Day 4: Running and Maintaining The System Center Suite on MS Hyper-V

The speakers are Gordon McKenna (MVP OpsMgr) and Justin Kimber.  Both from Inframon.  The subject is very interesting to me and I’d consider it.

Oh man!  This is a small world.  The guy sat beside me twisted his laptop around to show me he was reading one of the whitepapers from my blog.  That is totally cool!  If you’re reading … Thank you!

These guys have P2V’d their own System Center servers at the office.  They’re doing a live demo of it here.  Very brave!  If I was wearing a hat, I’d tip it.  They’re doing the MS styled one asks a question and the other answers as a consultant.

My concern is disk performance.  They’ve brought up I/O for things like ACS.  We know SQL performs well on fixed size VHD, but is ideal on pass through disks.  Fixed size VHD is more flexible but they recommend (correctly IMO) pass through.  This is not a solution for huge deployments.  Remember that virtualisation is not for everyone.  Use System Center to analyse the appropriateness of virtualisation for each candidate machine.

Self Service Portal

The self service portal is brought up as being nakedly presented to the Internet via SSL.  This allows remote console access to the VM.  Combined with roles and you have a nice SSL based KVM for the virtual machines.  Combine this with VLAN tagging (see my Hyper-V subject posts from a few months back) and you have a good combination for Hyper-V security.  What I like about the web site is the simplicity.  Very cleanly laid out and makes it ideal for delegated operators to manage machines they are responsible for.

For remote access, I’d alternatively suggest TS Web and TS Gateway.  Publish a shortcut to MSTSC.EXE and you can bounce to any internal server without VPN.  Haven’t tried it with TS but I did do it with Citrix Metaframe years ago.

Backup

Interesting point, they do bare metal backups of the VM’s using DPM 2007 and replicate the backup to a DR location.  That simplifies backup recovery.  The normal is to have alternative OpsMgr servers and sacrifice a goat for ConfigMgr.  The DPM solution allows for much simpler and rapid recovery.

Tips

• System Centre is fully compatible (not fully supported) on Hyper-V.

OK, these guys are light on facts and there’s a purely 100% wrong statement on their slides for RAM requirements.  They’ve suggested dynamic disks for some production usage.  Don’t tell PSS!  Every MS document I’ve read says fixed size and pass through are the only supported disks in production.  I’ve had enough.  Time to leave this room.  These guys are guessing.

My Advice

Be careful about what consultants you hire when you want System Center work done in the UK and watch out for MCS subcontracting to others.  Ask loads of questions that you’ve already researched.