Tomorrow (Feb 13th) I make my way to Bellevue in Washington State for the annual Microsoft Valuable Professional (MVP) Summit. The event is four days where MVP’s get to interact with and give feedback to the product groups in Redmond. Microsoft goes to great expense for this event, both in terms of money and time. It’s their chance to get feedback on new stuff from the MVP’s and to get feedback from the communities we work in.
As I’m a “Virtual Machine” MVP, about 50% of my time will be with the folks behind Microsoft’s machine virtualisation technologies, e.g. Hyper-V, VMM, and Virtual PC. I believe they have a good idea of what people are looking for in the future. Folks like Mike Briggs, Ben Armstrong, Mike Sterling, Edwin Yuen, etc are all quite visible and are great netizens. Microsoft Connect is also a good tool for gathering suggestions from the public. But it won’t do any harm to hear from anyone out there who has additional feedback. So fire ahead, post any comments you want to make and I’ll do my best to relay.
As the 4 day event is 100% under NDA, I will not be tweeting, talking, blogging or anything about the content of those 4 days. Everything will stay under wraps if or until MS decides to make things public.
Love the thought that I can get Hyper-V up and running without the cost of VM-Ware.
Hate the fact that there is not a comprehensive Step-by-Step set of instructions to assist those that are now “for the first time” taking the Virtual Plunge.
For those that are familiar with VMware and the early versions of Hyper-V these may sound like simplistic and obvious questions. However for the “Virtual Newb’s” that are finally getting on board, it is anything but simplistic or obvious. Especially when the owner is standing behind you wanting to know what it is not working correctly yet when he read in a sales magazine how easy it is.
1) I have built a Virtual Server and it is running on a physical Host server. Be it a single drive or SAN. I just want to create a template (using SCVMM) so that I can deploy it over and over again with my specified specs and settings. Note* I found this to be is easy with VMware…
With a few Blog exceptions, all that I am able to find are sales presentation documents or instructions that assume that this is not something new. Do I create a clone first and if so where? On a drive on the Host server where the VHD currently resides or on the server’s local drive where SCVMM is running from?
The instructions available from Microsoft simply state “create a template and use that to re-deploy your images from the Library.”
2) Can someone PLEASE confirm the use of a Heartbeat in a 2008 R2 cluster and REMOVE any web based Microsoft documentation that conflicts with your final answer… I was about 5 minutes from being fired and 3 from quiting over this issue. The week isn’t over yet.
3) Some step by step for naming and setting the NICs on each of the hosts of a 2008 R2 cluster. External is for the VMs only or is it the Internal that give the Virtual machines access to the network? Is External for the physical Host? depending on what Microsoft article your reading (or Blog) you will get a different answer.
4) PLEASE~! put something in writing to make all the Virtual NICs the same name..! This is causing havoc with “Incomplete VM Configuration” errors while using SCVMM. If I open a physical Host and use the VM Manager everything is fine. However, I noticed that on each physical Host the NICs are named differently,,, again… (sigh)
5) Please don’t assume that the entire world of IT Admin has been entrenched in Hyper-V or VMware from day one. There are MANY of us that are just now staring out for various reasons. Price, reliability, and mostly due to end of life for physical server which is a perfect time to transition to a Virtual solution.
6) On-Line labs that are current (2008 R2 with SCVMM R2) would be priceless! Doing would it in a lab would increase sales, popularity, recognition and most importantly. Give my friends a break from endless emails begging for long distance assistance.
7) Do the same for WDS and MDT 2010. Save us all a lot of grief.
One console to rule them all please.
I’d love to see more done to enhance the VMM Overview page, more options for intergration and displays from the other SC products. If I want a onestop picture of my dynamic datacenter then this overview screen is a great feature so far, perhaps instead of Library Resource I’d like to see the patch status of all host servers. Instead of recent jobs I may like to see how much ram is in use in my datacentre. This kind of realtime reporting in big piecharts is very effecient. If we intergrate with Sevice Manager in the future i’d like to see how many inbound new VM request are outstanding and how many decomission request etc.
I’d love to see them bring back the Multi-site Cluster Partner Program which lists and qualifies the replication solutions (host,network and array based) which support multi-site clusters for Hyper-V as well as all the other clustering technologies. The Failover Cluster Configuration Program is great for hardware vendors, but there is nothing comparable for the software based replication solutions and customers are left trying to find solutions on their own.
It would be great to find some information (more suggestions) about the configuration of the disks on the SAN … only for example: will I create each LUN on a separate RAID group, or place multiple LUNs on a single RAID group? … especially for those who would like to use CSV
Sorry for my bad en.
Thanks folks. I passed on the feedback to the folks in Microsoft.