Month: March 2009

My TechDays Tour Is Over

I am back home after the last gig in Belfast.  I had a lot of fun working with the guys.  A big thank you goes out to Enda, Dave and Will for asking me to be involved.  Others such as Niall Flanagan and David Gargan deserve a lot of credit too.  Nick Whittome added his unique approach to everyone’s entertainment and benefit in Dublin.  And we were graced by the ever professional Rhonda Layfield.

I am exhausted.  I’ve to catch up on a lot of work stuff.  I’ve a couple of Hyper-V presentations to prepare for the Windows User Group and Minasi Forum 2009.  And I want to get back into writing my document on Hyper-V.  I’ve some other stuff I need to do too that I can’t talk about yet.  We’ve also started preparing the May events for the Windows User Group in Dublin, Cork and Belfast.

Right now, my feet are going up and I’m going to watch the conclusion of Battlestar Galactica.

EDIT:

Don’t rely on things like hotel Internet if you’re doing live demonstrations or hotel A/V systems if you’re trying to record those sessions.  We were trying to do both this week and the hotel systems let us down.  I don’t know if we got anything good enough to put online; I’ll be sure to link if we did.

Irish Government Failing To Virtualise

There’s an interesting article in the Irish Independent today.  All but one of the Irish state departments is failing to place for virtualisation.  This has a few impacts:

  • Higher power costs
  • Greater carbon footprint
  • Lack of flexibility/agility
  • Higher taxes for the rest of us

By adopting virtualisation they have the potential to save us up to €30million per year if not more.  By adopting an outsourced model such as managed server hosting with an Irish company (it would be a requirement) they can make additional savings by adopting the pre-existing shared expertise and management infrastructure to increase uptime, fault tolerance and infrastructure management.

MDT 2010 Partner Webcast March 26th

Michael Niehaus will “be presenting a webcast" today "to the broad Microsoft partner community, talking about how MDT 2010 can be used to help customers deploy Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.  Since this is a partner-focused session, it’s not intended to be a general-purpose session”.  It’s on at 10:00 – 11:00 am PST. 

The invitation key from Michael’s blog is 26FA4B.

Cool Live Migration Demo

Most IT pro’s in Ireland are familiar with Microsoft Ireland’s Dave Northey and a lot of people outside of Ireland are familar with his cool blog posts and videos that show how to get things working, from A-Z.  Dave has a demonstration of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V that runs on 3 laptops.  Before today, it ran on 1 wired NIC and 1 wifi NIC, something that is not supported by MS because it’s unstable.  When the demo would work, the VM would fail over from host A to host B with 1 missed ping and file copies would continue seamlessly.  After some demo issues, Dave decided to go 100% wired.  We’ve been co-presenting on the TechDays tour in Ireland and our last event is in Belfast.  Dave showed me his updated demo this afternoon on 100% wired network.  Live Migration runs without any missed packets now. 
 
In the demo a ping from the VM to the network has a latency of <1MS, <1MS, etc.  Then the VM move starts and it changes to 1MS and 2MS before going back to <1MS, etc.  I could never get that to happen just over a year ago with VMware ESX 3.5 on HP blades; we had 1 missed ping on 50% of VMotion moves, something I’ve heard from others.  Sure, the applications and users never saw any outage but what Live Migration is doing is very impressive.  And that is on laptops!
 
Dave’s session is scheduled to be recorded so it will go up on the net within a few weeks.  Check it out when it happens.  I’ll be certain to link to it.

To Core or Not To Core With Hyper-V

This isn’t really instructions or a recommendation, just me thinking through the keyboard.  I’ve attended Will Craddock’s excellent session on virtualising SBS and EBS and he talks about various strategies.  The normal recommendation from MS for Hyper-V is that you use a Core Installation to conserve disk space/RAM utilisation and to minimise patching and the attack surface.  On the face of it that sounds perfect.  To his credit Will is a realist so he discusses that a little more than most will.

I originally wanted to go with a Core installation but it didn’t work out so well.

Benefits

  • The parent partition uses less disk: true.
  • The parent uses less RAM – not so sure really.  You’re always recommended to go with 2GB and that’s what I do with a full installation too.
  • Less patching: true.
  • Smaller attack surface: true.
  • Less CPU utilisation: probably true but if you have a dedicated parent partition that you rarely log into, it probably uses very little anyway.

Problems

  • OEM’s are still providing hardware management that requires a GUI, e.g. HP network configuration utility, or at worst, require you to learn another scripting language.
  • Command line is complex, I can’t delegate host administration to non-advanced administrators.
  • Troubleshooting is very hard, e.g. what do you do when the machine goes of the network or won’t authenticate anymore.

I really like the idea of Hyper-V Server 2008.  It solves some of the above by providing a DOS style menu.  R2 also adds CSV and cluster support which is sweet.  I can see that being popular for VDI and labs where OpsMgr and VMM management aren’t required – as of now you cannot manage the free Hyper-V Server 2008 using System Center.

I’m not going to say what’s right for you.  Try out the different solutions and do what suits you best.  The above may be OK for me but you find the Core installation is right for you.

Quick Hyper-V Fixed Size VHD creation

Creating a fixed size virtual hard disk in Hyper-V can be a timely process.  It is because the contents of the empty file are overwritten to ensure no sensitive data from the underlying “host” file system are accidentally revealed to the child partition or guest operating system.  That’s not such a problem on the current generation of Hyper-V in a clustered environment if your shared storage LUN’s are created specifically for the virtual machines (and immediately deleted afterwards).  If this is the case then you can use the tool that is mentioned in John Howard’s post.  This tool can create an unsecured VHD in seconds.

However, you should not use this on a reused file system or on a shared purpose file system.  I’m also thinking it probably shouldn’t be used on the new Cluster Shared Volume in Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.  Why not?  What if you create a VM with sensitive data and then remove it.  You create a new VM with an unsecured VHD using the tool.  Now the unused contents of that VHD can be scanned by someone who’s logged into it to pick up contents of the old VM’s VHD.  Ouch!

Mouse Driver for SUSE on Hyper-V

The biggest pain for me with a GUI installation of SUSE on Hyper-V was that I had no mouse driver.  So I went hardcore and stripped it back to command line like a real Penguin-Lover 😉  Citrix and MS have a cooperative project called Satori.  They’ve just released a Virtual Service Client (an integration component or enlightenment) for “Linux guests” that provides a mouse driver for Linux.

A buddy, Tim Berk, emailed me to let me know it was in the blogosphere.  I’ve been offline with the TechDays tour and work in between.  Tim has tried it out.  It works but it sounds like it is kionda like using one of those HP/Avocent KVM devices where you get a double mouse effect going on with a little latency.  Still, it’s better than nothing and makes life for a Windows guy like me a little easier!

MS Community Ireland TechDays for IT Pro’s Coming To A Close

We’re coming to the end of the TechDays tour in Ireland.  Tonight we have the Belfast “IT @ Home” gig where I’ll be doing my Win7 and digital photography session followed by Will and Dave on Windows Home Server, X-Box, etc.  Tomorrow will be the IT Pro and the BI sessions – I’ll be doing the W2008/W7/Hyper-V session with Dave and I have a quick few words at the start of Niall’s accidental DBA session.

Dublin was interesting.  We definitely had the most interaction with a crowd so far on the tour.  We were stunned at how many had already been using Windows 7 and even more so when we found out one particular organisation that was already using it in widespread production.

The session with Dave was fun.  We had a longer time slot than in Cork so I wasn’t speed-talking.  We had more time for demo’s too.  We had big plans.   The demo I’m most worried about is the BrachCache demo because it uses pre-beta OS builds.  It worked out perfectly yesterday.  However, Dave was bravely going to build from scratch a Hyper-V R2 cluster and show live migration in action.  Our server hardware plans didn’t work out so the “servers” were actually laptops.  For live migration you need at least 2 non-wifi NIC’s … a tough ask with laptops so there was some fudgery to make the wifi appear like wired NIC’s.  That ended up being our undoing as the live migration demo didn’t quite work out.  Trust me … the stuff works … it just doesn’t work with wifi and that’s why it’s not going to be supported.  We think we have a solution for this at the Belfast gig.  We also had internet issues at the venue.  This prevented Will’s branch cache demo from working.

Not to worry though, they guys will likely have things OK for tomorrow’s Belfast gig.  We’ll be recording those and I’m sure they’ll do some controlled environment demos too for the new IT Pro blog that Enda, Will and Dave are running.  And we’ll be doing lots of demos at the Windows User Group Hyper-V R2 session.