The Soul of a Virtual Machine : What's in the Toolbox

Branch Office Infrastructure Solution -- with automation tools

megand — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 03:56:00 GMT

The Branch Office Infrastructure Solution has been published on TechEd. It uses virtualization technologies and includes tools for automating the creation of virtual machines, among lots of other good stuff. Go take a look! http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5624f3a5-b379-41c1-80f6-df3228cb2622&displaylang=en

From the download page: "The Branch Office Infrastructure Solution (BOIS) deliverables provide conceptual information to facilitate the definition and deployment of a streamlined branch office infrastructure solution that provides a comprehensive set of core IT infrastructure services based on the Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 operating system. The BOIS deliverables also include prescriptive guidance and best practices for implementing a complete, lab-validated single-server solution for the branch office using automated deployment tools. The automation tools are part of this download and are configurable for individual branch office deployments."

Announcing Virtual Server Deployment Manager (VSDM) 1.3.0

megand — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 20:32:00 GMT

Finally, this very cool tool created by Nelson Araujo is available as a free download from Microsoft (it was demo'd last year at TechEd in WINIL401). VSDM manages a virtual library of templates and ISO images and provides a streamlined way to manage and deploy virtual machines. Administrators can configure VSDM to allow non-administrators to create and manage their own machines without impacting other users' machines, or even being able to view them. This is a "must have" tool if you manage a large number of virtual machines or need to frequently recreate images based on a master image (template).

To download VSDM, go to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=FF59C543-5107-42F6-9252-A8CDE3B53915&displaylang=en.

For lots of good information and support for using the tool, see Nelson's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/nelson_araujo/archive/category/9970.aspx. For some draft installation instructions, see Paul Adare's blog: http://www.identit.ca/blogs/paul.

MOM report for evaluating virtualization candidates

megand — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 04:15:00 GMT

Chong Lee and Thomas Mathew -- Technology Specialists here at Microsoft -- are developing a report that you can load into Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (MOM) to monitor the performance of physical computers that are candidates for virtualization. This report can help you determine which computers are good candidates for virtualization, and of those, which computers you can virtualize on the same hardware. This report will be available for download when it's complete. I'll let you know where you can get it. In the meantime, you can ask your TAM or account rep for a copy.

Click here to see a view of the report: http://megandavis.members.winisp.net/Resources/VS-Candidate-Report.JPG

New tool for precompacting virtual hard disks

megand — Sat, 11 Dec 2004 01:44:00 GMT

Compacting your dynamically expanding virtual hard disks (VHDs) reduces the amount of disk space they use. Preparing a disk and compacting it is covered in the Virtual Server 2005 Administrator’s Guide, so I won’t go into it here. What’s new is this: you used to have to use a third-party tool to zero out available blank space on the VHD before compacting it. Now you can use a tool that's included with Virtual PC 2004 SP1 -- the Virtual Disk Precompactor.

If you have Virtual PC 2004, you can simply install SP1 to get this utility.* Otherwise, you’ll need to download the trial version of Virtual PC 2004, and then install SP1. (If you try to install it on your Windows Server 2003 machine, you'll get a warning that it isn't a supported OS. You can ignore the warning.)

To use Virtual Disk Precompactor, you must first capture Virtual Disk Precompactor.iso, which is installed with Virtual PC 2004 SP1. For instructions on capturing media, see "Add or remove a CD or DVD drive" in the Virtual Server 2005 Administrator's Guide. Virtual Disk Precompactor.iso is located in %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Virtual PC\Virtual Machine Additions\.

After you capture Virtual Disk Precompactor.iso, you can run Virtual Disk Precompactor from the command line by navigating to the CD drive of the virtual machine and typing Precompact. The available parameters are:

-Help - Displays help for the precompactor.

-Silent - Runs the precompactor in unattended mode.

-SetDisks - Specifies the disks to be precompacted. If this parameter isn't specified, then all virtual hard disks for this virtual machine are compacted.

Example: Precompact -Silent -SetDisks:CDE

Note that you can only compact dynamically expanding virtual hard disks. To compact fixed-size VHDs, you can convert them to dynamically expanding VHDs, compact them, and then convert them back to fixed size.

* As announced in my posting of January 12, 2005 (http://blogs.msdn.com/megand/archive/2005/01/12/351756.aspx), this tool also will be available in Virtual Server 2005 Service Pack 1.