TechNet India - from the field : Virtual TechDays

Virtual TechDays – September 2008 – Managing Virtual Infrastructure

TechNetIndia — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:20:34 GMT

Hi, this is Ravi Sankar (http://ravisankar.spaces.live.com/blog ) again from the TechNet India team. This is the second blog post I am writing in response to the questions we received as part of virtual tech days (http://www.connectwithlife.co.in/vtd ). This time I am answering the questions from the session “Managing Virtual Infrastructure”

Q1: Is virtualization suitable for big corporations only? Or is it useful to small and medium enterprises also?

A1: Very good question. Virtualization technologies are useful to organizations of all sizes. Let me explain this with the help of an example.

Hyper-V is the server virtualization technology from Microsoft. By using Hyper-V in a data centre, a large organization can consolidate their server infrastructure into fewer number of servers. This will result in savings in terms of rack space, cooling, power, management cost etc.

The above advantages are applicable to a small and medium sized business organization (SMB) as well. Since SMBs face additional constraints in terms of quality infrastructure and skilled IT man power virtualization can offer them a more optimized IT solution by requiring less infrastructure and better server management technologies (backup, high availability, provisioning etc.).

Q2: How does System Centre Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) handle applications which are not cluster aware to provide high availability (HA)?

A2: SCVMM does not handle applications directly but through virtual machines. Hyper-V is cluster aware and can be configured to provide HA for all the virtual machines running on it. The applications running in these virtual machines may or may not be cluster aware. SCVMM can manage the failover of such virtual machines from one server to another server running Hyper-V.

Q3: What is template creation in System Center Virtual Machine manager (SCVMM)?

A3: Templates are virtual machines created and stored in SCVMM library with specific virtual hardware, OS and application configurations. Templates are created for frequently used virtual machine configurations so that it is easier to provision new VMs. It also allows automation of VMs through scripting.

As one of you said it is a one time activity

Q4: Is diagram view of virtual and physical machines created automatically in System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)?

A4: Yes, once SCOM is configured to monitor a Virtual Server or Hyper-V based computer it can generate a diagram of physical machines and associated virtual machines automatically

Q5: Is Hyper-V a Type-1 virtualization product?

A5: Yes, Hyper-V is a hypervisor based Type-1 virtualization product. Hyper-V is available either as part of Windows Server 2008 x64 editions or as a standalone product (http://www.microsoft.com/servers/hyper-v-server ) for bare metal implementation

Q6: How many Hyper-V based servers are required to virtualize my xxx number of servers?

Or How can I size my Hyper-V deployment?

Or How much memory is required to virtualize xxx number or servers?

A6: As an answer to all these questions I request you to visit the following URLs and read things related to virtualization.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/Perf_tun_srv.mspx

www.microsoft.com/map

http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/lior/archive/2008/08/15/hyper-v-server-sizing-and-performance-tuning.aspx

Q7: How powerful is Hyper-v?

A7: This is a very subjective question and it can be best answered with the help of some real customer case studies given the following link http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/case-studies.mspx

Q8: Is it possible to manage VMWare infrastructure from SCVMM?

A8: Yes, SCVMM allows the integration of VMWare into its console. Details can be found here. http://blogs.technet.com/chengw/archive/2008/04/29/managing-vmware.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/virtualworld/archive/2008/06/02/managing-vmware-with-scvmm.aspx

Q9: Can Hyper-V run on 32 bit hardware or 32 bit OS?

A9: Hyper-V runs only on 64 bit hardware and requires 64 bit edition of Windows Server 2008 in the parent partition. However some of the remote management tools for Hyper-V runs on 32 bit OS. Also Hyper-V supports 32 bit virtual machines.

Q10: What kind of drivers used by virtual machines in Hyper-V?

A10: Hyper-V supports two different types of devices viz. emulated and synthetic. Emulated device drivers are used for backward compatibility with older operating systems whereas synthetic drivers are supported only in newer operating systems like WS2008 but provides better performance. To know more about emulated and synthetic devices please refer to the following links.

http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2008/02/25/hyper-v-terminology.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/tvoellm/archive/2008/01/02/hyper-v-integration-components-and-enlightenments.aspx

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid94_gci1312278,00.html

Q11: How do I provide high availability for virtual machines running in Hyper-V?

A11: There are many articles available on Microsoft’s website on providing high availability to a Hyper-v environment. Here is one of them http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc837977.aspx

Q12: What makes the rapid provisioning of virtual machines possible in a Hyper-v environment?

A12: Libraries, templates, PowerShell based scripting and self service portal features in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 make the rapid provisioning of virtual machine possible in a Hyper-V based virtual environment.

