Month: May 2011

Monitor CentOS with Operations Manager 2007 R2

Now we have support for CentOS guests on Hyper-V, how about monitoring them?  I noticed some retweets by Carsten Rachfahl of some posts by @OpsMgr on Twitter:

With a bit of searching I also found an old post on the subject of installing the RedHat agent and importing a modified version of the RedHat management pack.

The above two posts use a management pack that is shared on the community cross platform extensions site.

None of this is supported in any way, but you’re probably not too worried about support if you’re using CentOS anyway (I guess).  This will extend the power of OpsMgr to your free Linux distro.

Another Way To Give Wireless Access to Hyper-V VMs

When building my new demo laptop environment, I wanted a way to:

  1. Grant Internet access VMs
  2. Give the VMs access to communicate with the host OS
  3. Keep VMs off of the office network – because I will do some messy stuff

Usually we use NIC bridging or Windows routing to get Hyper-V VMs talking on the wireless NIC because Hyper-V virtual networks cannot be bound to a wifi NIC.  But this would put my VMs on the office network which is a flat single-VLAN network.  That breaks requirement #3.

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My solution was as seen above.  I created an internal virtual network.  That allows the VMs to talk to the parent partition (host OS) without physical network access.  To give the VMs internet access (for Windows updates and activation), I have installed a light weight proxy on the parent partition.  Users on the VMs are configured to use the proxy, this giving the VMs the required Internet access.  I can confiure the proxy to use the wifi or wired NIC on the laptop for outbound communications.   This solution meets all 3 of my requirements.

IBM Up In The Clouds

IBM rolled out their Smart Cloud Enterprise public cloud offering earlier this Spring.  It is based on RedHat KVM virtualisation.  Right now, it offers support for RHEL, SLES, and Windows Server 2003/2008 guest operating systems.

  • Databases: You can have anything as long as it is DB2 or Informix, both from IBM.
  • Monitoring: Tivoli .. yay?
  • Application Servers (such as IIS or SharePoint): You can have anything as long as it is IBM WebSphere
  • Business Intelligence: You can have anything as long as it is IBM Cognos.

Hmm.

OK, I’m sure the IBM support will be amazing.  Oh? … Yeah, I nearly forgot.  Of course, big government departments and corporations will lap this up and IBM will make a lot of money.

Right now it is available to USA customers only, according to the website.

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Needed a Quick-to-Rebuild Lab

My role at work demands that I be able to demo lots of different sorts of scenarios, e.g. SBS 2011 + SCE 2010, or Hyper-V + System Center, or … well, lots of stuff.  All these scenarios are pretty much mutually exclusive in a single portable lab (my laptop, aka The Beast).

So my solution is as follows:

  • Configure the laptop to boot from a Windows Server 2008 R2 VHD
  • Enable AD and Hyper-V (not recommended in production)
  • Configure a standard AD, policies, and Hyper-V setup
  • Install drivers, patches, and so on
  • Shut it down
  • Copy the (boot from) VHD to a safe location

No I can quickly create a new lab on this Windows 7 laptop in a matter of minutes instead of hours:

  • Boot up into Windows 7 (from C:)
  • Copy the above VHD – this will either wipe/replace to configured VHD or I’ll save the original VHD lab

This gives me a new host and AD in the time it takes to copy a 10 GB VHD.  That means I can deploy SCE 2010 in on lab (running on VHD A) or the full dynamic datacenter in another lab (VHD B), without the need to totally rebuild the entire host OS, and go through the time consuming process of installing drivers on a W2008 R2 laptop.

Event: Private Cloud Academy – W2008 R2 SP1

I’ll be presenting at this MicroWarehouse/Microsoft Ireland event on Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1.  The focus will be on virtualisation/Hyper-V.  So that means Dynamic Memory.  I’ll talk about how it works, but more importantly, how you should implement it with the various workloads on your compute cluster.  DM is huge for VDI on Hyper-V (a core component of the Microsoft/Citrix VDI v-alliance).  So is RemoteFX.  And I’ll be talking about that too, as well as showing it being set up and configured on my laptop, “the beast”.  RemoteFX is a hot topic internationally because it opens up some interesting opportunities in server based or centralised computing.  You’ll see that if you attend – there won’t be a recording/webcast.

Intended audience: IT infrastructure architects, implementation consultants, engineers, virtualisation administrators.

The agenda is:

•Hello W2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1)

•Deploying SP1

•RemoteFX

–Demo

•Dynamic Memory

–Demo

–Guidance

•SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1

•If there’s time: ARP Spoofing Prevention

Veeam Backup & Replication to Support Hyper-V

The conspiracy theories started a few weeks ago when Veeam started to advertise on my (mainly MS infrastructure, featuring MS Hyper-V) blog.  Then we saw a countdown clock for a big announcement on the first day of TechEd USA 2011.  1 hour into the keynote, Veeam made their announcement:

“Veeam Software, innovative provider of VMware data protection, disaster recovery and VMware management solutions for virtual datacenter environments, today announced at Tech·Ed North America that it is adding support for Windows Server Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server to Veeam Backup & Replication, the leading data protection solution for virtual environments used with more than 1.5 million virtual machines (VMs) worldwide”.

Veeam Backup & Replication can:

  • 2-in-1 backup and replication for Hyper-V: Veeam’s solution includes replication, which provides near-continuous data protection (near-CDP) and enables the best possible recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs and RPOs).
  • Changed block tracking for Hyper-V: Veeam’s new hypervisor support includes technology for changed block tracking to enable fast, frequent and efficient backup and replication of all VMs, including those running on Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV).
  • Built-in deduplication and compression: Included at no extra charge, these capabilities minimize consumption of network bandwidth and backup storage.

