Month: September 2008

“I’m a PC” Or Is It “I’m Another Useless Advert”?

This is the latest advert effort from Microsoft:

 

That is to replace these useless adverts that have been cancelled:

 

and …

 

All these adverts have something in common (more than just sucking).  They fail to mention what it is they are selling and why people should want those products.  Of course, they do have a history of quality advertising:

 

Steve Ballmer has matured and mellowed with age 😉

 

Out’N’About

I’m in all sorts of places these days.  I spoke a few weeks ago at the Windows Server 2008 User Group (Ireland) about Hyper-V.  I’m speaking about Hyper-V at the UK/Ireland MVP Open Day in Reading on October 3rd.  There was a tiny bit about me in the Sunday Business Post yesterday.  And I’m quoted in the last edition of CompuScope about why IT admins/owners started to look at and justify VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure).

Hyper-V Fixed VS Dynamic Disks

Tim Litton has published the results of testing where the performance of fixed and dynamic disks were compared.  Fixed disks generally performed 10-15% better.

When considering fixed versus dynamic disks:

  • Fixed disks (and pass-through disks) are the only disks that PSS support in production.
  • Dynamic (and differencing) disks are great in labs where you have smaller physical storage capacities.

On a related note, some details from QLogic on their performance testing with 8GB fibre channel HBA’s (a few months ago prior to RTM) are available.

DST Patching

This is a subject I’m not familiar with at all – we may have stupid political "leaders" here in Ireland but they haven’t tried to pull the DST scam.  Microsoft has sent out information that applies to people in these countries:

Some countries with DST & TZ Changes Implemented Last Year (2007):

  • Australia
  • U.S.
  • Canada

Some countries with New DST & TZ Changes this year (2008) with H2 Impacts:

  • Egypt
  • Mauritius
  • Pakistan
  • Morocco
  • Brazil
  • Chile
  • Iran
  • Argentina
  • All other companies who have organizations with operations, customers or vendors based in these locales may be affected. In addition, companies who interact or integrate with systems that are based in these locales or rely on date/time calculations may be impacted.

According to Microsoft:

"In general, computer systems should be updated to reflect the new DST rules. For most companies, this means applying software updates to select Microsoft products, including various releases of the Microsoft Windows servers and operating systems, Microsoft Office, and other applications. In a few important cases, companies must take more considered action.

Please go to the Microsoft Products Affected site for a list of affected Microsoft products: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/dst_prodlist"

To Core Or Not To Core

I started a thread on the Minasi forum today wondering if people would think I was crazy or not.

I like Windows Server 2008.  2003 was excellent and 2008 has jumped way ahead.  It’s stable, modular and easy to use, e.g. clustering is a dream.  One of the things that got loads of PR was Server Core.  I was determined to deploy it in the Hyper-V cluster I’m deploying now.

I set up a pilot build to work out the kinks of the hardware and the OS configuration.  I’ve been having a few hardware issues and troubleshooting them on Core is impossible.  Pure, 100% impossible.  I can do certain amounts using remote GUI’s but it’s not the same.

We use HP hardware that’s monitored using OpsMgr 2007 with the HP management packs.  You soon discover the SIM agents have V8.0 issues.  I tend to disable the remote management and the performance SIM agents because I don’t need them.  Unfortunately, the GUI for configuring them is not available in Core and I don’t know of a command line option.  HP haven’t publicly documented one that either their search nor Google can find.

We know that getting Broadcom NIC’s working with VLAN trunks requires an advanced configuration of the NIC.  Apparently there’s a script we can write to get this working on GUI.  Great – more crap I have to learn.  If I was a single function administrator then maybe I could invest several weeks getting to grips with that.

I made a simple mistake when configuring a virtual switch in Hyper-V on the parent OS NIC (I wanted to be able to get VM’s onto the management network for initial build configuration).  My parent OS on that server went offline.  I got onto ILO to log on locally on that box.  However, what the hell is the command to undo what I did?  I could probably find powershell to run it …. but powershell isn’t available on Core!

So the long and short of it is that I decided that Core is not ready for me yet.  MS needs to come up with operational docs for all the roles and features on Core – locally on the machine itself and not via the network/WMI.  And the OEM’s need to catch up too.

I kicked off a thread on the Minasi forum to see what people thought.  I expected to get slammed because Core has been a popular idea.  I was shocked (and relieved) to see people had the same experiences as me.

How Long Does Quick Migration Take?

There are two variables on the time required for quick migration:

  1. Your storage throughput
  2. How much RAM is assigned to the VM

Using a 4GB Fibre Channel SAN on 15K disks, a quick migration of a VM with 1GB RAM is taking me 9 seconds.

EDIT:

I just moved a VM with 28GB of RAM.  It took exactly 70 seconds from start to finish.  A machine with 4GB RAM took 12 seconds.  Note that disk fail over always takes the same amount of time.

Hyper-V VM Network Configuration Goes Missing After Cluster Fail Over

This one embarrassingly stopped me in my tracks for a day until I got some help from Willem Kasdrop in MS Netherlands on the Minasi Forum.  

The symptoms were as follows:

  • I’d set up a VM in Hyper-V.
  • I’d add it to the cluster.
  • I’d finish the VM configuration, e.g. virtual network and VLAN ID.
  • I’d test the quick migration or cluster fail over.
  • I’d check the VM but the network configuration was reset to the defaults, the VLAN ID checkbox was cleared, the VLAN ID entry was back to "2" and the virtual switch was back to the original setting.

I went as far as rebuilding the cluster (that takes no time at all in W2008) but couldn’t find the solution.  Then Willem suggested that I hadn’t refreshed the cluster … as in right click the VM and select the entry to refresh the VM cluster configuration.

Why would you do this?  I was wondering when I checked the VM XML why I wasn’t seeing any virtual network configuration as above.  It turns out the cluster configuration for the VM stores some information.  If you change the VM configuration then you should:

  • Update the cluster configuration.
  • This saves the state of the VM, thus bringing it offline.
  • You get a report on the update.
  • You need to manually bring the VM back online.

After that, you’ll find that the configuration successfully follows the VM on fail over and fail back.