Tag: Windows Server 2012 R2

Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V – Generation 2 Virtual Machines

When creating a new virtual machine on WS2012 R2 Hyper-V, you will have the option to create a Generation 1 virtual machine (what has always existed in Hyper-V as just a VM) or a Generation 2 (G2) VM.  The G2 VM has the following features:

  • It is free of legacy hardware.  The VM no longer attempts to pretend to be a physical machine.
  • All devices run as synthetic VM Bus “hardware”
  • Your VM will boot from a SCSI controller.  This means the attached OS VHDX can take advantage of SCSI/VHDX features such as TRIM, UNMAP, and hot resizing.
  • The synthetic NIC can boot from the network using PXE
  • The VM uses UEFI instead of BIOS.  That means it can do secure boot from GPT partitions.
  • VM boots will be around 20% faster (think VDI boot storm).  OS installs will be around 50% faster.  But normal day-day operations won’t be much different.
  • There are fewer devices in a VM so there are fewer VM settings

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G1 VM Device Manager (left) versus G2 Device Manger (right)

I don’t expect that many people will deploy the G2 VM on WS2012 R2 as the norm, but I could be wrong.  Why?

  • You cannot convert a VM between G1 and G2.  That is a UEFI and MBT/GPT thing.
  • You must use 64-bit editions of Windows 8/Windows Server 2012 or later.

EDIT1:

Niklas Akerlund has blogged about how he has successfully converted a Gen1 VM into a Gen2 VM using Double-Take Move.

A Converged Networks Design For SMB 3.0 Storage & SMB Direct Live Migration

I recently posted a converged networks design for Hyper-V on SMB 3.0 storage with RDMA (SMB Direct).  Guess what – it was *consultant speak alert* future proofed.  Take a look at the design, particularly the rNICs (NICs that support RDMA) in the host(s):

There you have 2 non-teamed rNICs.  They’re not teamed because RDMA is incompatible with teaming.  They are using DCB because the OS packet scheduler cannot apply QoS rules to the “invisible” RDMA flow of data.  The design accounts for SMB to the SOFS node, Cluster communications, and …. Live Migration.

That’s because in Windows Server 2012 R2 (and thus the free Hyper-V Server 2012 R2), we can use SMB Live Migration on 10 GbE or faster rNICs.  That gives us:

  • SMB Multichannel: The live migration will use both NICs, thus getting a larger share of the bandwidth.  SMB Multichannel makes the lack of teaming irrelevant because of the dynamic discovery and fault tolerant nature of it.
  • SMB Direct: Live Migration offloads to hardware meaning lower latency and less CPU utilization.

With 3 rNICs on PCI3 slots, the memory on my host could be the bottleneck in Live Migration speed Smile  In other words … damn! 

What does it all mean?  It means VMs with big RAM assignments can be moved in a reasonable time.  It means that dense hosts can be vacated quickly. 

What will adding SMB Live Migration cost you?  Maybe nothing more than you were going to spend because this is all done using rNICs that you might already be purchasing for SMB 3.0 storage anyway.  And hey, SMB 3.0 storage on Storage Spaces is way cheaper and better performing than block storage.

Oh, and thanks to QoS we get SLA enforcement for bandwidth + dynamic bursting for the other host communications such as SMB 3.0 to the Scale-Out File Server and cluster communications (where redirected IO can leverage SMB 3.0 between hosts too).

In other words … damn!

Hey Eric, is having faster vMotions/Live Migrations not worth while now? Smile with tongue out

TechEd NA 2013 – Software Defined Storage In Windows Server & System Center 2012 R2

Speakers: Elden Christensen, Hector Linares, Jose Barreto, and Brian Matthew (last two are in the front row at least)

4:12 SSDs in 60 drive jbod.

Elden kicks off. He owns Failover Clustering in Windows Server.

