Virtual Machine Management : VMM 2008 R2 Beta

Rapid Provisioning in VMM 2008 R2 using the UseLocalVirtualHardDisks and SkipInstallVirtualizationGuestServices flags

mlmich — Thu, 07 May 2009 13:46:00 GMT

At MMS 2009, our team announced a new feature of VMM 2008 R2 called Rapid Provisioning. This feature is not available in VMM 2008 R2 beta, but it will be available in the upcoming release candidate and in the RTM version. This feature was implemented...(read more)

Using the VMM Self Service Portal from a Win7 computer

mlmich — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 01:49:00 GMT

We have seen a lot of cases of customers trying to view the Virtual Machine Manager Self-Service Portal (SSP) UI from a computer running Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7. If the portal is running VMM 2008, it is likely that you can't view the connections...(read more)

VMM 2008 R2 beta is now released

mlmich — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:55:00 GMT

The much anticipated VMM 2008 R2 beta is now released. You can go to http://connect.microsoft.com/ and sign up for the beta. Click on "Connection Directory" and sort by the newest beta programs or search for "System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Beta"

What's New in VMM 2008 R2 Beta

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM) is a comprehensive management solution for managing virtualized infrastructure running on Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V, Virtual Server 2005 R2 and VMware ESX through Virtual Center. Recently, Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta was released which included significant feature improvements to Hyper-V-the underlying hypervisor platform. A corresponding beta version of VMM R2 - the next version of VMM - is due for release shortly. VMM R2 Beta leverages the new platform enhancements and extends the feature set of VMM 2008. This overview highlights the most important new and significantly enhanced features in the VMM 2008 R2 Beta:

Support for new features of Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta

Live Migration: - Seen through the VMM console, this enables administrators to move virtual machines from one machine in a virtual host cluster to another with no downtime. This allows administrators greater flexibility in responding to planned or unplanned downtime, provides higher machine availability and more robust fault tolerance within virtualized infrastructure. The basic requirements for Live Migration are that all hosts must be part of a cluster and host processors must be from the same manufacturer. Additionally all hosts in the cluster must have access to shared storage. No changes are required to existing virtual machines, network, or storage devices in moving from Quick Migration to Live Migration other than upgrading to beta versions of Windows Server 2008 R2 and VMM 2008 R2.
Hot addition/removal of VHDs: Allows the addition and removal of new virtual hard disks (VHDs) on a running virtual machine. This enables storage growth in virtual machines without downtime. Additionally, ‘live" VHD management allows administrators to take advantage of additional backup scenarios and readily use mission critical and storage-intense applications (eg: SQL Server and Exchange).
New optimized networking technologies: VMM 2008 R2 Beta supports two new networking technologies - Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ) and TCP Chimney - providing increased network performance while demanding less CPU burden. NICS that support VMQ, create a unique virtual network queue for each virtual machine on a host that can pass network packets directly from the hypervisor to virtual machine. This speeds throughput as it bypasses much of the processing normally required by the virtualization stack. With TCP Chimney, TCP/IP traffic can be offloaded to a physical NIC on the host computer reducing CPU load and improving network performance.

Enhanced storage and cluster support

Clustered Shared Volumes (CSV): Provides a single, consistent storage space that allows virtual hosts in a cluster to concurrently access virtual machine files on a single shared logical unit number (LUN). CSV eliminates the previous one LUN per virtual machine restriction and coordinates the use of storage with much greater efficiency and higher performance. CSV enables the Live Migration of virtual machines in and out of the shared LUN without impacting other virtual machines. Enabling CSV on failover clusters is straightforward and easy to monitor through the VMM administrator's console; many storage configuration complexities prior to CSV have been eliminated.
SAN migration into and out of clustered hosts: This allows virtual machines to migrate into and out of clustered hosts using a SAN transfer, which automatically configures the cluster nodes to recognize and support the new workload.
Expanded Support for iSCSI SANs: Previously, only one LUN could be bound to a single iSCSI target whereas now -- with VMM 2008 R2 Beta -- multiple LUNS can be mapped to a single iSCSI target. This provides broader industry support for iSCSI SANs allowing customers more flexibility in choosing storage providers and iSCSI SAN options.

Streamlined process for managing host upgrades:

Maintenance Mode: Allows administrators to apply updates or perform maintenance on a host server by safely evacuating all virtual machines to other hosts on a cluster using Live Migration or putting those workloads into a saved state to be safely reactivated when maintenance or upgrades are complete. Maintenance mode is enabled for all supported hypervisor platforms on Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta.

Other VMM 2008 R2 Beta enhancements

Support of disjoint domains: Reduces the complexity of reconciling host servers with differing domain names in Active Directory and DNS. In these situations, VMM 2008 R2 Beta automatically creates a custom service principal name (SPN) configured in both AD and DNS allowing for successful authentication.
Use of defined port groups with VMware Virtual Center: On installation, VMM 2008 R2 Beta will present available port groups for VMM's use with VMware Virtual Center thus allowing administrators to maintain control over which port groups are used.

Running the Virtual Machine Manager server component inside a Virtual Machine

mlmich — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 22:16:00 GMT

Running VMM inside a Virtual Machine is a fully supported way of running VMM. Our team tests this scenario and we have some customers deploying VMM in such an enviroment. If you would like to deploy VMM in such an environment, it is recommended to place the SQL server in a separate server, especially if your environment size will be substancial. SQL server can either be on a physical machine or on a virtual machine. Guidance on running SQL server as a virtual machine on Hyper-V can be found here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/d/9/4/d948f981-926e-40fa-a026-5bfcf076d9b9/SQL2008inHyperV2008.docx.

Because the VMM server component does not offer any high availability options, you can't make VMM a highly available application. However, there is a way to accomplish that by running VMM inside a Hyper-V Virtual Machine that is highly available. That way, when that VM fails over to another host, the VMM server fails over as well and can survive a hardware failure on the source host. This is a supported configuration for VMM. However, there are some gotchas that you have to be careful of in this scenario:

Make sure you don't migrate the Virtual Machine VMM is residing on from within VMM. This will fail the task and kill the VMM service in the process.
As per my comment above, the same restrictions on the DB apply here as well. Keep SQL in a remote server. SQL can also be clustered for high availability.

By keeping the VMM component inside a VM that is highly available, it means that on failover the VMM server's name and identity are left intact. Users can still connect to it and the host machines will authenticate the same server, so everything from a VMM perspective will work the same.

Update: With VMM 2008 R2 and Hyper-V R2 in Win2k8 R2, we are able to add two more scenarios to running the VMM server inside an HA VM:

Now the VM containing the VMM server can be live migrated from one host to another without any loss of service and no Jobs will fail
If you have installed the Administrator Console to a remote machine, it will not lose connection to the HA VM containing the VMM server during the live migration