Month: April 2009

One of the Microsoft guys has posted about how Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 will continue to be free but it will also include CSV and Live Migration (aka VMotion) included.  Hyper-V Server 2008 does not have cluster functionality so you must use Windows Server 2008 Enterprise/Data Center Edition to get this functionality.

Cluster Shared Volume overcomes the shared nothing principle of shared cluster disks by delegating read/write access to individual files to Hyper-V hosts (physical cluster members).  This means you can have many virtual machines on a single disk and they can run on many hosts in the cluster.  It’s not required for Live Migration but it is strongly recommended.  I’m looking forward to it to simplify my disk management.  The current version of Hyper-V doesn’t require (it does with VMM 2008) but should have 1 VM per 1 LUN – this allows VM’s to run on any host; the disk ties a VM to the host.

Live Migration finally gives Hyper-V a VMotion style of VM failover where a VM is “offline” for 10 milliseconds (not noticeable) when it is migrated from host 1 to host 2.  I’ve recently posted a PowerPoint slide deck that explains this.  I’ll be doing a presentation on this online on April 30th.

The mini geek conference based on MS technology that is hosted by Mark Minasi (MVP, author, journalist, trainer, speaker and consultant) in Virginia Beach has kicked off.  Saturday saw us all meeting up and a number of us went out to Mark’s house for beers and pizza.  Mark and Rhonda were great hosts as always.

The conference started yesterday.  Mark went through each of the attendees to ask who they are and what they do.  We found what people wanted to learn about or were having trouble with. The big ones were:

• Virtualisation (almost everyone)
• Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity
• Windows 7 and migration from XP
• Cloud Computing
• Certificate Services – because everything will require it in some way, shape or form

Mark then did his first Windows 7 feature list presentation.

I followed up with the last session of the day.  My subject was Hyper-V.  I spoke about:

• The need for machine virtualisation
• Hyper-V architecture and components
• Failover Clustering
• Licensing
• ManagementW2008 R2: Cluster Shared Volume and Live Migration
• The possible future

My slides are available here.

The session went very well and was very interactive. Our crowd at his event is always fun with a high percentage of MVP’s.  A lot of questions and scenarios were covered.  I got great feedback, the best being from another MVP who said MS hadn’t managed to explain things this well in the USA and that I’d made Hyper-V a viable solution for him now.

I don’t know much about the Business Intelligence stuff and I know less about BizTalk so I don’t know much about this new document from MS:

“The purpose of this guide is to provide guidance for using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. The emphasis is on BizTalk Server, but the performance evaluation methods and performance testing scenarios are useful for analyzing the performance of virtualized server applications in general. This guidance will be of interest to both the IT Pro and Developer communities”.

The Windows Core team posted a blog about how to add a pass through disk to a Hyper-V VM or child partition.  Pass through disks are the fastest storage option for VM’s.  Instead of using a VHD file, they are presented with a raw and unformatted volume.  This is dedicated to the VM.  The VM will then format the volume.  You’ll use this option when you need VM’s running things like Exchange or SQL that need the very best in disk performance.  Note that Fixed VHD’s get within 6% of the underlying disk speed.

The update I referred to a little while ago for Virtual Machine Manager 2008 has been released as part of a rollup package.  This update is said to deal with the unsupported cluster configuration alert.  It also fixes a number of other issues.

“List of issues that are fixed:

Issue 1

When you migrate VMware virtual machines, the resource pools that are associated with the virtual machines are changed.

Issue 2

Hyper-V virtual machines have a status of "unsupported cluster configuration" if a node in a Windows Server 2008 Failover Cluster does not respond or has been restarted.

Issue 3

Differencing disks are lost when the following conditions are true:

• You migrate a virtual machine from a Virtual Server host.
• Multiple virtual machines share the same parent virtual hard disk file.

Issue 4

The agent status is not updated for Windows Server 2008 Failover Cluster nodes.

Issue 5

Hyper-V virtual machines in a Windows Server 2008 Failover Cluster have a status of "unsupported cluster configuration" if the cluster has a resource that has an MSCluster_Property_Resource_Cluster_Extension_XP_Type type. This resource type is typically used by storage replication software.

Issue 6

If you add a Virtual Center server by using an account that is a member of the Enterprise Admins group, you receive the following error message when the refresh host job runs:

Error (2951) Virtual Machine Manager cannot complete the VirtualCenter action on server servername.domainname.com because of the following error: Login failed due to a bad username or password. (InvalidLogin).”

EDIT #1:

Normally you’ll get this update via Microsoft Update or WSUS.  However you can manually download it.  Don’t just double click on the MSP otherwise you’ll get a baffling message: "Launch setup.exe for installing virtual machine manager server".  It turns out I’m not the only person to get that one.  I did some digging and found you need to run this command to install the update: "msiexec /p vmmServer64update.msp BOOTSTRAPPED=1”.

EDIT #2:

Part of this update was a request from myself through IT Pro Momentum.  When you patched VMM 2008 managed Hyper-V nodes, 1 at a time, the state of VM’s in that cluster would change to "unsupported cluster configuration".  I’ve installed the rollup update.  On day 1 to test I downloaded security updates onto our redundant host in the cluster.  There were no issues with VM’s.  I forced a VM refresh using the refresh-vm cmdlet in the Powershell interface.  On day 2 I installed Windows Server 2008 SP2.  VMM saw that the agent was offline but the VM states remained managable.

Excellent.  This seems to have fixed an anoying issue.

Dell has released a guidance document for those planning to use Hyper-V on Dell servers.  I’ve scanned through it quickly and there is no mention of NIC teaming that I can see.