Clive Watson's Weblog

Not sure what RDSHC is, then take a look at the RDS Hosts Capacity Planning document

Remote Desktop Session Host Capacity Planning in Windows Server 2008 R2

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=ca837962-4128-4680-b1c0-ad0985939063

The Remote Desktop Session Host (RD Session Host) role service lets multiple concurrent users run Windows-based applications on a remote computer running Windows Server 2008 R2. This white paper is intended as a guide for capacity planning of RD Session Host in Windows Server 2008 R2. It describes the most relevant factors that influence the capacity of a given deployment, methodologies to evaluate capacity for specific deployments, and a set of experimental results for different combinations of usage scenarios and hardware configurations.

This release of the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool completely replaces version 2.0. Version 2.1 of the tool now works with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, System Center Configuration Manager 2007 SP2, and Windows Server Update Services 3.0 SP2. The tool also supports updating the Windows® 7 and Windows Server® 2008 R2 operating systems.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc501231.aspx

All you want to know about Hyper-V in one place on the Technet website

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/dd565807.aspx

Including:

·        Planning

·        Installation

·        Guidance

·        Best Practices

·        Deployment

·        Pre-Deployment Tools

·        Management

·        Performance

·        Workload Specific Guidance

If so the Technet Script Center has plenty of resources, view them here

Some scripts I’d like to highlight:

Virtual Machine Management

Configure Guest OS for VDI (PowerShell)

Configure Guest OS for VDI (VB Script)

Virtual machine assignment management

Bulk assign virtual machines to users or pools

List VM assignment information

Infrastructure setup: RD Connection Broker cluster creation and management

Manage RD Connection Broker cluster (create, add nodes)

Update RD Connection Broker configuration across nodes in a cluster

Troubleshooting

Configuration verification

Monitoring and Reporting:

Monitor sessions

Generate usage report

…in that case you’ll need

http://www.codeplex.com/CoreConfig

It is completely open source so it can be ammended and changed to fit your requirements, this version has been a year in the making and has been written in powershell with a reference to Winforms so that a GUI format is displayed.

Core Configuration tasks include:

• Product Licencing
• Networking Features
• DCPromo Tool
• ISCSI Settings
• Server Roles and Features
• User and Group Permissions
• Share Creation and Deletion
• Dynamic Firewall settings
• Display | Screensaver Settings
• Add & Remove Drivers
• Proxy settings
• Windows Updates (Including WSUS)
• Multipath I/O
• Hyper-V including virtual machine thumbnails
• JoinDomain and Computer rename
• Add/remove programs
• Services
• WinRM
• Complete logging of all commands executed

This also works for Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 Server R2.  You also get to view the Virtual machines which is a nice bonus.

Selecting the Right Virtualization Technology

Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services

The Infrastructure Planning and Design team has released two updated guides, Selecting the Right Virtualization Technology and Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services.

Download the IPD Guide for Selecting the Right Virtualization Technology at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=160981

Download the IPD Guide for Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=177881

For users of Windows Server 2008 R2, the Remote Desktop Services guide is a complete replacement for the Terminal Services guide. The Remote Desktop Services guide reflects the new capabilities introduced with Windows Server 2008 R2 as well as the rebranding of Terminal Services. The Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide for Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services remains available at http://www.microsoft.com/IPD.

If you need these tools and if your reading this you probably do, the the RSAT tools are now at RTM and available

John has all the details (as usual):

http://blogs.technet.com/jhoward/archive/2009/08/11/windows-7-rsat-final-build-available-for-download.aspx

I couldn’t be clearer than that, more details here and from Presspass

Today, in a break from the ordinary, Microsoft released 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community. The code, which includes three Linux device drivers, has been submitted to the Linux kernel community for inclusion in the Linux tree. The drivers will be available to the Linux community and customers alike, and will enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/Jul09/07-20LinuxQA.mspx

Matt and the Virtualization Team blog have extra details.

This is a recent post I missed (thanks for the pointer Julius) from the Remote Desktop Services Team (formally known as Terminal Services).

Basically with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V “We conducted our testing using both non-SLAT and SLAT hardware and found that SLAT enabled processors increased the number of sessions by a factor of 1.6x to 2.5x compared to non-SLAT processors.”

Hyper-V R2 supports Second Level Address Translation (SLAT), which uses new features on today’s CPUs to improve VM performance while reducing processing load on the Windows Hypervisor and new Hyper-V VMs will also consume less power by virtue of the new Core Parking feature implemented into Windows Server 2008 R2.

Some more detail on SLAT can be found here

This possibly increases your likelihood of being able to virtualise the RDS workload – as always testing is recommended.

Only a few days left now to book a place at iForum http://blogs.technet.com/clive_watson/archive/2009/04/02/uk-event-citrix-iforum-in-june.aspx

64LP and Processor Compatibility Mode were discussed yesterday on the Windows Server blog, AMD have posted a Live Migration demo, what is different about this, is that they do this across CPU families using Compatibility Mode.

So Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 will be available…

As part of today’s news, Microsoft Corp. announced that the company is anticipating that the next version of its client operating system, Windows 7, will be available to customers in time for the holiday shopping season. In addition, Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate (RC) is available today with the final product releasing to market in the same timeframe as Windows 7.

Source: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/may09/05-11TechEd09PR.mspx

and SCVMM R2 RC has some new features which you can all about here until then the highlights are:

• Storage Migration
• Queuing of Live migrations
• Rapid Provisioning
• Host compatibility checks
• Support for 3rd party CFS
• Support for Veritas Volume Manager

The Release Candidate (RC) is now available @ http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsServer2008R2 which obviously includes Live Migration & CSV. 

Also released is Microsoft Hyper-V Server R2 RC - the FREE offering: http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/05/06/microsoft-hyper-v-server-2008-r2-release-candidate-free-live-migration-ha-anyone.aspx

John (as usual) has lots of great advise and links to other complimentary tools (such as RSAT)

If you've ever had to follow Cheng’s definitive article on setting up SCVMM tracing you know it’s a reasonably simple process but with lots of steps.

Now you can do all this in 4 easy steps thanks to Jonathan