Month: July 2008

Are VMware Bonkers?

Judging purely by all my Hyper-V posts as of late, you might think I was anti-VMware.  Far from it.  I reckon they have a great product.  It’s not perfect.  In my opinion, they need to start playing nice with others and provide better end-end management of their enterprise solution from centralised management solutions.  I’m not just talking about placement of VM’s (Virtual Center); I’m talking about health of hardware, health of VM’s, hypervisor performance, etc.  On that they could take a page from Citrix, e.g. Presentation Server.  Pricing is something else they need to reconsider too, e.g.pay less for the product and maybe make the profits from the support or management services.

Now I’ve just read something rather interesting on Bink.  Some regional director is spouting that the days of the operating system will be over in 5-10 years.  Oka-ay then.  I for one, am not throwing my OS books into a fire in the back garden tonight.  Is this really how VMware are thinking?  Is this how they think they will survive the serious entry of Microsoft/Citrix into the enterprise hypervisor world?  This is not good; not good at all.

Is industry moving to the hypervisor?  Yes.  But not all machines are candidates for virtualisation.  I certainly don’t see the virtual appliance replacing the operating system.  Is the operating system changing?  Definitely.  Windows Server 2008 already features component based installation.  You can get an even smaller footprint using a Core installation.  And Core isn’t so scary as I found out for myself.

Credit these comments to the kook bank and don’t expect to see this looneytune making a big splash in the future.

Credit: Bink.

Service Level Dashboard Management Pack for SCOM 2007

Why is System Center Operations Manager 2007 different to everything else?  You’ve already heard about management packs: how they use state models instead of just traditional triggers and how they use the monitored products vendor expertise.  The other big difference is that SCOM recognises that IT is their to serve a customer.  Think of this from the ITIL or MOF point of view.  IT provides services to a customer, either someone in the same organisation or a client who subscribes for the service.  That customer doesn’t care about IIS sites, disk utilisation or CPU interrupt time.  They care about the uptime and performance of their service, e.g. the user who complains about there "being no Internet" doesn’t care if a network switch is dead.  Their service enables their business.  SCOM gives you the ability to model that service using a distributed application model.  Up to now, to give the customer visibility to their service was messy.

Microsoft has just released the Service Level Dashboard Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007.  This allows you to use an accelerator to present the availability and performance of the service to a customer in a more accessible manner.

You can watch a video on the subject on MSN.  There’s also an executive summary on TechNet (note the MS link are mostly dead for this one so use my link).

Here’s what Microsoft has to say:

"The Service Level Dashboard Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 assists you in tracking, managing, and reporting on your line-of-business (LOB) application service level compliance. It displays a list of applications and their performance and availability against a target SLA.

The application or service is defined using the Operations Manager distributed application model. This model allows the user to define all components of the application or service that affect the health state and SLA calculation. When an application does not meet the defined performance or availability thresholds, it is placed into a warning or error state within Operations Manager. This state shows the current status of an application relative to its defined thresholds.

The Service Level Dashboard report uses the history of the state of an application to calculate the time the application was in each state over the duration of the report. Based on this information, the report derives a performance and availability percentage for the time period that the report covers".

Volume License Media Shipment Changes

If you have a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement or a Select Volume License agreement then you will want to read this PowerPoint.  It details changes to Microsoft’s media shipping policy:

  • "Beginning September 1, 2007 Microsoft Enterprise Agreement and Select Agreement Volume License customers worldwide with active media subscriptions will receive monthly product subscription kits of the most widely-used Microsoft products.
  • Updates of all other products will be available either via download from the Microsoft Volume Licensing Services website or by purchasing media (CDs/DVDs) from a Microsoft Reseller.
  • This change will reduce the quantity of media in shipments to create a better customer experience".

Basically, everything they produce media for, you will get in the kit.  You only have to license it (according to your license program) to use it.  No more waiting around for the media to arrive in the post after your already lengthy internal purchasing process.

Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool

.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).

System Center Management Suite Enterprise and VMM 2008 Release

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.

Installing Hyper-V on Server Core

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.

Infrastructure Planning and Design

Want to do a best practice deployment of new Microsoft technologies?  If so, have a read of the IPD documents.  Of note are new documents for SCOM 2007, SCVMM 2008, IIS7 and NAP.

"The Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) guides are the next version of Windows Server System Reference Architecture. The guides in this series help clarify and streamline design processes for Microsoft infrastructure technologies, with each guide addressing a unique infrastructure technology or scenario.

  • Infrastructure Planning and Design guides share a common structure, including:
  • Definition of the technical decision flow through the planning process.
  • Listing of decisions to be made and the commonly available options and considerations.
  • Relating the decisions and options to the business in terms of cost, complexity, and other characteristics.
  • Framing decisions in terms of additional questions to the business to ensure a comprehensive alignment with the appropriate business landscape.

These guides complement product documentation by focusing on infrastructure design options.

Each guide leads the reader through critical infrastructure design decisions, in the appropriate order, evaluating the available options for each decision against its impact on critical characteristics of the infrastructure. The IPD Series highlights when service and infrastructure goals should be validated with the organization and provides additional questions that should be asked of service stakeholders and decision makers.

IPD consists of the following downloadable packages:

  • New! System Center Operations Manager 2007
  • New! System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008
  • New! Internet Information Services 7.0
  • New! Selecting the Right NAP Architecture
  • Infrastructure Planning and Design Series Introduction
  • Microsoft SoftGrid Application Virtualization
  • Selecting the Right Virtualization Technology
  • Windows Deployment Services
  • Windows Server 2008 Active Directory Domain Services
  • Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services
  • Windows Server Virtualization (for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1)

The guides are available as individual downloads or as a single all-in-one package".

Credit: Kurt Roggen.

Hyper-V Just Isn’t For The Enterprise! Pfft!

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 😉

PowerShell Management and Hyper-V

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.