New Approach To Storage

  • File based storage: high performance SMB protocol for Hyper-V storage over Ethernet networks.  In addition: the scale-out file server to make SMB HA with transparent failover.  SMB is the best way to do Hyper-V storage, even with backend SAN.
  • Storage Spaces: Cost-effective business critical storage

Enterprise Storage Management Scenarios with SC 2012 R2

Summary: not forgotten.  We can fully manage FC SAN from SysCtr via SMI’-S now, including zoning.  And the enhancements in WS2012 such as TRIM, UNMAP, and ODX offer great value.

Hector, Storage PM in VMM, comes up to demo.

Demo: SCVMM

Into the Fabric view of the VMM console.  Fibre Channel Fabrics is added to Providers under Storage.  He browses to VMs and Services and expands an already deployed 1 tier service with 2 VMs.  Opens the Service Template in the designer.  Goes into the machine tier template.  There we see that FC is surfaced in the VM template.  It can dynamically assign or statically assign FC WWNs.  There is a concept of fabric classification, e.g. production, test, etc.  That way, Intelligent Placement can find hosts with the right FC fabric and put VMs there automatically for you.

Opens a powered off VM in a service.  2 vHBAs.  We can see the mapped Hyper-V virtual SAN, and the 4 WWNs (for seamless Live Migration).  In Storage he clicks Add Fibre Channel Array.  Opens a Create New Zone dialog.  Can select storage array and FC fabric and the zoning is done.  No need to open the SAN console.  Can create a LUN, unmask it at the service tier …. in other words provision a LUN to 64 VMs (if you want) in a service tier with just a couple of mouse clicks … in the VMM console.

In the host properties, we see the physical HBAs.  You can assign virtual SANs to the HBAs.  Seems to offer more abstraction than the bare Hyper-V solution – but I’d need a €50K SAN and rack space to test Smile

So instead of just adding vHBA support, but they’ve given us end-end deployment and configuration.

Requirement: SMI-S provider for the FC SAN.

Demo: ODX

In 30 seconds, 3% of BITS VM template creation is done.  Using same setup but with ODX, but the entire VM can be deployed and customized much more quickly.  In just over 2 minutes the VM is started up.

Back to Elden

The Road Ahead

WS2012 R2 is cloud optimized … short time frame since last release so they went with a focused approach to make the most of the time:

  • Private clouds
  • Hosted clouds
  • Cloud Service Providers

Focus on capex and opex costs.  Storage and availability costs

IaaS Vision

  • Dramatically lowering the costs and effort of delivering IaaS storage services
  • Disaggregated compute and storage: independent manage and scale at each layer. Easier maintenance and upgrade.
  • Industry standard servers, networking and storage: inexpensive networks. inexpensive shared JBOD storage.  Get rid of the fear of growth and investment.

SMB is the vision, not iSCSI/FC, although they got great investments in WS2012 and SC2012 R2.

Storage Management Pillars

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Storage Management API (SM-API)

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VMM + SOFS & Storage Spaces

  • Capacity management: pool/volume/file share classification.  File share ACL.  VM workload deployment to file shares.
  • SOFS deployment: bare metal deployment of file server and SOFS.
  • Spaces provisioning

Guest Clustering With Shared VHDX

See yesterday’s post.

iSCSI Target

  • Uses VHDX instead of VHD.  Can import VHD, but not create. Provision 64 TB and dynamically resize LUNs
  • SMI-S support built in for standards based management, VMM.
  • Can now manage an iSCSI cluster using SCVMM

Back to Hector …

Demo: SCVMM

Me: You should realise by now that System Center and Windows Server are developed as a unit and work best together.

He creates a Physical Computer Profile.  Can create a VM host (Hyper-V) or file server.  The model is limited to that now, but later VMM could be extended to deploy other kinds of physical server in the data centre.

Hector deploys a clustered file server.  You can use existing machine (enables roles and file shares on existing OS) OR provision a bare metal machine (OS, cluster, etc, all done by VMM).  He provisions the entire server, VMM provisions the storage space/virtual disk/CSV, and then a file share on a selected Storage Pool with a classification for the specific file share.

Now he edits the properties of a Hyper-V cluster, selects the share, and VMM does all the ACL work.

Basically, a few mouse clicks in VMM and an entire SOFS is built, configured, shared, and connected.  No logging into the SOFS nodes at all.  Only need to touch them to rack, power, network, and set BMC IP/password.

SMB Direct

  • 50% improvement for small IO workloads with SMB Direct (RDMA) in WS2012 R2.
  • Increased performance for 8K IOPS

Optimized SOFS Rebalancing

  • SOFS clients are now redirected to the “best” node for access
  • Avoids uneccessary redirection
  • Driven by ownership of CSV
  • SMB connections are managed by share instead of per file server.
  • Dynamically moves as CSV volume ownership changes … clustering balances CSV automatically.
  • No admin action.

Hyper-V over SMB

Enables SMB Multichannel (more than 1 NIC) and Direct (RDMA – speed).  Lots of bandwidth and low latency.  Vacate a host really quickly.  Don’t fear those 1 TB RAM VMs Smile

SMB Bandwidth Management

We now have 3 QoS categories for SMB:

  • Default – normal host storage
  • VirtualMachine – VM accessing SMB storage
  • LiveMigration – Host doing LM

Gives you granular control over converged networks/fabrics because 1 category of SMB might be more important than others.

Storage QoS

Can set Maximup IOPS and Minimum IOPS alerts per VHDX.  Cap IOPS per virtual hard disk, and get alerts when virtual hard disks aren’t getting enough bandwidth – could lead to auto LM to another better host.

Jose comes up …

Demo:

Has a 2 node SOFS.  1 client: a SQL server.  Monitoring via Perfmon, and both the SOFS nodes are getting balanced n/w utilization caused by that 1 SQL server.  Proof of connection balancing.  Can also see that the CSVs are balanced by the cluster.

Jose adds a 3rd file server to the SOFS cluster.  It’s just an Add operation of an existing server that is physically connected to the SOFS storage.  VMM adds roles, etc, and adds the server.  After a few minutes the cluster is extended.  The CSVs are rebalanced across all 3 nodes, and the client traffic is rebalanced too.

That demo was being done entirely with Hyper-V VMs and shared VHDX on a laptop.

Another demo: Kicks off an 8K IO worklaod.  Single client talking to single server (48 SSDs in single mirrored space) and 3 infiniband NICs per server.  Averaging nearly 600,000 IOPS, sometimes getting over that.  Now he enables RAM caching.  Now he gets nearly 1,000,000 IOPS.  CPU becomes his bottleneck Smile 

Nice timing: question on 32K IOs.  That’s the next demo Smile  RDMA loves large IO.  500,000 IOPS, but now the throughput is 16.5 GIGABYTES (not Gbps) per second.  That’s 4 DVDs per second.  No cheating: real usable data, going to real file system, nor 5Ks to raw disk as in some demo cheats.

Back to Elden …

Data Deduplication

Some enhancements:

  • Dedup open VHD/VHDX files.  Not supported with data VHD/VHDX.  Works great for volumes that only store OS disks, e.g. VDI.
  • Faster read/write of optimized files … in fact, faster than CSV Block Cache!!!!!
  • Support for SOFS with CSV

The Dedup filter redirects read request to the chunk store.  Hyper-V does buffered IO that bypasses the cache.  But Dedup does cache.  So Hyper-V read of deduped files is cached in RAM, and that’s why dedupe can speed up the boot storm.

Demo: Dedup

A PM I don’t know takes the stage.  This demo will be how Dedup optimizes the boot storm scenario.  Starts up VMs… one collection is optimized and the other not.  Has a tool to monitor boot up status.  The deduped VMs start up more quickly.

Reduced Mean Time To Recovery

  • Mirrored spaces rebuild: parallelized recovery
  • Increased throughput during rebuilds.

Storage Spaces

See yesterday’s notes.  They heapmap the data and automatically (don’t listen to block storage salesman BS) promote hot data and demote cold data through the 2 tiers configured in the virtual disk (SSD and HDD in storage space).

Write-Back Cache: absorbs write spikes using SSD tier.

Brian Matthew takes the stage

Demo: Storage Spaces

See notes from yesterday

Back to Elden …

Summary

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Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 is Announced

EDIT: Download Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 from here.

I was talking to Jeff Woolsey (Windows Server Principal Program Manager Lead) tonight and he told me that today at TechEd North America he announced that there will be a Hyper-V Server 2012 R2.  This is the free version of Hyper-V, with all of the features (minus the GUI) and all of the scalability that you get with Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 R2.  Yes, that includes Failover Clustering (HA), unlimited Live Migration (with compression/SMB), shared VHDX, extensibility, Hyper-V Network Virtualiztion, Hyper-V Replica, etc.

It should be no surprise, but Hyper-V Server has been released with every version of Windows Server.  It’s the ESXi Free (and more) killer.  Once RTM, it’ll be a free download, as always.

Licensing-wise, Hyper-V Server has a niche market.  That’s because you never license VMs for Windows Server, even with VMware or XenServer; you license hosts with Standard (smaller installs) or Datacenter (makes sense financially with around 7 or more VMs per host, depending on Standard versus Datacenter license cost for your specific case).  So if you’re purchasing Windows Server per host for the VMs that will run on the host, then you might as well install Windows Server on the host to enable Hyper-V.  Where Hyper-V Server does have a place is:

  • VDI: where you’re not licensing the host for Windows Server VMs.  It might be pointless buying Datacenter edition (unless you’re a hosting company doing shared hosted VDI) when those licensing benefits are going to waste and not cancelling out the cost of the host OS.  the free Hyper-V Server has all the same functionality.
  • Linux VMs: Same argument as with VDI, and richer than ever with file system consistent backup and full Dynamic Memory support.
  • You don’t have licensing for Windows Server, you want to build a host once, and play with downloaded time-bombed demo stuff.
  • You licensed your VMs for an older version of Windows with no intention of upgrading, but you’d like to use the newest version of Hyper-V.
  • You want to ensure that no one can enable non-Hyper-V related roles/features on the Management OS.

There’s so much in Hyper-V Server.  But that’s always been the norm, because Hyper-V IS FREE.

TechEdNA 2013 – Application Availability Strategies for the Private Cloud

Speakers: Jose Barreto, Steven Ekren

Pre-session question … How far can a cluster stretch?  You can have your heartbeat up to 1 minute timeout.  They recommend no more than 10-20 seconds.  However there is a license mobility limit – it is pretty long distance, but it does exist.

Moving Physical to the Private Cloud (Virtual)

Many ways to P2V from rebuilt, disk2vhd, backup/restore, VMM, and on and on and on.

VMs can be HA on Hyper-V.  Cost reductions and mobility by virtualization.  Easier backup.  Easier deployment.  Easier monitoring.  Flexibility.  Self-service.  Measurability.  Per-VM/VHD VM replication is built in with Hyper-V Replica.  And on and on and on.

VM Monitoring added in WS2012 Failover Clustering

2 levels of escalated action in response to a failure trigger:

  1. Guest level HA recovery
  2. Host level HA recovery

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Off by default and requires configuration.  Watch for an alert, say from a service.  If service fails, cluster gets the alert and restarts the service.  If within an hour, the cluster gets the same alert again, it’ll fail it over (shut down) to another host.

Requires that the VM is WS2008 R2 or later and in the same domain as the hosting Hyper-V cluster.

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In the private cloud:

  • Guest OS admin configures the failure triggers
  • