Month: April 2012

MMS 2012, Here I Come

I’ll be making my way to Las Vegas tomorrow morning and arriving there in the evening for my very first trip to the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2012.  MMS, if you don’t know it, it sometimes referred to as the System Center conference.  While there might be presentations on other products, they will be few.  The focus is purely on System Center 2012, automation, security, compliance, and the private cloud.

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This event is so sold out that even the wait list was allegedly closed.  There’s a huge amount of interest.  But don’t despair if you couldn’t attend; the content will be made available online in a few ways:

As usual, the keynotes (by Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President of the Management and Security Division at Microsoft) will be streamed live:

  • Day One Keynote: Microsoft Private Cloud. Built for the Future. Ready Now.  (Tuesday, April 17, 16:15-17:45AM GMT) – Cloud computing and the delivery of true IT as a Service is one of the most profound industry shifts in decades. Join Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Management and Security Division, as he shares Microsoft’s vision for cloud computing and shows how System Center 2012, as part of the Microsoft private cloud, will enable you to deliver the promise of cloud computing in your organization today.
  • Day Two Keynote: A World of Connected Devices (Wednesday, April 18, 16:15-17:45AM) – Clouds and cloud-connected devices are changing the world of work and our daily interactions. Tech-savvy and always-connected, people want faster, more intuitive technology, uninterrupted services, and the freedom to work anywhere, anytime, on a variety of devices. Join Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President of the Management and Security Division at Microsoft to learn how System Center 2012 and Windows Intune can help IT embrace this new reality today, and in the future, by making the right intelligent infrastructure investments.

The sessions will be available, I’d guess on Channel 9, 2 days after their original presentation.  I might be blogging live, as I usually do at conferences like this.  So keep a watch here!

The sessions I’m most interested in are possibly Orchestrator and Service Manager because they are the ones I have little or no experience of.  A conference like this is also a great opportunity to network.  I’ve a few meetings and side presentations lined up for the week, and I’m really looking forward to meeting up with fellow MVPs and others who I have “met” over the past years.  And if I get the chance, I want to make some large holes in paper targets.

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Survey Finds That vmLimited Customers Prefer Big Cat Wallpapers On Their OS/2 Warp Desktops

A recent survey found that vmLimited customers preferred to use images of big cats for their OS/2 Warp desktop wallpaper.  The same survey found that they also preferred the Phil Collins MiniDisc over the Mariah Carey one.

On the other hand, it was found that System Center 2012 customers preferred to look at dashboards that depicted the health of their private cloud and applications.

How I’m Building Our Demo Lab Environment

I’ve talked about our lab in the past and I’ve recorded/shown a few demos from it.  It’s one thing to build a demo, but it’s a whole other thing to build a lab environment, where I need to be able to build lots of different demos for W2008 R2 (current support for System Center 2012), Windows Server 8 Hyper-V, OS deployment, and maybe even other things.  Not only do I want to do demos, but I also want to learn for myself, and be able to use it to teach techies from our customer accounts.  So that means I need something that I can wipe and quickly rebuild.

WDS, MDT, or ConfigMgr were one option.  Yes, but this is a lab, and I want as few dependencies as possible.  And I want to isolate the physical lab environment from the demo environment.  Here’s how I’m doing it:

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I’ve installed Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Datacenter as the standard OS on the lab hardware.  Why not Windows Server 8 beta?  I want an RTM supported environment as the basis of everything for reliability.  This doesn’t prevent Windows Server 8 Beta from being deployed, as you’ll see soon enough.

Lab-DC1 is a physical machine – it’s actually a HP 8200 Elite Microtower PC with some extra drives.  It is the AD DC (forest called lab.internal) for the lab environment and provides DHCP for the network.  I happen to use a remote control product so I can get to it easily – the ADSL we have in the lab doesn’t allow inbound HTTPS for RDS Gateway Sad smile  This DC role is intended only for the lab environment.  For demos, I’ve enabled Hyper-V on this machine (not supported), and I’ll run a virtual DC for the demos that I build with a forest called demo.internal (nothing to do with lab.internal).

Lab-Storage1 is a HP DL370 G7 with 2 * 300GB drives, 12 * 2TB drives, and 16 GB RAM.  This box serves a few purposes:

  • It hosts the library share with all the ISOs, tools, scripts, and so forth.
  • Hyper-V is enabled and this allows me to run a HP P4000 virtual SAN appliance (VSA) for an iSCSI SAN that I can use for clustering and backup stuff.
  • I have additional capacity to create storage VMs for demos, e.g. a scale out file server for SMB Direct (SMB 2.2) demos

The we get on to Lab-Host1 and Lab-Host2.  As the names suggest, these are intended to be Hyper-V hosts.  I’ve installed Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 on these machines, but it’s not configured with Hyper-V.  It’s literally an OS with network access.  It’s enough for me to copy a VHD from the storage server.  Here’s what I’ve done:

  • There’s a folder called C:VHD on Lab-Host1 and Lab-Host2.
  • I’m enabling boot-from-VHD for the two hosts from C:VHDboot.vhd – pay attention to the bcdedit commands in this post by Hans Vredevoort.
  • I’m using Wim2VHD to create VHD files from the Windows Server ISO files.
  • I can copy any VHD to the C:VHD folder on the two hosts, and rename it to boot.vhd.
  • I can then reboot the physical host to the OS in boot.vhd and configure it as required.  Maybe I create a template from it, generalize it, and store it back on the library.
  • The OS in boot.vhd can be configure as a Hyper-V host, clustered if required, and connected to the VSA iSCSI SAN.

Building a new demo now is a matter of:

  • Replace virtual DC on Lab-DC1 and configure it as required.
  • Provision storage on the iSCSI SAN as required.
  • Deploy any virtual file servers if required, and configure them.
  • Replace the boot.vhd on the 2 hosts with one from the library.  Boot it up and configure as required.

Basically, I get whole new OS’s by just copying VHD files about the network, with hosts and storage primarily using 10 GbE.

If I was working with just a single VHD all of the time, then I’d check out Mark Minasi’s Steadier State.

Are You vmLimited Like Tad? Go Ahead Punk, Make Me Laugh & Pay Your vTax

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Meet Tad, he’s a salesman for vmLimited, a company that cannot see beyond virtualisation. 

 

 

As any decent IT pro knows, the thing that the company cares about is not that tiny little virtualisation layer, but they do care greatly about the LOB apps that run on the virtualisation platform.  What does Tad think of that?

If you think you’re a cool a cat as Tad thinks he is, then maybe you should get to know him a little more by buying one of his blast-to-the-past tapes:

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So if you don’t care about the app, if you cannot see beyond virtualisation, if you want to pay not just more, but to be paying a crippling vTax, if you don’t give a damn about the business, and if you can find them, then maybe vmLimited is the platform for you!  How A-Team is that!  I’d sure hate to be a decision maker making that unwise move!

Alternatively, you might want to check out System Center 2012 and where Windows Server 8 Hyper-V is bringing us in just a few months … beyond virtualisation.

EDIT:

On a serious note, the VMware approach reminds me of what I had to work with in the 1990’s … buy up a bunch of systems management point solutions in a short period of time, stuck a –IT on the end of the name, or an A+, or a v- in front of it, call it a framework, say it’s integrated (the logos are changed and grouped together [maybe]) and Bob’s your Uncle.

HP P4000 VSA Fails To Install On Hyper-V With ‘Unmounting the configuration drive…’ Error

The SAN I’m installing in the lab at work is a HP P4000 (Lefthand) virtual SAN appliance (VSA).  While the majority of the online conversation for the VSA centres on VMware, there is a supported Hyper-V VSA, and obviously that’s the one I want to use.

