This morning Microsoft announcied the Release to Manufacturing of the hypervisor for Windows Server 2008, also known as Hyper-V. You’ll also find that some of our existing case studies are in Education!!!
I was ecstatic to learn during TechEd that several customers in higher education are already running Hyper-V RC1 in production. I met one with over 80 production servers in Hyper-V, another with over 30.
Given the methods in which virtualization has grown, this is not super-surprising to see. For the most part, virtualization did not get its start by a C-level executive declaring it would be the new path forward across a centralized environment. Engineers have been working with virtualization software in test labs and developer/development environments for many years. As the software matured and performance improved, the concept became more appealing to move some production services on to a virtualization platform. First the lighter workloads and then over time it has grown to be a preferred method of server hosting. I noticed some university bloggers even have a “percent of servers virtualization” ticker gadget running as blog flair.
So why does virtualization make so much sense in EDU? There are many schools who have great intentions to provide new IT services but simply don’t have the funding. Often this isn’t a budgeting problem as in where the money is spent, it is a funding problem as in there IS NO money. Believe it or not, the Microsoft discount on software for EDU customers does put a new server within range even for customers with almost no funding, but finding $2,000 for a new server is sometimes just impossible.
To date, virtualization has grown mostly in pockets where IT groups were able to find funding. The result is hundreds (yes literally hundreds) more servers on campus environments than just a few years ago. Those numbers are about to take another leap.
With the release of Hyper-V, now any department or district that owns a Windows Server can also find themselves empowered with a hypervisor technology for hosting virtual machines. Some of the interesting scenarios that I have heard:
- We are running out of space in the server room/closet
- Our datacenter is getting too hot and is causing hardware failures
- I need to provide services at a remote school building but need to minimize hardware investment
- We would like to host a server for another department
- A professor/teacher would like to run a client/server application but needs hardware and we have no $ or space
- We are interested in moving computer labs in to the cloud
- We would like students at home to have the same computing environment they have here at school
One of my colleagues has built a presentation named “running your district on 6 servers or less”. As hardware continues to evolve, the virtual machine density (vm’s per server) will continue to improve. It may only be a few years before the title can adjust to “running your entire district on a 2 node Windows Server cluster”.
Cheers, and Happy Hyper-V Day. Heroes Happen {EDU}.
This is one of the best webcasts I’ve watched in recent memory. Really great information on how machines find domain controllers in 2008.
http://searchwincomputing.techtarget.com/generic/0,295582,sid68_gci1317644,00.html?track=NL-119&ad=647382&asrc=EM_USC_3893103&uid=8071835
Thanks Mike, and great job publishing this info!
http://blogs.msdn.com/mikester/archive/2008/05/30/using-the-hyper-v-integration-components-in-winpe.aspx
This post details how exactly to build a WinPE disk with the Hyper-V integration components build in. You can bet Kevin and I will be working over the next couple of days to build this in to our deployment labs.
There is no add/remove programs or programs and features dialogue, so how do you remove applications?
Start by opening regedit and expanding to the section where all applications should publish their installation data (according to the Windows Application Compatibility Guidelines). If the application does not store data here, you will need to seek out additional support from the vendor.
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
In this case I’ll use the C++ Redistributable as an example but it could be any application. See the value “UninstallString”. Double click and copy the contents to the command line. This funny looking string of characters is the GUID for the application. Windows Installer will associate the value with the application and initiate the uninstall process.
If so I would love to chat with you, have coffee, or setup a discussion with someone from a product team. Just send an Email to me using the form on my blog or stop by one of the Intro to Powershell hands-on-labs. I will be proctoring M, T, W, & F. I am here from the Microsoft EDU specialist team as is Kevin Sullivan, our System Center specialist.
… and/or domain functional level? There is a table on the following TechNet page that outlines this info. It has been a re-occuring question in my recent trips! Note that the domain functional level is the important factor for 2008, as that enables new features including fine grained password policy.
http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/library/34678199-98f1-465f-9156-c600f723b31f1033.mspx?mfr=true
In other words to get to this page.
I’ll be honest, having to navigate through the Network and Sharing Center can sometimes be an extra step for me rather than a value-add. At times it can be very helpful, at other times I just want to get to the IP configuration page for a network adapter as quickly and with as few keystrokes/clicks as possible. Here is a shortcut.
I launch this directly from the Vista/2008 Start Menu search field by typing ncpa.cpl and hitting Enter.
You could also create a new shortcut that launches ncpa.cpl and then add it to the Start Menu or “Pin it” to the list of frequently used apps in the left column of the Start Menu. I’m a heavy keyboard user so typing is actually faster for me, other may find clicking more to their liking. This will work in either case.
In my test environment I just discovered an issue and need to remove the Domain Controller role from one of my Hyper-V hosts which happens to be running Server Core. This brought a question to mind, if I want to demote a DC running Core, what is the path of least resistance?
I found that if I am willing to accept all default parameters I could do it with just one command line argument –
dcpromo /AdministratorPassword:<password>
To review the default parameters, type “dcpromo /?:Demotion”. Unfortunately my RDP session closed before I could copy/paste the full output of the command. If anyone captures it, feel free to drop it in the comments. It basically confirms each step of removing the role, dns records, binaries, etc. Note that if your DC is the last DC within the domain you would need to specify additional parameters.
Due to feature changes between Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008, there is no support for a rolling in-place upgrade. There is support for an in-place migration. During a discussion last week on Server 2008, a question came up regarding the process.
The difference is in a migration there is some down time. You have two options, to replace one node with Server 2008, migrate settings and shift over services and migrate the other node, or migrate settings from one cluster to another with multiple nodes already in place for each cluster.
The details of this operation are provided in the following TechNet articles:
Overview - http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/library/6820ae3f-1ecc-43fd-8a76-fe8c2125cfe61033.mspx?mfr=true
In-place migration of two-node cluster - http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/library/6820ae3f-1ecc-43fd-8a76-fe8c2125cfe61033.mspx?mfr=true
Migrating with multiple nodes - http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/library/d20951ed-a8f7-4ff8-9943-4a3a567f6c6a1033.mspx?mfr=true
Good information from the Virtualization team blog:
"Each VM has a separate instance of VMBus. VMBus is a bus only in the sense that multiple VSCs inside a VM share the same instance of VMBus. This means that a local, kernel mode compromise of a VM will not reveal any data from other VMs. That said, a vulnerability in VMBus and VSPs in the root partition could critically affect VM isolation if the vulnerability resulted in arbitrary code execution there. For this reason we treat all data coming from guest VSCs to the root VSPs over VMBus as untrusted data when validating the Hyper-V root components."
http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2008/04/07/isolation-of-vms.aspx
In a session last week someone specifically asked whether VMBUS is independent or shared. Thank you to Michael Icore for sending this link to me.
It is possible open the Hyper-V console for an individual VM without opening the full mmc. You can do this either using the cmdlet that was just published by James O'Neill, or by creating a custom shortcut.
PowerShell method
See the recent post from James on his TechNet blog:
http://blogs.technet.com/jamesone/archive/2008/04/19/more-on-the-accessing-the-hyper-v-api-from-powershell.aspx
Shortcut method
Create a shortcut to:
C:\Program Files\Hyper-V\vmconnect.exe HostName VmName
If you have multiple VMs with the same name, you can also use the machine GUID:
C:\Program Files\Hyper-V\vmconnect.exe HostName -G VmGUID
Of course, in either case, you would substitute the name of the physical server for HostName and the name of the Virtual Machine, or the GUID, for VmName or VmGUID, respectively.
Thank you to James O'Neill and Cedric Davies for pointing this out to me! This came up as a question during a presentation this week.
From the Vista team blog:
Starting today, users will be able to choose to manually install Windows Vista SP1 via Windows Update or download the standalone installer from the Microsoft Download Center (x86 and x64) for any of the 36 supported languages
Windows Vista Team Blog : Releasing Windows Vista SP1 for more languages
In a recent blog post one of our IT Pro Evangelists shared two iSCSI target software solutions that offer trial editions of their software.
Free iSCSI Target Software
[MSFT-BE] Arlindo's Blog - IT Pro Evangelist : Free iSCSI Target Software
Several people asked me about iSCSI target software this week and where they might find a solution to test. I haven't worked with either of these so let me know about your experience.
I received a link to this site from one of our field resources. Very nice GUI tool to kick off the command lines that are needed to manage server core. Could be handy. See the link below for details.
Features:
- Product Activation
- Configuration of display resolution
- Clock and time zone configuration
- Remote Desktop configuration
- Management of local user accounts (creation, deletion, group membership, passwords)
- Firewall configuration
- WinRM configuration
- IP configuration
- Computer name and domain/workgroup membership
- Installation of Server Core features/roles
CoreConfigurator - MS Israel Community
