Category: Hyper-V

.I’ve just read about the Microsoft Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool.  The idea is that many organisations keep a certain number of VM’s in an offline state.  Maybe they are used once in a while.  Maybe they are archived for regulatory reasons.  However, there is a chance they need to be powered up once in a while.  What is the risk that they power up and are not sufficiently secured by updates?  Are you really going to manually power them up every month to deploy updates and human resources?

Microsoft has the Virtual Machine Service Tool accelerator to take care of this for you.  It runs a servicing job (using PowerShell scripts) to power up the VM, deploy updates using either WSUS 3.0 or SCCM 2007 and then powers down the VM.

The product has recently been released by Microsoft.  It’s a free download and well worth checking out if you have a limited virtual lab or large production environment that utilises MS virtualisation. 

I don’t see any support for Hyper-V yet.  Maybe that’s coming – I’ve sent in a question to find out.  There’s a dependancy on VMM.  VMM 2007 only supports Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 so I guess we’ll have to wait and see on VMM 2008 (RTM Q4 2008).

Its requirements are:

• Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2003 R2 (32-Bit x86); Windows Server 2003 R2 x64 editions; Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2.
• Other Requirements: .NET Framework 2.0, .NET Framework 3.0, IIS with ASP .NET installed, Windows Remote Managment, Windows PowerShelll 1.0, Configuration Manager 2007, WSUS3.0, Virtual Machine Manager 2007 (VMM), Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 or higher, Windows Server 2003 R2 SP1 or higher, Active Directory, SQL Server 2005 SP1 or higher, SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (VMM only).

I’ve just read about some licensing changes for the SMSE CAL.  This CAL entitles you to license a physical device (and hence all the VM’s on it) for the following System Center products:

• Operations Manager
• Configuration Manager
• Data Protection Manager
• Virtual Machine Manager

You’re probably aware that VMM 2008 is in beta at the moment.  The System Center team blog says that it will be released in Q4 2008.  Along with this it will be included to replace VMM 2007 in the SMSE.  VMM 2008 will also be available as a standalone product.  It can make sense to use the SMSE because it works out around the price of the CAL’s for two of these products.  VMM and SCOM can work very closely together offering an almost consultancy/advisor like experience for MS virtualisation (Virtual Server and Hyper-V).

It is expected that the cost of the SMSE will increase by 10-15% at this time.

Credit: Bink.

I finally got around to installing Hyper-V on Server 2008 Core at home.  I’m building a lab to do some work on SCCM 2007 SP1 and R2 and I figured I rebuild my Vista desktop with Core so I could provision more RAM for my VM’s.

My desktop is a 4GB RAM "home build" that I got on Komplett back in September 2006.  Imagine trying to install ESX on that?  LOL.  One of the great perks of Hyper-V is that it will support anything that Windows Server 2008 can install on.

Here’s what I did to get going:

• Enabled CPU virtualisation assistance and DEP in the BIOS.
• Installed Windows Server 2008 Enterprise x64 (Core Installation).  This takes no time at all.  It was using about 6GB of disk and around 500MB of RAM.
• Changed the regional settings:  I am in Ireland but my wireless keyboard is USA: control intl.cpl.
• Determined the NIC ID (I have a few in it): netsh interface ipv4 show interfaces.
• Set the IP address for NIC 2: netsh interface ipv4 set address name="2" source=static address=192.168.1.3 mask=255.255.255.0 gateway=192.168.1.1.
• Set the DNS: netsh interface ipv4 add dnsserver name="2" address=192.168.1.2 index=1.
• Renamed my server: netdom renamecomputer %computername% /NewName:HyperSvr1.
• Rebooted for that to take effect: shutdown /r /t 0.
• Joined it to my SBS domain: netdom join %computername% /domain:mydomain.local /userd:administrator /passwordd:*.
• Rebooted for that to take effect: shutdown /r /t 0.
• Copied CoreConfigurator onto the Core server and configured any users, groups, enabled RDP, firewall settings that I needed.
• Downloaded and copied the Hyper-V update onto the server.
• Installed the Hyper-V update: wusa.exe Windows6.0-KB950050-x64.msu.
• Installed the Hyper-V role: start /w ocsetup.exe Microsoft-Hyper-V.
• Rebooted when prompted.
• Downloaded and installed Remote Management for Windows Vista.  Using this I can manage my headless Core "server" from my laptop and do all my lab work in a more comfortable location.