I set up the storage server, a HP DL370 G6 with lots of disk, and got W2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V up and running.  I didn’t go Windows 8 beta because I only want to run RTM software for the underlying bits of the lab that don’t get wiped/etc – more on that once the lab environment is built.

Then I ran the setup.exe for the VSA and that’s where I wasted many hours because it kept failing with this error:

Installation Failed.

Provider failure

While ‘Unmounting the configuration drive…’

A search found one result and the suggestions in that forum post were about as helpful as standing on one foot, bouncing counter-clockwise, touching the tip of my nose, and signing the national anthem backwards.

I decided to dig a little deeper and found that HVSA_Original.VHD was a compressed file.  Hmm … interesting!  I then did the following:

  1. Uncompressed the HVSA_Original.VHD file and moved it to the folder where I’d create my VSA VM
  2. Created a new VM for the VSA in Hyper-V Manager
  3. Attached HVSA_Original.VHD to the new VSA VM
  4. Attached another new fixed VHD to the VM’s SCSI controller
  5. Powered up the VM … it appears to be based on CentOS
  6. “Logged into” the VM and ran the setup wizard to set the hostname and IPv4 configuration
  7. Set up the CMC to remotely configure and manage the VSA
  8. Configured a P4000 cluster and provisioned a LUN
  9. Bob’s your uncle!  I think Winking smile I’ve never managed a P4000 before.  EVA was much easier but P4000 has more potential, hence the complexity I suppose.

KB2665347 – You Cannot Connect To A VM Using The Hyper-V Manager MMC In W2008R2

Microsoft also released a hotfix for Hyper-V where you cannot connect to a virtual machine by using the Hyper-V Manager MMC snap-in in Windows Server 2008 R2.  The situation is:

“When you try to connect to a Hyper-V virtual machine by using the Hyper-V Manager Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in on a computer that is running Windows Server 2008 R2, you cannot connect to the virtual machine. Additionally, you receive the following error message:

Cannot connect to the virtual machine. Please retry.

Note This issue does not occur when you connect to the Hyper-V virtual machine by using Remote Desktop Services.

This issue is caused by a function failure that occurs when the connection uses the VMconnect.exe command line”.

A supported hotfix is available from Microsoft.

KB2687646 – A LUN That Is Registered To A CSV Is Invisible & Inaccessible In W2008 R2

Microsoft has just released a hotfix for Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Clusters where a LUN LUN that is registered to a cluster shared volume is invisible and inaccessible.  The scenario is:

•You use a cluster shared volume on a Windows Server 2008 R2-based failover cluster that has the Hyper-V 2.0 role installed.
•You register a logical unit number (LUN) from the host operating system on the cluster shared volume.
•The Disk Control Manager component detects a STATUS_CONNECTION_DISCONNECTED error and starts a failover.
In this situation, Windows Server 2008 R2 does not detect the LUN.

In this situation, Windows Server 2008 R2 does not detect the LUN.  This issue occurs because the Disk Control Manager component does not remap the cluster shared volume resource after a failover occurs.

A supported hotfix is available from Microsoft.

A Day of Lync 2010 In Dublin

This event has just been confirmed and is essential for anyone considering Lync 2010.  The presenters are experts in this technology.  You’ll really lose out if you don’t attend this Level 400 technical Lync immersion:

The Microsoft Unified Communications User Group is running an all day event in Dublin on Microsoft Lync.

We’re here to help you understand how to use Microsoft Lync and Exchange Unified Messaging products giving you solid guidance on both business issues and technical deployment. The day will provide you with a forum to learn and for all of us to share our experiences and pains.

Having run events previously in London, Edinburgh and Reading we are now branching out. Our first events in these new locations will deliver an overview of Lync and give you inspiration for how to apply Lync and Exchange Unified Messaging within your organisation.

The day’s sessions will be presented by Microsoft MVPs and subject matter experts with many decades of experience of UC projects between them.

