Month: September 2011

Amazon Opens “Fire” On The iPad

It has happened.  Amazon has launched the new Android-based Kindle reader and it is called the Kindle Fire.

Already this $199 (wow!) tablet is making waves.  That’s because Amazon already has a huge library of content available.  This one device release puts Android in a position to compete with the iPad – despite some hype, none of the other offerings have counted for much.  Amazon’s tablet is different because it leverages a very successful database of content and Kindle brand.

The machine is small at 7 inches and 1024 * 600 pixels (making it a nice high res for the size).  They’re going primarily for the reading or mobile audience.  It has just 8 GB of storage (“That’s enough for 80 apps, plus either 10 movies or 800 songs or 6,000 books”) but that’s a lot of books, and probably enough space for movies/apps for most users.  Not everyone has a gigantic library of apps.  But it is supplemented by Amazon Cloud Storage.  The battery should be good for 7.5 hours of playback with a 4 hour charge time.  And yes, it has USB 2.0 and Wi-Fi (no 3G). 

I bet the Kindle Fire is a winner by one minute to midnight on Black Friday (the first day of Christmas shopping in the USA after Thanksgiving).  It’s cheap, it’s got a huge library of content to sell, it’s based on a known and liked brand name (Kindle), and did I mention that it is cheap?  So cheap, that Amazon might just be selling it at a $50 loss … just to get you to buy it and lots of content!

Where is My Windows 8 Tech Documentation?

It seems like some people have started to write tech guides for Windows 8 already.  Me being an avid blogger, you’d expect to see me at it too.  Not yet.  And here’s why.

What we have now is a Developer Preview.  It isn’t even a beta.  We know squat about how things work under the hood.  We know even less about best practice.  Heck, the product is buggy (as one should expect at this stage of the development and test cycle) and probably isn’t feature complete or locked.

If I write something on Windows 8 then I want to give you as much valid information as possible.  My SEO (by no skill or knowledge) is not bad so when I write a doc or a guide, it tends to score well on the search engines.  That means the content sticks around and is referenced.  Therefore I will be waiting a while until we have a more complete product, we do know more about how things work, and we have figured out some best practices.

Until then, have fun playing with the pre-beta release, but be aware than the Server Core group are still hard at work and are still listening to feedback.  Things will change and so will your plans.

High Availability (HA) and Live Migration

With the coming changes in Windows Server 2012 (WS2012), I thought I’d take a few minutes to explain the difference between HA and Live Migration.

High Availability (HA)

HA is when we make a virtual machine highly available by placing it on a cluster of hosts, e.g. a group of Hyper-V hosts in a Windows Server Failover Cluster, or a group of ESXi hosts in a vSphere cluster.  If a host has a failure VM can be failed over to a different host.  This means that an automated system provides better levels of availability than you get with non-clustered hosts.  Typically, the failed host has crashed or powered down, and the VM is booted up on a different host.

Live Migration (aka VMotion)

Live Migration is a system where a running virtual machine can be moved from host A to host B with zero downtime.  It is different from HA because it is more proactive than a failover operation.  For example, Live Migration will be used by an administrator to move a VM from one host, that is going to have some maintenance operation, to another host with spare capacity.

Windows Server 2012

I have brought up this topic because in Hyper-V, Live Migration and HA went hand in hand, because they both required a Hyper-V cluster.  That’s changing.

In Windows Server 2012 the tie between Live Migration and Failover Clustering has been broken.  All you will need to do Live Migration is a 1 Gbps network, meaning you can live migrate a VM between two non-clustered hosts, between clusters, and of course, between clustered hosts.

As you now know, Live Migration is not high availability.  I’m sure the tech media is going to confuse things – in fact, I believe they already are Smile If you want your virtualised workloads to be independent of hardware/host fault then you must still install a Hyper-V cluster … and don’t forget that Windows guests need appropriate clustering (you can move a MSFT license from one hardware to another once every 90 days so you really should license hosts).  If you work in a small/medium business, then don’t fret – Windows Server 2012 doesn’t require that expensive SAN any more – have a look at my previous posts on Storage Pools where you can now store HA VMs on active/active clustered file shares using cheaper JBOD.

Don’t get me wrong; Live Migration without clustering is an excellent addition.  Many choose not to do HA because they cost of downtime is less than the cost of HA for some applications.  They will like the agility and mobility they’ll now get with zero downtime.

