Month: February 2009

Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

The MS Virtualization team posted some details on what to expect from Hyper-V Server 2008 R2:

  • Failover Clustering with Live Migration:  This is a huge addition bringing Hyper-V Server closer to production environments.
  • Memory Support: You can have up to 1TB of RAM in a host.  That’s not exactly going to affect many people 🙂
  • Processors: You can have up to 32 logical processors (cores).  The “sweet spot” for sockets is 4 so this implies support for 8 core processors.
  • Updated configuration utility: Anyone who hates the command line administration of Server Core should appreciate the basic DOS-style wizard in the current release of Hyper-V Server 2008.  R2 adds more functionality to this.  I wish MS would do something like this for the normal Core installation, heck, maybe they have already – I haven’t checked yet.

One thing will stop it from going into production for me.  The current release cannot be managed by OpsMgr 2007 SP1 (the agent installer doesn’t recognise the operating system) and a VMM agent crashes repeatedly.

Whitepaper: An Introduction To Hyper-V

This is the first of a series of documents that I plan to write on Hyper-V and associated technologies.  This whitepaper will give the reader an introduction to Hyper-V and hypervisor virtualisation.  You’ll learn about why we virtualise, the architecture, virtual machines, the features and clear up some of the false rumours that are floating about.  With this document you should be armed to take the next step with Hyper-V … and hopefully have an installation whitepaper from me by that time!

For our friends across the water: yeah, we don’t spell it as virtualization or virtualize 🙂

My thanks to Dave Northey, John Howard and Willem Kasdorp, all from Microsoft who have helped from time to time over the last year with my adventures in Hyper-V and also James Kane who helped with proof reading (anyone who downloaded the original of this document will have lots of typos!).

You can download the document from here.

Do You Remember BOFH?

Back in the day when I was an administrator with server and desktop responsibilities, I could be a very mean administrator.  Sometimes, if it was a rare boring Friday afternoon and someone in the department had asked me too many quick questions, I might start killing processes on their PC, a favourite was nlnotes.exe … mainly cos they expected that to crash anyway and it was really annoying when it would disappear half way through writing an email.

I just posted about the new management pack template in OpsMgr 2007 R2.  I think I know how to take advantage of it.  With a little customisation, you could create a target group containing one PC … say the one of a person who’s asked you too many quick questions that week.  Set up process monitoring with a twist by customising it to auto kill the process … say Outlook.exe or nlnotes.exe.  This would really put “Operator” into the O of BOFH.

I do not recommend actually doing this.  But it shows the power of this stuff if placed in the right hands; obviously not mine 🙂

Installed OpsMgr 2007 R2 Beta 1

I just installed System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 for the first time.  As usual, the longest part of the process was getting all the pre-requisites in place.  Installing OpsMgr 2007 R2 was a breeze.  For a laugh, I went with Windows Server 2008 and SQL 2008 Standard in a Hyper-V VM.  New things I’ve noticed:

  • Prompted at the end of the install to back up the encryption key used (a) to protect RunAs account passwords and (b) can be use to promote management servers to a root management server (RMS).
  • Linux/UNIX management is possible with Cross Platform Extensions.  MS originally wanted to add this to OpsMgr 2007 but a rewrite was required for RunAs accounts.  I’m also setting up a SUSE Enterprise 10 SP2 VM for monitoring – the reason for the whole project to begin with.
  • There are 3 new management pack templates: Process Monitoring (monitor a process when it is running or alert if it is running at all – BRILLIANT!  Imagine how useful this could be for known rampant malware?), UNIX/Linux Logfile and UNIX/Linux Service.
  • Service Level Tracking is built in – as opposed to being a download for OpsMgr 2007.
  • The notifications wizards are improved.  Outlook’s rules wizard looks like it was an inspiration.  It still could do with an exemptions option, e.g. "all sub groups in this group except this group”.

The GUI has remained the same as would be expected with an R2 release.

EDIT:

The BEST bit of Windows Server 2008 R2 has to be the new management pack import tool.  It downloads meta data from the online catalog and allows you to directly import the latest management packs from Microsoft.  Alternatively, you can import them from disk, e.g. 3rd party management packs.  Note that the *NIX management packs are on disk, probably because they are still beta.

I Guess You Get What You Pay For

I’ve been using GMail since its very early days when an invite to the beta was like gold dust.  I switched over from Yahoo because GMail did a nice job with spam and the large mail box was nice to have.  I used to use Hotmail back in the mid 90’s but I hated it.  Lately I’ve noticed that emails disappear in GMail.  I’ve no idea what it’s up to, maybe anti-spam on old mails and getting lots of false positives.  The tagging mechanism cannot replace folders.  Now I have lots of mail and lots of things to search for (books, projects, user groups, photography, etc) it’s getting harder to find what I’m after.

A new problem popped up today on another GMail account that I manage for a group.  I was sending mail to joe.bloggs@gmail.com (not really but it’s a sample name).  There was a typo with one letter so the address didn’t exist.  I didn’t know that because I never got a failure report.  What I did get was a response from an angry person who couldn’t speel.  His address was joebloggs@gmail.com.  I think I figured it out.  GMail couldn’t find the mailbox that I was sending to so it dropped the “.” from the address.  Why didn’t it just give me a failure report?

Hotmail or Live Mail has improved drastically.  I use it for some personal stuff and for the Windows User Group.  For the personal stuff it’s OK.  The mail client is fine but I still prefer Outlook to connect to Live Mail.  A real pain for the user group is the limitations Live Mail puts on us.  We can only send a mail to 50 people at once.  That counts as 50 mails and it appears we can only send 250 mails in one day.  There’s plans afoot to sort out the user group.  I guess that particular problem won’t affect most legitimate freE-mail users.  And I guess I must be a bit unusual?!?! 🙂

I Am A Twit!

Yes, that’s probably confirming something you already suspected.  But I’m also now on Twitter.  I’m not really sure what to make of Micro-Blogging yet.  It was recommended that I try it.  I have a feeling that it might just be blogs for the post-Youtube generation where 5 minute long items on MTV couldn’t hold their attention long enough.  But I’ll give it a whirl.