Microsoft has released a configuration guide on how to set up networking cards in a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V cluster with Live Migration. There’s been a bit of confusion on this topic for those who are new to Hyper-V and failover clustering. It hasn’t been helped with various failover clustering posts making recommendations that don’t take account of CSV or Live Migration. Once you get to know this stuff, it is actually not too bad at all.
Category: Hyper-V
Crazy Idea – Use VMware for Hyper-V P2V of Linux
I posted a while back about how to P2V convert a physical Linux machine to a Hyper-V virtual machine. I really only looked at nasty complicated solutions that required knowing Linux. You can P2V Windows machines using Virtual Machine Manager but not Linux machines.
Some conversations last week at the summit revealed an alternative that I really should have thought of. It’s not NDA stuff.
You can use the free VMware vCenter Converter to P2V a Linux VM. That creates a VMware VM with a VMDK disk file. The downside is that it appears that the target must be VMware ESX, ESXi, Workstation or Player (See below comment).
Now, you can use a tool to convert the VMDK to a Microsoft VHD disk file, e.g. VMDK2VHD. Now you have a disk you can attach to a Hyper-V VM and boot from. You can then install your integration components which are supported on RHEL and SLES. They’ll install on other distros but are not MS supported.
At least, that’s the theory. I’ve not tried this. It feels like it’ll work.
It’s a shame that a Linux tool has to be used for this. It’ll look bad for a MS partner consultant who has sold a client on the idea of Microsoft virtualisation to break out a VMware tool for a P2V of Linux VM’s. Sure, they’ll be the majority of VM’s but there’s still a good number of them out there.
Troubleshooting Windows Server Backup and Hyper-V
I’ll be honest, this is something I’ve never attempted. I just backup VM’s at the guest level mainly because you need to do this very often to get the complete results that you need. Things like non-VSS aware applications and granular recovery require in-VM backup/recovery. There’s a few other architectural reasons I don’t do host level backup but there’s one or two other people out there who have done this and are more qualified to blog about it.
However, MS Virtualisation Program Manager Ben Armstrong has done it at home and blogged about the process he had to go through to resolve different issues. It’s a good read, even if you aren’t going to use WSB for your back process.
Deploy a Virtualized Session-Based Remote Desktop Services Solution
Microsoft has released guidance on how to deploy a virtualised Remote Desktop Services (aka Terminal Services) Session Host (aka Terminal Server) on a machine/hardware virtualisation platform.
“This document provides guidance on deploying Remote Desktop Session Host (RD Session Host) and other Remote Desktop Services role services in a virtualized environment with minimal hardware resources. The document also provides scalability information for a virtualized Remote Desktop Services role configuration by using the Knowledge Worker scenario to help size hardware for similar workloads”.
If this subject interests you then you should check out an independent white paper by The Virtual Reality Check that compares the performance of Terminal Services on VMware vSphere 4.0, Citrix XenServer 5.5 and Microsoft’s Hyper-V 2.0 (Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V).
I’ve deployed fairly small solutions on Hyper-V and they worked fine. One of the nice things about virtualising them is that you can control your resources nicely: start out small and grow as required in a very rapid manner.
Multi-Site Live Migration Clustering Whitepaper By HP
I just saw a tweet by one of the Microsoft virtualisation feeds, announcing that HP had released a white paper on how to do Hyper-V Live Migration/clustering across multiple sites using the HP StorageWorks Cluster Extension.
“This paper briefly touches upon the Hyper-V and Cluster Extension (CLX) key features, functionality, best practices, and various use cases. It also objectively describes the various scenarios in which Hyper-V and CLX complement each other to achieve the highest level of disaster tolerance.
This paper concludes with the step-by-step details for creating a CLX solution in Hyper-V environment from scratch. There are many references also provided for referring to relevant technical details”.
News of Third Party VHD/VMDK Optimisation Solution
I just read an article that reports on the launch of a new third party solution (beta) by Virsto Software to optimise the performance of VHD’s on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. It will later be available for VMware’s VMDK’s. It installs on the parent partition (host OS) and treats VHD’s like database files. Instead of the VM writing directly to the VHD, it instead writes to a log file which is replayed back to the VHD. This improves performance but also allows more VHD’s to be placed in a single LUN when I/O has become an issue (probably not channel related – more disk speed related).
Microsoft Whitepaper: How To Protect Hyper-V with DPM 2010
Microsoft has a white paper on how to backup and restore Hyper-V using System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 (currently in RC stage, might be RTM announced at MMS). It includes:
- Protection for Live Migration scenarios, including Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV)
- Item level recovery (ILR) for restoring individual items from a host-based backup of a VM
- Restoring VMs to different Hyper-V hosts than where they were backed up
I was chatting with Hans Vredevoort 2 days ago about DPM 2010. He’s been working with it quite a lot and has some good contacts on the product. He says you need to be very careful about how you schedule backups of VM’s on CSV and that the devil is in the details. Read the paper once, twice and again.
Unicast Mode Network Load Balancing on Hyper-V
This Microsoft blog post discusses a problem you might encounter when you enable NLB in unicast mode on Hyper-V virtual machines. Clients may not be able to access the virtual IP address of the NLB cluster or the VM’s themselves. This is because MAC spoofing is disabled by default on W2008 R2. The blog post shows you what change to make to each VM in the NLB cluster to resolve the issue.
Burn The Witch! Hyper-V Security Fix And Hyperventilating
Ah, it takes a patch to find out who’s really thinking what :) As you are now aware, Hyper-V had it’s very first (ever) security patch this week. Not bad (typical Irish understatement) after a year and a half of being the most accessible hypervisor ever. Just think of how many volume license, OEM, TechNet, MSDN, evaluation and pirated copies of Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 must be out in the world, not to mention the free to download Hyper-V server, and that it can run on most hardware around in the last few years. I’m betting people in parent’s basements were attempting to find vulnerabilities since the emergence of the first beta for Hyper-V, around 2 years ago.
And after all that time and opportunity, 1 security hole was found. It isn’t even the dreaded “break out” where a VM is capable of reaching out and accessing the host and other VM’s. No, it was a DOS attack where the hypervisor would shut down. And you had to be logged into a VM on the host with admin rights!
I’ve noticed a lot of tweets in the last 48 hours of people writing with glee about a dreaded problem, implying that Hyper-V is inferior. Oh, get over it! I can think of another hypervisor from a certain company that has suffered from a break out attack. Its patches are a complete OS upgrade and they break the host on a way too frequent basis. So much so, in fact, that experts in that technology run 1 “service pack” behind the latest release to stay safe.
It’s a secure platform. Think of all those attackers who hate Microsoft and have the chance to attack the most available hypervisor around and we get 1 patch in 2 years (since beta). That’s unbelievable. The basic architecture requirements (DEP) prevent buffer overrun attacks on the host from a VM. The German government has certified it as being secure … trust me if you are unfamiliar with working in Germany … that doesn’t happen by accident. Every piece of complex software has vulnerabilities and bugs. If you didn’t learn that in programming classes in college then you need to ask for a refund. The fact is that Hyper-V is so well designed and implemented that it’s taken quite some time for one to be found. And Microsoft reacted perfectly about it.
So before you go running to the woods to get some kindling for the witch burning, sit back, breath into a brown paper bag and realise that this is not the end of the world for Microsoft virtualisation. It’s actually not bad at all. It was one small patch that was quick and easy to download and installed reliably.
Give Me Your Microsoft Virtualisation Feedback For Microsoft
Tomorrow (Feb 13th) I make my way to Bellevue in Washington State for the annual Microsoft Valuable Professional (MVP) Summit. The event is four days where MVP’s get to interact with and give feedback to the product groups in Redmond. Microsoft goes to great expense for this event, both in terms of money and time. It’s their chance to get feedback on new stuff from the MVP’s and to get feedback from the communities we work in.
As I’m a “Virtual Machine” MVP, about 50% of my time will be with the folks behind Microsoft’s machine virtualisation technologies, e.g. Hyper-V, VMM, and Virtual PC. I believe they have a good idea of what people are looking for in the future. Folks like Mike Briggs, Ben Armstrong, Mike Sterling, Edwin Yuen, etc are all quite visible and are great netizens. Microsoft Connect is also a good tool for gathering suggestions from the public. But it won’t do any harm to hear from anyone out there who has additional feedback. So fire ahead, post any comments you want to make and I’ll do my best to relay.
As the 4 day event is 100% under NDA, I will not be tweeting, talking, blogging or anything about the content of those 4 days. Everything will stay under wraps if or until MS decides to make things public.