Hyper-V Road Show for Irish Microsoft Partners

THIS EVENT IS FOR MICROSOFT PARTNERS ONLY

I will be speaking at a series of events next week on behalf of my employers, MicroWarehouse Ltd (a Microsoft Value Added Distributor).  Anyone who works for a Microsoft partner is welcome to attend (no cost).  Each event (Dublin, Belfast, Galway and Cork) will be aimed at the technical audience: so that’ll be field engineers, consultants, IT architects and, technical sales. 

The first part of the session is aimed at getting the best from Hyper-V.  It’s based on best practices, things I’ve learned from Microsoft and other MVPs, and common mistakes I’m encountering in the field.  That’ll be about 2 hours of “level 400” in-the-guts deep tech.  The second part of the session will be 1 hour, looking at The Great Big Hyper-V survey.  In that we’ll look at what people are doing with Hyper-V and System Center, now and in 2012, comparing/contrasting with best practices (from the first part of the session), and maybe more Smile

And who knows, maybe I’ll have my Windows 8 slate PC there and I might be able to answer some questions about Windows Server 8 Hyper-V if I’m asked Smile All the details are below:

THIS EVENT IS FOR MICROSOFT PARTNERS ONLY

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Call us now on 01 616 0400 or events@mwh.ie

Header

Learn how to improve your Hyper-V deployments with resident MicroWarehouse MVP, Aidan Finn. During his presentation Aidan will cover:
  • How to improve your Hyper-V Deployments: This level 400 technical presentation will contain information about how to design and deploy Hyper-V while avoiding some common issues and maximising performance.
  • The Great Big Hyper-V Survey of 2011: Learn how other organisations are deploying Hyper-V, System Center, and security including analysis of the information, how people could improve their deployments and looking to the future of Hyper-V and System Center in 2012.

 

When & Where All events 9am – 1pm.

Monday 26/09/2011

MicroWarehouse, Dublin

Tuesday 27/09/2011

The Fitzwilliam Hotel, Belfast

Thursday 29/09/2011

The G Hotel, Galway

Friday 30/09/2011

Rochestown Park Hotel, Cork

 

About Aidan Finn

 

 

Aidan Finn (Hyper-V MVP) of MicroWarehouse   has been working with Hyper-V since it was a beta on Windows Server 2008.  He has 15 years’ experience working in IT infrastructure, specialising in Windows Server, desktop deployment and management, System Center, and virtualisation.  Aidan Finn is the author of Mastering Hyper-V Deployment (Sybex 2010), and a contributing author of Mastering Windows 7 Deployment (Sybex 2011) and Mastering Windows Server 2008 R2 (Sybex 2010).

 

 

 

 

 

MicroWarehouse | 13 Heaney Avenue | Park West | Dublin 12
t: +353 (0)1 616 0400 | f: +353 (0)1 623 2800 | www.mwh.ie |sales@mwh.ie

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THIS EVENT IS FOR MICROSOFT PARTNERS ONLY

Comparing Windows 8 And iPad Start Up Times

When I got off my plane from Anaheim in Chicago, I went to the nearest power station to recharge my devices for the next leg to Dublin.  I noticed something interesting; my Windows 8 (Developer Preview release) slate PC booted up much faster than my 10 month old iPhone 4.  I wondered how that would compare with my iPad (1).  One of the perks of the iPad has been quick access to the device when I needed it.  It seemed like I needed to do a comparison test.

The first thing I did was test the cold boot times of both devices.

 

It seems like the Windows 8 slate, now taking advantage of UEFI hardware, is faster at cold booting than the iPad.

Most of the time, these portable devices are carried around in a sleep state.  Next I decided to test a warm wakeup. 

It seems to me that Microsoft has managed to knock down that criticism of Windows.

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What Event Will Windows 8 RTM Be Announced At?

Please forgive me while I take off my tinfoil (aluminium) hat; the aliens have taken a break from trying to read my thoughts.

I previously stated that I believed that Windows 8 would release before July 2012 because of how Microsoft’s financial year works (think EA Sports game titles) and their fear of the number 13.

Mary-Jo Foley and Paul Thurrot stated on Windows Weekly that they think an early RTM is coming – we have the developer preview, there will be 1 beta and 1 RC before RTM, and they think Microsoft is aiming to have GA for the lucrative back-to-school timeframe in August/September.