Q13: What are the minimum system requirements to run Hyper-V?

A13: The answer depends on whether you are running a bare metal Hyper-V server, server core based Hyper-V and Hyper-V with full installation of Windows Server 2008. Here is the system requirements for running Hyper-v server

http://www.microsoft.com/servers/hyper-v-server/system-requirements.mspx

Q14: Where can I get a free copy of Hyper-V?

A14: Hyper-V is available to you when you purchase a copy of “Windows Server 2008 x64 edition with Hyper-V”. To download an evaluation copy of Windows Server 2008 please visit the following link

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/trial-software.aspx

A full version of Hyper-V server can be downloaded free of cost from the following link

http://www.microsoft.com/servers/hyper-v-server/how-to-get.mspx

Technorati Tags: Hyper-V,SCVMM,Virtualization

Q&A: Performance Tuning Redefined with SQL Server 2008

TechNetIndia — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 19:12:00 GMT

I am sure you folks are enjoying all the Q&A posted by my fellow Evangelists on this blog. The intentions are very much there to give you complete information even after our webcasts have got over. If you didnt get to read the Part I Q&A I wrote around the DMVs session, dont forget to read them too. Let me next give you the links to PPT and Session for your offline viewing if you missed them. Next, moving to the unanswered Q&A from the session. Here we go:

Question Asked: can we run data collector on sql server which is having sql server 2005 ?

The management data warehouse can only be installed on a server running SQL Server 2008.

Question Asked: different collection modes available for data collector

The Data Collector Architecture (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb677355.aspx) explains the real backend work. Incidentally, this is an completely async process and uses a combination of SSIS, SQL Agent and SQL Relational engine magic. You can also manually collect and upload the data into SQL Server from the Management Studio.

Quesiton Asked: Could you plz tell something more about WMI event?

If you personally ask me, this is a super cool event one seems to miss-out from the SQL Server 2005 days itself. Anyways, check the complete documentation of WMI Events and SQL Server at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms180606.aspx. Infact, if you crank up your SQL Server Configuration Manager, it operates completely around the WMI Eventing Infrastructure. It is really powerfull and under-utilized.

Quesiton Asked: What is the Impact on Memory Usage and Performance of system of Data collection?

This my friend is a dicey question because the data collected is completely under your control. And everytime a collect and upload happens the runtime fires enough info into the database. Now when this happens is completely configurable and the purging is also configurable. Hence the stress on the IO and Memory is something in your hand. Moreover we use the SQL Server Agent infrastructure and it can also be configured to run at our specified interval rather than automatically every 10 sec or so.

Question Asked: Can we use data collector to pull the data from the the data provider or website that allows to fetch the data using webservices?

Though the question is vaugue I think if you get a chance to read through the Architecture (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb677355.aspx) in detail things will get clear. There is nothing like a webservice or sorts available.

Question Asked: can we have single data collector to collect information from multiple instance ?

If you have multiple SQL Server instances you could configure the data collection processes on each of your instances to use a central MDW repository. In fact, It is recommended you do this to minimize the impact of the data collection process.

Question Asked: Can the Monitoring data be Stored outside the server being monitored

Your question seems to be similar to the one asked in the previous question. You can raise the collection as T-SQL Collector, SQL Trace, Perf Counter Collector and Query Activity Collector. You can read on each at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb677328.aspx.

Question Asked: Does it upload the data to the warehouse db on its own or we have to do it manually?

As described before, you have all the flexibility here. You can manually do it or schedule it at regular intervals via the SQL Server Agent process.

Question Asked: how much frequently is the data fed to dataware house from cache ?

Same as the previous question. You can completely customize it.

Question Asked: we can use this data collector for maintain performance related data for application or database or Visual studio application

Though this is a nice thought, currently we are restricted for collecting perf data using the DMVs inside of a SQL Server instance only.

Question Asked: Say If I run this tool, every 1 hour, for 30 days, how much of data space will it take?

There is no straight forward answer to this question. It depends on how much data you will be collecting. I have seen with an interval of 10 sec for the past ~25 days the current size is close to 400MB for me. But I this happens on my laptop which starts and shuts down often.

Question Asked: WIll Data collector effect MSDB ?

This is a good question. We do use msdb for DW activities. The data collector uses msdb for storing configuration information, run-time information, auditing, and collection history information. This database must be present on the instance of SQL Server that runs the data collector. Using msdb provides the following benefits: a) All the data needed to configure and run the data collector is in one location. b) Data collection configuration can be deployed across several servers without having to use the file system. c) The data collector can use existing SQL Server security mechanisms to protect the data. In addition, database roles can provide granular security, and there is no need to implement cross-database chaining. and finally d) Since msdb is a relational database, it is possible to ensure the referential integrity of the configuration and run-time data.

Hope these clarified some of your questions from the session and hope to meet you all again in the next VTD scheduled on Nov 25th and 26th. And guess what we will have 8 fabulous sessions around SQL Server. Dont miss the action and dont forget to register.

Virtual Tech Days – September 2008 – Virtualization Security

TechNetIndia — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:03:00 GMT

Hi I am Ravi Sankar (http://ravisankar.spaces.live.com/blog) from the TechNet India team. First of all let me thank everyone who attended the sessions under virtualization track. We have received hundreds of questions as part of the sessions and due to time constraints the speakers could answer only a few of them. So I am taking this opportunity to answer all of those questions.

A number of questions are either repeated or asked with same concepts in mind. I have consolidated those into fewer number of questions and answered here. In other words answers written here are not 1:1 replies of your questions but essentially covers everything you wanted to know.

Q1: Is there a virtual firewall or special security protocol in Hyper-V?

A1: The answer is NO. Virtual machines can be protected using the same firewall applications and security protocols used in physical machines. To know more about virtual networks please click here

Q2: Do I need to run antivirus software in all the virtual machines in a Hyper-V based server or is it sufficient to run one instance of antivirus software in the parent partition?

A2: Antivirus software should be installed in all virtual machines including the parent partition. Also depending on the applications installed, the requirement on antivirus software would vary from one virtual machine to another virtual machine. For example, the antivirus software required for a virtual machine running Exchange Server is different from a virtual machine running SQL Server.

Q3: I have a smart client application. Will this work in a virtual machine environment (as such) or does it require customization?

A3: I don’t see any reason for additional customisations. But I do not know the details of the application you have mentioned. So I suggest you to thoroughly test the application before using it in production

Q4: Can my offline virtual machines be patched to keep it update?

A4: Yes, you can do this. Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool can be used to achieve this goal. Click here to download the tool. An update version of this tools is expected soon.

Q5: Please explain the ring model of CPU as far as Hyper-V is concerned.

A5: Hypervisors work at ring –1, OS kernel works at ring 0 and user applications work at ring 3. Ring 1 & 2 are not used in Windows

Q6: What are the specific CPU features required for Hyper-V to run?

A6: For any computer to run Hyper-V it should have a CPU from Intel or AMD with hardware assisted virtualization capability. For Intel processors this technology is called Intel-VT and for AMD processors this technology is known as AMD-V. Additionally Data Execution Prevention (DEP) should be turned on for Hyper-V to run.

Q7: Will the physical environment security applications take care of the full virtual environment or do I have to consider any additional products?

A7: Security applications such as firewalls and anti malware products remain the same for virtual environments. But these security applications should be configured to secure both parent and child virtual machines

Q8: Is System Management Server/System Center Configuration Manager a supported application on Hyper-V?

A8: Yes, SMS/SCCM products can be installed in a Hyper-V based virtual machine. Hyper-V based virtual machines can also be configured as SMS/SCCM clients.

Q9: Is there a “bare metal” installation type available for Hyper-V? Is it possible to install Hyper-V without installing Windows Server 2008?

A9: Yes and this type of Hyper-V implementation is known as Microsoft Hyper-V server. For more details please follow this link http://www.microsoft.com/Hyper-VServer

Q10: How the Hyper-v architecture can mitigate security attacks?

A10: Let’s look at different potential attack vendors on the virtualized environment.

Let’s say an application that encounters malware with some frequency (e.g. a web server) is running in one of the guest virtual machines above. It becomes compromised, but the malware would still need to compromise the guest kernel OS for the virtual machine (which is typically what happens when a physical machine is running an application with a vulnerability). From there the malware could potentially target a number of vectors for broader infection:

The right arrow signifies that the malware could try to target other virtual machines running on the same box
Alternatively, it could try to target the hypervisor to bring down the overall virtualization environment, or
Try to target the VSPs through the VSC-VSP communications path. (Again, the virtualization service clients, or VSCs, enable virtual machines to be installed on their own Hyper-V device and to talk more directly with the virtual service providers which broker access to physical I/O.)
Another option is to target the individual virtual machine worker processes where the majority of the code with Hyper-V resides

Let’s now look at how the Hyper-V architecture helps to mitigate these potential attack vectors

The hardware itself mitigates attacks on the OS kernel. The latest CPUs from Intel and AMD have the ability to run this in the most privileged part of the processor, otherwise known as “Ring 0”, and to block access to this from other components (e.g. guest virtual machines running in user mode) that should not have access.

The architecture itself creates isolation between other virtual machines, addressing the scenario of malware trying to attack other virtual machines from the infected virtual machine. If a guest wants to communicate with another guest, it must be done through the root partition. “Back-channeling” is not allowed – no two parts can communicate directly with each other, similar to how two machines connect on a physical network.

Regarding the other three attacks (on the Windows hypervisor, VSPs-VSCs, and on VM Worker processes):

The size of the hypervisor, VSCs/VSPs are small (i.e. lower likelihood of vulnerabilities)
When VSPs receive data from the VMBus, it is considered untrusted and requires validation
If a VM Worker process (where most of the Hyper-V code resides) is brought down, it only brings down the VM session

In short, the separation of components from each other by privilege level and architecture helps enable defence-in-depth against malware attacks.

All of the above components have been extensively tested through the Security Design Lifecycle – threat modelling, fuzz testing, and security code review.

Q11: What is Microsoft Forefront and what kind of protection does it offer?

A11: Microsoft Forefront represents a suite of security products offering protection at client, server and network edge levels. Fore more details please refer to the following link www.microsoft.com/forefront

Q12: How many virtual machines can be created in a given instance of Hyper-V?

A12: Please follow this link to see the maximum supported configurations under Hyper-V. http://blogs.msdn.com/nickmac/archive/2008/07/04/hyper-v-rtm-maximum-supported-configurations.aspx . But these are not fixed numbers. They would change with newer hardware configurations and corresponding changes made to Hyper-V.

Another link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956710

Q13: Please explain the difference between monolithic hypervisor and microkernelized hypervisor.

A14: The diagram below explains the difference. Hyper-V follows the more secure and stable microkernelized architecture unlike many of it’s competitors.

Q14: What kind of hardware is recommended for Hyper-V?

A14: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc816844.aspx

Technorati Tags: Virtualization,Hyper-V,Security

Q&A: Top 10 DMVs Admins must know in SQL Server

TechNetIndia — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 11:18:00 GMT

In the recent Virtual TechDays that got concluded we had a number of sessions and there were questions that couldnt be answered. You can download the PPT for the "Top 10 DMVs Admin must know in SQL Server" at: http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/1/A/61A76FEB-8035-47BC-9573-A438F7513E6A/DAY2/TRACK4/Top_10_DMVs.ppt

Question Asked: What is ITW in SQL 2000 and What are DMVs?

ITW is Index Tuning Wizard and was available in SQL 2000 days. We rewamped it as DTA (Database Tuning Wizard) in SQL Server 2005 which was far more powerful than the SQL 2000 ITW counterpart. Now to get into the second part, Dynamic Management Views (DMV) provide greater transparency and insight into the database and a powerful infrastructure for proactive monitoring of database health and performance to make managing data more flexible and secure.

Question Asked: do we need to run DMV on prod server or we can run on the restored DB also

We need to understand one fundamental thing here, DMV's are like pseudo views / tables that are exposing the in-memory structures of SQL Server. These are useful to diagnoze any potential problems that might occur in that system. Some of these views are transient and some are cummulative and some get fulshed from time-to-time. Typical examples in these categories would incude Locks data is transient and changes every micro-second while data like the Index usage (seeks, scans etc) are cummulative and data like the query cache can get flushed if there is memory pressure from any other side. Having said all this, these data are NOT like metadata (e.g. sys.tables) which can be restored on another DB and analyzed. There is a way in SQL Server 2008 using Data Collector that we can do this and check the architecture here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb677355.aspx

Question Asked: all these DMV are part of SQL 2005

DMV's were very much intrduced as concepts inside SQL Server 2005 itself. AFAIK, there were close to 80+ DMV's with SQL Server 2005 RTM build. We increased this set to ~136 with this new version of SQL Server 2008.

Question Asked: How to get a list of all DMVs available for us to query upon....?

Here is a simple query that will help you answer this part:
SELECT * FROM sys.all_objects
WHERE [name] LIKE '%dm_%'
AND [type] IN ('V', 'TF', 'IF')
ORDER BY [name]

With SQL 2008 we introduced a number of DMV's around auditing, Extended Events, CDC, Filestreams etc.

Question Asked: what will calculeted by awe_allocated_kb

This value shows the overall amount of memory that is allocated through the AWE mechanism on the 32-bit version of SQL Server. Or, this value shows the overall amount of memory that locked pages consume on the 64-bit version of the product. This value comes from the sys.dm_os_memory_clerks DMV and the documentation for the same is at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175019.aspx.

