What’s The Big Deal With Hyper-V and System Center?

Microsoft’s big differentiator from the competition is management.  Most people have never experienced System Center so they’ve no idea by what I mean by management.  They’ve seen things like HP SIM, IBM Director or VMware Virtual Center.  For me, those are incomplete point solutions but they’re better than some of the freeware or “cheapware” solutions I’ve seen on some sites.  When I say management I mean knowing what is where, how it’s performing, automation of deployment & configuration, backup/recovery from cradle to grave and from hardware to application inclusive of virtualisation.  Sounds like science fiction?  Nope, it’s a reality for some of us who’ve gone down the System Center route.  Even back in the early days, I had this sort of thing running in 2005.  Me and my team of 2 others managed 173 worldwide servers and were 3rd line support for the desktops.  That included doing all the AD management, PC image builds, patching and software deployment.  That sounds like we must’ve worked 24 hours a day?  Nope, outside of project/development work, we did around 3 hours a day between us.

This was all thanks to the automation provided by Microsoft System Center.  It wasn’t even called that back then … or the term had just been coined.  We had SMS 2003 (now known as Configuration Manager 2007 R2).  That allowed us to audit systems, generate license deployment reports, measure software utilisation and deploy software automatically.  It could have done software deployment and patch deployment but those features were pretty crude prior to the current release of ConfigMgr.  Instead we used WSUS and Remote Installation Services (now replaced by Windows Deployment Services).  Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (now Operations Manager 2007 R2) gave us centralised monitoring of health and performance for our Windows Servers.  This included HP hardware, operating system, Microsoft applications/services and Citrix MetaFrame at the time.  Combined with Active Directory and a carefully designed GPO and delegation model, we had complete control of everything, always knowing what was happening and being able to proactively respond to issues in the network.  We had a frequently changing business so being able to respond quickly was essential.  We had that.

Let’s have a look at what MS has to offer now.

Let’s start with Hyper-V in Server 2008 R2.  That’s Microsoft’s enterprise virtualisation platform.  You have the versions built into Windows Server 2008 R2and the free Hyper-V Server 2008 R2.  You can run standalone machines with no hardware fault tolerance.  Or you can create a cluster.  This means that virtual machines can move from one host to another with only 10 milliseconds of an outage during the move.  10 milliseconds is virtually nothing and no network application will notice.  This is thanks to Live Migration.  The R2 version simplifies storage by using Cluster Shared Volume (CSV).  You can store many VM’s on one large volume reducing the amount of time you need to spend talking to that pesky SAN administrator 😉

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 or VMM allows you to manage your Hyper-V hosts, the placement of the VM’’s and the configuration of the VM’s.  It can also manage ESX, ESXi and many VMware Virtual Center installations.  VMM is based on PowerShell so it gives you a central place for scripting.  There’s a library where you can save those scripts and ISO’s, VM configurations, VHD’s (virtual hard disks), etc.  There’s a self service console that allows you to delegate the deployment and management of VM’s.  You can control delegated VM deployment using quotas.  This really works now because the storage work is already done – it’s not a real player in the pre-R2 release in the real world due to this complication.

That’s the virtualisation dedicated stuff done with.

System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 allows you to monitor the health and performance of Windows, Linux, UNIX, Microsoft services/applications, distributed applications and synthetic transactions out of the box.  You can add in support for things like ESX, MySQL, Oracle, Cisco, Juniper, etc using purchased 3rd party applications.  HP, Dell and IBM provide free management packs for monitoring their hardware.  The new *NIX support is perfect because we can monitor those SLES VM’s we have now or the RedHat VM’s that MS will probably start supporting before the end of the year.

VMM integrates tightly with OpsMgr using Pro Tips, e.g. OpsMgr can detect a performance issue with a VM.  It then notifies VMM to move that VM to another host with more available resources.  Hardware vendors are adding to this, e.g. Brocade has a management pack where their HBA can report heavy utilisation of a fibre channel link by a VM.  OpsMgr reports this to VMM and then VMM responds by moving VM’s about on the cluster.  Live Migration means that these VM moves have no impact on the application they host or the clients they service.

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 SP1 is Microsoft’s backup solution.  Using the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) writer for Hyper-V, it can snapshot a VM without it being brought offline.  That’s using an agent on the Hyper-V host or parent partition.  You could also install and agent in the VM for a more traditional backup.  OpsMgr will monitor that DPM installation for you.  And you can more easily test your backup recoveries now.  Snapshot a VM and restore it to an alternate location.  Attach it to a private lab network.  Then do some tests like database recovers or SharePoint recoveries.

System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 is a huge product now.  I’m probably going to do it a disservice here.  It can do your OS deployment, software deployment, security update deployment, custom update deployment, license usage reporting, hardware auditing, license usage reporting, desired configuration auditing … to be honest it can do anything you can do in a script or from a command prompt and on a controlled and scheduled basis.  With this mad ability to deploy VM’s at a moments notice, ConfigMgr gives you options for deploying the OS.  Maybe you use a sysprepped VHD template.  Maybe you use ConfigMgr to deploy an OS image over the network.  A VM deployed using the self service console can be immediately configured by ConfigMgr with settings and security updates that are mandated by policy.  Network configuration policy can be enforced by checking that customised VM’s are up to scratch using desired configuration management.

That’s a quick view of what’s to offer.  As you can see, it’s pretty damned powerful.  It also allows you to automate so much.  You can focus on future developments, maybe even get onto that Windows Server 2010/2011 Serer beta 😉