Microsoft won’t do an RTM without a big event to go along with it.  It just so happens that TechEd Europe is moving back to Amsterdam and Summer in 2012.  To be precise, it will be held on the week of June 25th, 2012.  That allows Microsoft to call the server product “Windows Server 2012”, and it allows them time to start the OEM build up for August and September.  I’d expect actual launch events in early September.

OK, that’s done and I can hear the aliens, it’s time to don my protective cover once again.

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Build Windows 2011 Review

It’s Friday afternoon in Anaheim USA, I’m sitting in my hotel room (jetlagged), and it’s that time of the week when I have to look back on what’s happened.  First thing’s first; how well did Build Windows go?

The Event

I thought the event was excellent.  There was a little bit of drama by some people about the lack of an agenda before the event.  We knew that “Build Windows” was going to be about Windows 8.  And we also knew that Microsoft wanted to keep as much of the Windows 8 announcements for this week to maximise their impact on the media.  I think that worked … kind of.  I didn’t see the 6 o’clock news, where I’d expect to see a certain California based appliance company be mentioned on one of their launch days.  But just about everyone I met of the 5,000 delegates seemed pretty excited. 

I thought the venue was good, the event was well organised, food/drink was good, the crew managed to get 5,000 people fed without much in the way of queuing, and I can’t complain about getting a UK£999 device with Windows 8 developer preview preloaded on it. 

The Sessions

The two keynotes were well thought out.  Everyone I talked to thought that Steven Sinofsky did a good job.  To be honest, I didn’t notice the time go by.

Most of the speakers knew what they were presenting on.  Was the content level 400?  No – but I wouldn’t expect that here; this was a place to kick things off.  At ask the experts, two of the presenters gave me a good bit of time to answer my questions.

I had a small bit of concern that there wouldn’t be much in the way of content for an IT Pro like myself.  As it turned out, sessions for IT pros were in the minority (as expected for this event) but there were more sessions than I could attend.  I’ll be downloading some to watch on my slate PC on the way home.

What Stood Out?

I don’t believe that Microsoft mentioned that Windows Server 8 is optimised for the cloud.  They should have because it is Winking smile 

I have said over and over that the Hyper-V group listen to feedback like no other, and we got further proof of that this week:

  • NIC teaming by Windows is a reality
  • Snapshot merge is done while the VM is online
  • Hyper-V on the client, with support for wifi and host power settings

And let’s not forget the innovation:

  • Hyper-V replica
  • Hyper-v extended switch
  • Network virtualisation
  • Live migration without Failover Clustering
  • Virtual fibre channel HBA
  • All sorts of offloading
  • VHDX for up to 16 TB of virtual hard disk with metadata
  • A new VDI story on preventing the disk storm
  • Using file shares for VM storage
  • … and on, and on, and on.

If day 2 seemed to be the private cloud/Hyper-V day, then day 3 was the storage and failover clustering day.  It is no secret that I hate Redirected IO and what it does to the backup and CSV design story in Hyper-V.  That has been changed because we now have direct IO during CSV backup.  That’s all I needed to hear to make me happy.  But no, we found out that storage would never be the same again with a new feature called Storage Pools, in which we could create highly available and scalable Storage Spaces.  Combined with 10 GbE, NIC teaming, offloading, and RDMA, and SMB 2.2, we get very fast storage on file shares!!!  It’s simple, it’s cheap, it makes clustering possible for the small business, and it makes storage more flexible for the large enterprise.  Believe it or not, but the thing I most want to try out now is to create one of these active/active clustered file shares on a Storage Spaces located CSV – that’s a mouthful Smile

What’s Next?

The developer preview release is an early pre-beta release aimed at the software developers and hardware manufacturers.  It gives them a chance to start getting their products ready in time for RTM, if not earlier – it would be best to test on RC so a final product is ready on RTM day.  But that isn’t stopping us IT pros from starting to learn.

We can expect Microsoft to start revealing more information.  We IT pros actually learned very little of the new OS this week.  We heard nothing of Active Directory, security and identity, “better together”, OS deployment, and so on.  There isn’t a TechEd Europe this November/December so I guess most of the announcements will either be online, at some other event (that I don’t know of). 

My money is on some kind of event/announcement in January/February 2012 where the complete feature set is detailed. 

ARM devices were on display behind secure Perspex cases at Build.  There is no public ARM build of Windows 8 so that will have to wait.

Until then, we finally have something to install, dig into, and learn about, and isn’t that what the Build event was all about in the end?