Question Asked: What permission does a user need to access the DMV's

There are two types of dynamic management views and functions:
Server-scoped dynamic management views and functions (e.g OS, IO, Threads, tasks etc). These require VIEW SERVER STATE permission on the server.
Database-scoped dynamic management views and functions (e.g Index, Tables, partition, file etc). These require VIEW DATABASE STATE permission on the database.

Question Asked: Which DMV give me query plan or I will use old method to find query plan?

Here is a query that you can run to get the Total Elapsed time of queries and the number of times those queries were hit. It also give's you the query and the plan used for each of those.

select qs.execution_count
     , qs.total_elapsed_time, qs.last_elapsed_time
     , qs.min_elapsed_time, qs.max_elapsed_time
     , substring(st.text, (qs.statement_start_offset/2)+1
                        , ((case qs.statement_end_offset
                              when -1 then datalength(st.text)
                              else qs.statement_end_offset
                           end - qs.statement_start_offset)/2) + 1) as statement_text
      , qp.query_plan
from sys.dm_exec_query_stats as qs
cross apply sys.dm_exec_sql_text(qs.sql_handle) as st
cross apply sys.dm_exec_query_plan (qs.plan_handle) as qp

Question Asked: How are DMV's and DMF's changing the memory consumptions of SQL Server? consider the dm_exec_* which store the results of the current workload.

I think this has come a number of times from various people I have interacted. As described before, DMV's are in-memory structures and are anyway's used by SQL Server internally. It is with SQL Server 2005 that we started exposing them in an official manner rather than doing bit-manipulations with some DBCC commands. Hence there is nothing to be worried about the load or memory consumptions. It is not as alarming as you think.

Question Asked: does there is support for DMVs in SQL 2000?

DMV's were introduced with SQL Server 2005 onwards. Though these numbers are increasing from version to version these cannot be got with SQL 2000 version. If you are still using SQL Server 2000 version I would strongly recommend you to move to SQL Server 2008 version :).

Question Asked: it seems to be very hard to remember DMV names, is there any way to get list of DMV's and its usage?

Fair enough and I dont think you are the only person finding it difficult :). With SQL Server 2005 I gone to BOL a number of times, but with SQL 2008 the intellisense takes away half the problem. But if you want to learn more on DMV's and start using them then I would recommend you to book mark this page on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188754.aspx

Due to time constraints we were not able to answer them during the session itself but I am sure these have got clarified now. Keep those questions coming and we will try our best to answer them during the session else dont forget to visit this blog post the event :). Hope this was of help, btw dont forget to login to the VTD site to register your views on Nov VTD Topics.

PS: These are the exact questions that were asked during the session. I have taken the relevant ones and compiled the same here for you. BTW, there are couple more blogs around other sessions that will get posted.

Vinod Kumar
Technology Evangelist
www.ExtremeExperts.com

VTD - Gets a start !!!

TechNetIndia — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:21:00 GMT

Well, officially from the TechNet team we will have the ITPro tracks starting from tomorrow and there is a dedicated track on Virtualization spanning two days and we have industry speakers from our various organizations talking on different virtualization techniques used by them. We will also have a track on SQL Server and Windows Vista Client (on 19th) that we will talk extensively.

If you have not yet joined our party, feel free to login tomm @ 10AM here.

Our SQL Evangelist blogs on his day 1 experience on the SQL Server topics on the dev track here. Pass you comments and feedbacks ... We will be more than happy to hear you !!!

Virtual TechDays - Countdown begins !!!

TechNetIndia — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:40:00 GMT

First, let me take this opportunity to Welcome all to this blog from the TechNet India Team where we try to share our experiences, information on various events/activities we do in India. This is also a channel where we solicit feedbacks from you folks who use our product day-in-day-out. Thanks again for all the innovation you do using our tools and technologies.

This blog cannot come at a better time than now. We are about to start our "Virtual TechDays" in less than a week, actually Sep 17th, 18th and 19th. We are going to give you a tough time in choosing our sessions, as much as 48 sessions with 4 tracks in parallel this is going to be one mega online event you dont want to miss.

From the TechNet side, we have topics around "Virtualization" which is big and we are having close to 8 sessions around this theme. Many of these sessions are done by Industry speakers who have used these technologies - hence this is more of what our customers have experienced. We also have tracks around SQL Server, Windows Vista that you can attend during these three days. BTW, if you are a developer you have choices of sessions around Client development, Mobile, Web development etc. So lots in store for you.

For detailed information around the tracks and sessions, feel free to visit / register at: http://www.connectwithlife.co.in/vtd/

There are already links from our Evangelists around Virtualization and SQL Server on their blogs.

TechNet India