Veeam is a name that is almost synonymous with VMware.  Many would consider that if you buy VMware then you buy Veeam.  With this new offering for Hyper-V, and with cluster support, you have to think that more than a few Hyper-V architects are considering the wider set of options that are now available to them.

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Office 2010 Service Pack 1 RTM Date

According to Microsoft, you can expect Service Pack 1 for Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 to RTM in the end of June.  “Initially, Service Pack 1 will be offered as a manual download from the Download Center and from Microsoft Update, and no sooner than 90 days after release, will be made available as an Automatic Update”.

Changes include:

  • Outlook fixes an issue where “Snooze Time” would not reset between appointments.
  • The default behavior for PowerPoint "Use Presenter View" option changed to display the slide show on the secondary monitor.
  • Integrated community content in the Access Application Part Gallery.
  • Better alignment between Project Server and SharePoint Server browser support.
  • Improved backup / restore functionality for SharePoint Server
  • The Word Web Application extends printing support to “Edit Mode.”
  • Project Professional now synchronizes scheduled tasks with SharePoint task lists.
  • Internet Explorer 9 “Native” support for Office Web Applications and SharePoint
  • Office Web Applications Support for Chrome
  • Inserting Charts into Excel Workbooks using Excel Web Application
  • Support for searching PPSX files in Search Server
  • Visio Fixes scaling issues and arrowhead rendering errors with SVG export
  • Proofing Tools improve spelling suggestions in Canadian English, French, Swedish and European Portuguese.
  • Outlook Web Application Attachment Preview (with Exchange Online only)
  • Office client suites using “Add Remove Programs” Control Panel, building on our work from Office 2007 SP2

CentOS Supported on Hyper-V

I used to work for a quite “big” hosting company in Dublin, that claimed 1/3 of the Irish internet footprint was in their infrastructure.  Over half of the servers we had in that infrastructure ran Linux, in particular the CentOS distribution.  It was liked because it’s a relation of RedHat and … well … it’s free … and most hosting customers are pretty tight with their wallets.  I’d really never heard of CentOS before that.  As a hosting company we weren’t unusual for choosing CentOS for our Linux platform.  In fact, it’s the norm because it is free.

We’ve had growing support for Linux on Hyper-V for a while but that was restricted initially to SUSE SLES (Novell, a partner of MSFT, and very unpopular in the market because of the NetWare abandonment) and RedHat RHEL (popular in the enterprise because you have to pay for it).

Over the last couple of years CentOS has come up more and more in conversations.  I remember one very large “RFI” (a first step in the tender process) for a very large cloud (virtualisation environment) for a particular closed industry.  In my last job we started reading that document with great anticipation – thinking about the huge numbers.  But then our hearts sank:  CentOS support was required.  That ruled us out at the time.  I know that other IT services companies were feeling the same way because I received a number of calls on the subject of Hyper-V/Linux support.  I also know what official opinions in certain places were: this was no longer a Hyper-V opportunity and VMware would win it.  CentOS may have run perfectly with the Linux integration components but the lack of an official support statement was impacting on potential sales & installations.  And this is a huge factor in the decision making process for hosting (VPS/cloud/whatever-marketing-label-is-popular-at-the-time) companies who do favour CentOS over the paid for Linux distros that were previously the only supported open source OSs on Hyper-V.

But now we do have support for CentOS, according to an announcement on the Openness @ Microsoft blog.  Now more enterprises and hosting companies can consider Hyper-V for their virtualisation and/or private/public cloud needs.  There are no specifics such as version support, or how Microsoft will support an open source OS with no company being responsible for it.  Hopefully that will emerge in the coming days.

One remaining lacking component is the System Center story.  OpsMgr has made great strides in adding support for SLES and RHEL.  Unfortunately they haven’t been in sync with Hyper-V so the common denominator of supported versions is quite small.  Hopefully OpsMgr will add equal CentOS support quite soon.  Let’s face it: the business really doesn’t care about the servers; they care about the services running on them, and quite a lot of those run on CentOS.

EDIT#1

I’ve been informed that CentOS 5.2 through 5.6 are supported now.

Unattended Linux VM Configuration Tool for Hyper-V

Yusuf Öztürk has released a handy looking tool on his blog for setting up Linux virtual machines.  It will:

1) Unattended IP, Hostname and DNS configuration for Linux VMs.
2) Automatic Linux integration components installation.
3) Multi Distro Support: Debian, Ubuntu, Centos, Fedora, Redhat and Suse!
4) Automatic CPanel installation for Redhat and Centos
5) Linux VM Template support (Use Skip for EnableLIC switch)
6) Hyper-V support! You don’t need SCVMM to use this script.
7) Multiple Hyper-V and SCVMM host support.
8) Automatic Emulated NIC to Synthetic NIC support.
9) No need to internet connection (SSH access etc.) or additional changes on VM.
10) Custom Answer File support! You can execute your own scripts.

You can download the tool from his blog.  Well done, Yusuf!

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Best Practices for Virtualising Exchange Server 2010 with W2008 R2 Hyper-V

I’ve talked about, presented about, and written about this topic quite a bit.  There’s already a TechNet article on the topic, but Microsoft has also issued a document called Best Practices for Virtualizing Exchange Server 2010 with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper V.

“The purpose of this paper is to provide guidance and best practices for deploying Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 in a virtualized environment with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper V technology. This paper has been carefully composed to be relevant to organizations of any size”.