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Building Continuously Available Filer Server NAS Appliances

Speakers are Gene Chellis and Cristian Teodorescu

A file server NAS could be a fine appliance for SQL Server or Hyper-V file storage.  This is the last of the sessions in the storage track.

Why is NAS Relevant?

  • Customers like them according to sales figures. Sales rising steeply for last 2 year and into future, whereas file servers sales growing slowly now and in future (after 2 years of big drop)
  • Simple deployment (appliance)
  • Supports virtualisation and private cloud
  • Storage optimized hardware

Requirements of NAS

  • Support heterogeneous environments: Windows/Unix and File/Block
  • Support multiple workloads: client and server
  • Designed for end-to-end storage performance
  • Designed for continuous availability
  • Integrated software/hardware/packaging (appliance)
  • Simplified setup, configuration, and management (appliance experience)

New for Unified Storage on Windows Server 8

  • iSCSI target continuous availability
  • NFS v3 server continuous availability
  • NFS 4.1 server

End-to-End Storage Performance

Requirements vary by workload.  Some OEMs have not considered that and sometimes have a bottleneck that prevents high end-end performance.

Long demo of a virtualised pre-packaged NAS/cluster appliance with lots of wizards to set it up.

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Building Continuously Available Systems with Hyper-V

The speaker is Brian Dewey of Microsoft.

If you came to this post because it is about Hyper-V, then I really urge you to read the other “Building Continuously …” session notes that I have taken.  They all build to this session (it was a track of sessions).

Continuously available:software and hardware are designed to support transparent failover without service or data loss.

Continuous Availability Improvements

Live Migration: Move a VM with zero downtime.  Now we can LM VMs inside of clusters as well as between clusters. 

Live Storage Migration: Move the VM storage with no downtime between hosts.  First the VHDs and config files are copied from one location to another (while the VM is running).  IO is mirrored to both locations – stays in that state while LM of the VM state happens.  Once we’re in sync, the VM starts running on the destination location with just I/O running over there.  If there’s a failure in the workflow, nothing is lost and the VM resumes on the source location.  More flexibility for maintenance, host migrations, etc.

Guest clustering: now high end storage customers can use virtual fibre channel HBAs to create failover clusters using VMs.  This allows a legacy service running in the VM to become highly available so a VMs OS can be maintained or fail with no service downtime.

Hyper-V Replica: Maintain a warm standby disaster recovery site with asynchronous replication.  At high level, configure any running VM to replicate to a remote host.  Perform an initial replication of all content.  Once that’s done, Hyper-V tracks changes to the VM.  The changes are shipped on a scheduled bases to the remote location to update it.  This is optimised for high latency WAN and DR.  Initial replication can be huge so it can be done out of band using USB drive.  Loose coupling of source and destination: use certificates to replicate to a Hyper-V host in a different AD forest or company, e.g. hosting company.  It’s “warm standby” because the administrator initiates the failover – might be one for PSH or System Center Orchestrator to bring up lots of VMs in specific order.

Consolidation Magnifies the Effect of Failure

Virtualisation puts more eggs in one basket: fewer servers and less storage systems.

How to Build the Right Solution with Hyper-V?

Continuously available Hyper-V systems require shared storage.  W2008 R2 requires SAN.  Windows 8 now adds Remote File Servers, Storage Spaces, and Clustered PCI RAID to the mix. 

VHDX

  • Supports up to 16 TB, which all but eliminates need to use inflexible passthrough disk for scalability
  • Aligns to megabyte boundaries for large sector disk performance
  • Customers can embed meta data in VHDs – server applications likely to do this.
  • VHDX will be the default format going forward.  Does not support anything earlier than Windows 8 developer preview release.

Offloads

  • ODX: offline data transfer where SAN does copy work directly instead of involving slower server.  See previous notes on ODX token. Note that ODX makes creation of VHDX happen more quickly, so ODX is more than just data transfer.
  • Trim: freed up space in a disk can be returned to the storage system – thin provisioning.

Demo:

Creates a large VHDX and it is created in a few seconds.  It is not dynamic.  It is a fully allocated, zeroed out disk.  ODX makes this possible. 

Hyper-V and SMB

We now know that file share storage of VMs is now supported.  You get Live Migration and planned/unplanned failover.  Can cluster the file server for HA and scalability.  Cross-cluster LM requires remote file shares, even if only transient.  Requirements:

  • SMB 2.2
  • Remote VSS for host based backup

Storage Spaces

See previous notes.  It provides thin provisioning and resiliency.  Mirror and parity spaces deliver resilience to physical storage failures.

PCI RAID

Resiliency to node failure as LUN is switched to the failover node.  Resiliency to disk failure through RAID.

Continuously Available Networking

NIC teaming is in the box for network path fault tolerance.  NIC teaming works in the root and in the guest VM (2 NICs, connecting to 2 virtual switches, each on different pNICs).

Scalable Networking

Get concurrent live migrations with 10 GbE.  Hyper-V can use RDMA in the parent partition for efficient file access.  Hyper-V hosts can use network offloads.  Hyper-V can utilise SR-IOV on capable NICs to optimize VM networking. 

Note: SR-IOV bypasses the virtual switch, so any extensions or configurations you’d have on a virtual switch are no longer applicable.

Note: I’m sure Cisco’s extension offers a SR-IOV option.

Modern Server Hardware

  • Going from up to 64 logical processors to up to 160 LPs.
  • Physical NUMA topology projected into the guest.  Big issue with more than a few vCPUs in a guest on multi-CPU hosts.
  • Fault containment: H/W memory errors confined to the affected virtual machine.  This is a feature of some modern processor.  If an error happens in pRAM that is only used by a VM, then only that VM needs to shut down. 

Jose Barreto comes up to do a demo.  Two hosts.  1 Ethernet and 1 Infiniband NIC.  1 of each switch type connecting to 2 file servers – 1 Ethernet and 1 Infiniband each on the front end.  Each file server has 2 SAS HBAs meshed to 2 JBODs.

The Hyper-V hosts use \<cluster-name> to access VM files on the file share, not \<server-name>.  The file servers are using storage pools.  Instead of IQN or WWN, we grant permission to the file shares to the Hyper-V hosts’ computer accounts.  The cluster has no cluster storage: all file shares.  In the HA VM properties, you can see the VHDX is stored in \<cluster-name>VMFolder.  That share is in a volume that is in a Storage Space.  He’s pumping 2.6 Gbps of data throughput to the VHDX from within the VM. Using high speed NICs and RDMA with multiple connections. 

Next up: a demo of a transparent failover of the file share on the clustered file servers.  This is while huge throughput is happening.  We get a drop in IO because it is being cached.  The cluster witness tells the client to redirect after the failover so there is no timeout, cache purges, and IO continues as normal with no loss.

Windows 8 Metro UI Internet Explorer 10 is Plugin Free Zone

It was announced this week at Build Windows that IE10 in the Windows 8 Metro UI would not support any plugins.  The goal is to eliminate common performance and security flaws, e.g. Adobe Flash in being increasingly viewed (at least by me) as a vulnerable attack vector that doesn’t get updated quite as well as it should.  This ban effects Flash, ActiveX, etc.

Note: IE10 via the desktop does still support plugins.

I paid little attention to this story until last night when a couple of developers I was spending time with expressed how they felt.  They were not happy; not one little bit.  One of them had made great investment in a SaaS cloud product that was based on one or more plugins.  Their work, if nothing changes with IE10 for Metro, will have been for naught because they will have to convert everything to HTML5.  I don’t know what the toolset is like so I am not sure about how easy/difficult such a porting operation would be.

This morning I was lucky to sit down for breakfast with two other developers who I had met the previous morning at breakfast.  I asked them what they thought.  Firstly, they hadn’t heard the news.  They made some very interesting points:

  • Apple users have lived without Flash and other plugins for years.  OK, Apple users are a little different because they “do what they have done told by the turtle-necked one”, and they are used to not having access to all of the possibilities we PC users have had for 20 years.
  • Developers and users might not have such a bad reaction if they are educated about they why’s and how’s of plugin removal.  Yes, there will be a vocal minority, but Microsoft has to have the toolset and education available to win them back.
  • A critical plugin is ActiveX.  It apparently will not be compiled for ARM.  The same is probably true of lots of other plugins that are used in personal and commercial apps.  If true application universality across x86, x64, and ARM is to happen then there has to be a common denominator.  That is HTML5.

I’m sure this one will boil up slowly over the coming 6-12 months.  Maybe when launch happens, Metro UI will be ignored because of this, and users will focus on IE10 for the desktop.  Maybe legacy business apps that use God-knows-what will be an issue – let’s remember that IE6 is still widely used on XP because of them!

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