It’s not so long ago we used to hear the following from Novell Netware heads:

• Windows isn’t scalable.
• Active Directory isn’t good enough.  You can’t build an enterprise on it.

And guess what … that sort of hot air usually came from people who hadn’t even tried Windows or AD on normal production hardware or even at all.  Over the last 5-6 years we’ve seen NDS disappear faster than Tyrannosaurus Rex and consultants making a fortune doing Netware-to-AD migrations.  AD is reliably managing 10’s and 100’s of thousands of users and probably more.

Now I get great pleasure in reading from vested interests that Hyper-V isn’t up to the job.  "It can’t be used in an enterprise".  "It’s only good for testing".  That sounds very familiar, eh?  And again, it’s pure trash!  I’ve been hammering Hyper-V over the last while since it was a release candidate.  It performs beautifully.  I can’t complain about it.  Easy to install, easy to set up VM’s and reliable.  I’ve not had one outage.  VM’s are lightening fast.  I’ve been even using differencing disks and haven’t had any issues (not that I recommend differencing disks for production).  Don’t just take my word for it either.

I’ve read a lot of critiques by the vested interests and they make me laugh.  They are so obviously commenting from a standpoint where they haven’t even tried the product in the last 6 months.

Before anyone goes nuts; ESX is an excellent product.  There are certain reasons why I would choose it over Hyper-V and there are reasons why I would choose Hyper-V over ESX.  And I’m sure Xen is probably excellent too, but to be honest, if I’m paying extra for virtualisation outside of the System Center management scope, I’ll go for ESX.

If you are looking at Hyper-V as a potential solution then try it.  That’s the only true test.  Remember that us bloggers are very often no better than you.  Look for credentials.  Look for evidence that they’ve tried what they are talking about.  If the commentary is too one sided then watch out for the "Fair and Balanced" alarm bells 😉

I’ve fallen behind with PowerShell.  There’s a bazillion things to do and this is one of them but I’ve not been able to learn the language yet.  There’s a plan: one of the books I bought recently is a cookbook for PowerShell coding for SCOM and Windows.

Anyone who likes PowerShell will love Hyper-V and everything about it.  It’s very manageable from the scripting language.  Taylor Brown has dedicated a lot of time giving Hyper-V coding examples.  The Virtual PC Guy has noted that James O’Neill just posted a free to use PowerShell library for Hyper-V.

Taylor Brown has been running a series of posts on his blog about Hyper-V Data Exchange.  It’s one of the integration services available on each VM.  The idea is that you can query a certain section of the registry (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftVirtual MachineGuestParameters) on either the guest or the parent.  You can also write to there as well.

That brought up a question in my mind.  There are some environments where this would be very bad.  Can you disable this?  Sure you can!  Open up the properties of the VM in question and clear the tick box for the Data Exchange integration service.  Voila: it’s disabled.

The Hyper-V team announced that Hyper-V was available via Windows Update (and WSUS) since Tuesday.  It is available as a recommended update.

The Microsoft Windows Virtualisation team has posted a blog entry on the top 5 things you need to know about Hyper-V.  It covers:

• The Hyper-V architecture and how it performs much better than Virtual PC or Virtual Server.  It’s a hypervisor with a very slim architecture making it much faster.
• Snapshots – Yes!  Hyper-V has snapshots just like we lab rats have been using in VMware Workstation for years.  It’s quite fast too, even on a less than recommended disk specification.
• Quick Migration – No, it is not VMotion and we likely won’t see "live migration" for a few years in Hyper-V.  Question you have to ask yourself is: do you really need it?  Think about why you would willingly move a VM in ESX (not failover because both products are essentially the same here).
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008: Offers that layer of management that ESX admins associate with Virtual Center.  However, it integrates with SCOM 2007 and can manage Virtual Server and ESX.
• Hyper-V can run on Server Core.  This minimises your resource requirements for the parent partition, reduces the attack surface and reduces the numbers of possible patches.

John Howard has started documenting how to "slipstream" Hyper-V into the install image for Windows Server 2008.  That’ll be pretty handy if you want to be able to rapidly deploy Hyper-V hosts, e.g. a rapidly growing farm of hosts.

Credit: John Howard.

If you are installing the RTM of Hyper-V then you really should read the release notes.  There’s information in there relevant to backup, security and operations.