This day long event is made possible by the supported of A10 Networks.

Space is limited so please register when you know you can definitely make the event. We look forward to seeing you on the day.

Agenda:

Start

End

Title

09:30

10:00

Registration and coffee.

10:00

10:15

Welcome.

10:15

11:00

Introduction to Lync.

11:00

11:15

Coffee break.

11:15

12:00

We have a PBX, how do we move to Lync?

12:00

12:45

High availability and disaster recovery.

12:45

13:15

Sponsor Session – A10 Networks.

14:13

14:00

Lunch.

14:00

14:45

Using an existing video conferencing solution with Lync?

14:45

15:30

Deploy our own or use a cloud offering, if cloud who’s?

15:30

15:45

Coffee break.

15:45

16:45

All of this sounds good, how do I get my boss to agree?

16:45

17:00

Q&A and wrap-up.

If you have any questions please let us know.

Microsoft UC User Group UK

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V & NUMA

NUMA has been one of those things that’s been with us for some time and gone unmentioned by most of us who didn’t work in the “super computing” high end of the market.  But for us Hyper-V folks, it came to the fore when we got Dynamic Memory and needed to understand the penalties of a VM expanding it’s RAM across NUMA boundaries.  It wasn’t a common possibility thanks to the limit of 4 vCPUs and 64 GB vRAM per VM, but it was a risk nonetheless.

Windows Server 2012 supports 1 TB RAM and 64 vCPUS per VM.  On that host, we’ll definitely span NUMA nodes with that spec of VM.  How does Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V react?  Jeffrey Snover has the answer on the Windows Server 8 blog.  Long story short: Hyper-V does the work for you, and hides the complexity unless you want to go looking for it.

The cleverness is that Hyper-V makes the guest OS aware of NUMA in the host.  Windows VMs can then schedule their internal processes and memory according to the NUMA boundaries of that VM, just like a physical installation would have.

And so can Linux:

Using the ACPI SRAT for presenting NUMA topology is an industry standard, which means Linux and other operating systems that are NUMA aware can take advantage of Hyper-V virtual NUMA

While Hyper-V will figure out NUMA node sizes on the host automatically, what happens when you Live Migrate a VM to a different spec host?  Well, the settings presented to the VM obviously cannot be changed while the VM is running.  It’ll take the original NUMA node sizes to the new host and use them there.  Tucked away in the advanced vCPU settings, you can customize a VM’s NUMA nodes to suit the host with the smallest NUMA nodes.  That means the VM won’t span NUMA boundaries (aka Remote Run where it a process on a CPU is allocated RAM in a remote NUMA node) when it Live Migrates between hosts of different specs.

In a second post, Jeffrey Snover talks about these advanced settings, how to reset them back to the defaults, and how to monitor NUMA using Performance Monitor.  In my opinion, these two posts are essential reading if you intend to do scale out computing on a virtualisation platform.

Now that big SQL, IIS 8.0, or MySQL workload (assuming MySQL is NUMA aware like SQL is since 2005) can be moved onto Hyper-V and take full advantage of the benefits of virtualisation and private cloud, without compromising on scale up performance demands.

 

 

Windows Server 8 Hyper-V Failover Cluster Failover Startup Priority

There’s a blogger out there who used to claim that the only reason he wouldn’t consider Hyper-V as an enterprise virtualisation solution was because he couldn’t set the ordering of automatic VM startup during a failover scenario, e.g. start up the SQL server, then the middle tier server, then the web server. 

Windows Server 8 Hyper-V Failover Clustering has this feature, enabling you to set VMs into one of 4 buckets and thus order their startup when they failover from one host to another:

  1. High: These VMs start up first
  2. Medium: The default, and they start up after the high priority ones
  3. Low: These VMs start up after the high and medium priority VMs
  4. No auto start: These VMs fail over but do not start up automatically

How does it work?  Check it out for yourself: