrade in their environment and want to quantify the performance impact before and after using the side by side comparison view

PowerShell scripts support System administrator can write scripts to invoke SPA cmdlets and schedule remote periodic data collections on target servers within certain time intervals. They can also query the database for information about which APs were run and the target servers with associated SPA reports. The SPA manual has more details and syntax for the supported PowerShell cmdlets.

Configurable thresholds inside of APs The built-in APs ship with a predefined set of thresholds for all the rules, but given that different workloads and different customers will have different Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and different alarm points, users have the flexibility to set their own thresholds in the APs to better suite their environment and workload.

Figure 6: Users can get more information about a rule in the Details view

Conclusion

In this blog we introduced the redesigned Server Performance Advisor 3.0. We walked you through a high level overview of how the different SPA components interact and what role they each play. We also shared some of the exciting new features and capabilities available with SPA. We hope you enjoyed this post and we invite you to download and try out the latest bits from the SPA MSDN download page. Please share your experiences and send us feedback at spafb@microsoft.com.

A comparison of Microsoft VDI vs. VMware View published over on Server Cloud Blog

Microsoft Windows Server Team — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 16:00:00 GMT

We usually leave comparison review articles to the team over on the Server-Cloud Blog. In keeping with that tradition, we are keeping it that way, Excuse the duplicate posting, :)

Here is the original article:

Microsoft VDI vs. VMware View: Freedom of Choice

Thanks,

Kevin

Become More Marketable at Certified Career Day

Microsoft Windows Server Team — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 17:00:00 GMT

Would you like to help your company transform their IT operations, reducing costs and delivering a whole new level of business value?

Windows Server 2012 Certification will allow you to cloud optimize your career and provide you with the knowledge to harness the power of the next generation of networks, applications, and web services.

Certification is the key to a cloud ready career. Did you know that 40% of workers believe that certification helped them find a job or led to a promotion?

Join us for Certified Career Day, taking place on March 12, 2013 ay 9:00am PST. This live, interactive event begins with a panel discussion of IT managers and industry experts who will discuss how the cloud is redefining IT recruitment and the growing need for up-to-date certification. The panel will be followed by an exclusive interview with special guest Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Technical Fellow. Next, attend the technology focused sessions with Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 product group experts.

Attendees of Certified Career Day are eligible to win an Acer tablet complete with Windows 8. Event capacity is limited so register now!

WS-Management ISO/IEC Standard

Jeffrey Snover Windows Server — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 17:00:00 GMT

We’ve talked about it before and we’ll talk about it again, are strong believers in the customer benefits of standards. In Windows Server 2012 we invested heavily in standards based management to deliver great customer value and will continue with these investments going forward. In today’s blog Wassim Fayed, a Principal PM in our Standards Based Management team talks about a significant advance in the industry’s embrace of this approach. It’s great to see this area grow and gather momentum. If you don’t have standards based management in focus, you should invest a bit to understand what is going on in your industry. This blog is a great start.

Cheers! Jeffrey

Evolution of standards-based management in Windows

In a world where management has shifted from managing one server to managing many complex, heterogeneous servers and clouds, standards-based management—long supported by Microsoft—has become essential. We were one of the founding members of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), and shipped the first, and richest, Common Information Model Object Manager (CIMOM) we know as Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). In 2005, Microsoft, along with 12 other companies, submitted WS-Management for DMTF standardization. Since then, the specification has been improved, stabilized and implemented widely by the industry. Today, the specification reached its highest level of maturity as it became an ISO (International Organization for Standardization)/IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) international standard. Windows Remote Management (WinRM), Microsoft’s implementation of WS-Management, has been included with Windows since Windows XP. Today, all versions of Windows, both client and server from XP forward, support WS-Management through WinRM. System Center uses WS-Management to remotely manage systems. This includes both Windows and Linux (System Center Cross Platform). Windows PowerShell uses WS-Management for remote shell access.

In Windows Server 2012, standards-based management was necessary to help make Windows Server 2012 the best Cloud OS. WS-Management provided remoting access for managing Windows resources by using CIM + WS-Management. While WMI has served our customers and partners well, the true promise of standards-based management was only realized through completing and making our WS-Management implementation, WinRM, the default remote management protocol for Windows. In Windows today, Windows PowerShell remoting is built on WS-Management. Additionally, WMI’s default protocol is no longer DCOM, but WinRM.

WS-Management as a management protocol

WS-MAN was developed to enable remote management of systems over a firewall friendly protocol such as HTTP while utilizing existing tools and investments in SOAP. With the 1.0 and 1.1 releases, WS-MAN has been used as the preferred protocol for desktop and mobile system management as part of the DASH initiative and a recommended protocol for server systems management as part of the SMASH initiative. Hardware from different vendors in the market today have support for DASH and SMASH and can be managed by Windows and System Center products.

The Web Services for Management (WS-Management) Specification describes a simple object access protocol (SOAP) for managing systems such as PCs, servers, devices, and other remotely manageable entities. The WS-Management protocol identifies a core set of web service specifications and usage requirements that expose a common set of operations central to all systems management. This includes the ability to do the following:

Get, put (update), create, and delete individual resource instances, such as settings and dynamic values
Enumerate the contents of containers and collections, such as large tables and logs
Subscribe to events emitted by managed resources
Execute specific management methods with strongly typed input and output parameters

WS-Management now an ISO/IEC standard

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. This body ensures that products and technologies that reach the ISO standardization are of the highest quality, meeting international demands and requirements. ISO standards gain governmental and broader industry support and adoption.

The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) is a non-profit, non-governmental international standards organization that prepares and publishes International Standards for all electrical, electronic and related technologies – collectively known as "electrotechnology".

We are pleased to report that on January 30, 2013, Web Services for Management (WS-Management or WS-Man) was adopted as an international ISO/IEC standard. With WS-MAN now an international standard, expect to see a wider range of products that will be manageable using WS-MAN. Imagine being able to manage all types of devices in your datacenter using a consistent set of tools, practices, and skills. This helps to simplify the datacenter and lower cost of both adoption and on-going management of systems as well as make related skillsets more valuable in the marketplace.

As an ISO/IEC standard, WS-Management, is uniquely positioned to play a key role in streamlining the IT world as more devices and solutions adopt it as the standard protocol for management. The approval of WS-Management as an ISO/IEC standard is further evidence of the global interest in standards-based management of systems, applications, and devices.

Microsoft makes it easier for the rest of the industry to adopt standards based management

While Windows Server 2012 is the best Cloud OS, supporting the latest ISO/IEC standards such as WS-Management, Windows Server 2012 must interoperate with many devices and technologies in a predictable and standard fashion. To address this issue, and to help the industry adopt and embrace standards-based management, Microsoft has designed and implemented OMI (Open Management Infrastructure) as a small and scalable CIMOM which implements CIM and WS-Management. We contributed OMI as an open source project to Open Group in August 2010.

The public availability of OMI means that you can now easily compile and implement a standards-based management service into any device or platform from a free open-source package, by using the WS-Management ISO/IEC standard protocol and CIM. Our goals are (1) to remove obstacles that stand in the way of implementing standards-based management, so that every device in the world can be managed in a clear, consistent, coherent way; and (2), to nurture a rich ecosystem of standards-based management products.

SearchStorage.com Products of the Year: Windows Server 2012 takes the Gold!

Microsoft Windows Server Team — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 17:00:00 GMT

Windows Server 2012 was recognized as the top Storage System Software product in TechTarget’s SearchStorage.com and Storage Magazine Products of the Year competition. Specific features that caught the judge’s attention included:

Server Message Block 3.0 for high-throughput, low-latency data transfers between servers and storage.
Storage Spaces, which enables customers to build scalable, high-performance storage solutions on commodity hardware.
Virtualization improvements, including live storage migration and Hyper-V Replica.

As storage demands increase, we continue to evaluate how we can evolve our products to better serve customers. This award demonstrates our commitment to innovating products to meet changing customer needs.

We would like to extend a special thank you to SearchStorage.com and Storage Magazine for the opportunity to participate in these awards.

Final Stops for the Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow: Australia, Serbia, and Thailand!

Christa Anderson — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 00:10:33 GMT

Hi, this is Christa Anderson, Community Lead for the Windows Server and System Center Group. As we wrap up the Windows Server 2012 Community roadshow this month, I’d like to thank our many MVPs who supported it. They’re great speakers and very knowledgeable, and through their continued efforts this roadshow reached every continent but Antarctica. I am very proud to work with this group, and as a former MVP I am proud to have been among their numbers.

Get on the wait list for an event in Belgrade, Serbia on February 11

Get on the wait list for an event in Perth, Australia on February 11

Get on the wait list for an event in Brisbane, Australia on February 12

If you’re in the neighborhood of one of these events, I urge you to register if you can or get on the wait list if you’re close to one of the sold-out sessions. You’ll be glad you did!

Thanks,

Christa Anderson

Windows Server Blog

The Private Cloud Blog has combined its efforts with Building Clouds

Brad Anderson on the topic of Hybrid IT

Brad Anderson on A Real Cloud OS for the Enterprise Cloud Era

Real World Best Practices for Hyper-V and update on Slow Login Hotfixes from the Premier Field Engineering Platform Team

Server Performance Advisor (SPA) 3.0

Introduction

How it Works

SPA Features

Conclusion

A comparison of Microsoft VDI vs. VMware View published over on Server Cloud Blog

Become More Marketable at Certified Career Day

WS-Management ISO/IEC Standard

Evolution of standards-based management in Windows

WS-Management as a management protocol

WS-Management now an ISO/IEC standard

Microsoft makes it easier for the rest of the industry to adopt standards based management

Further Reading

SearchStorage.com Products of the Year: Windows Server 2012 takes the Gold!

Final Stops for the Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow: Australia, Serbia, and Thailand!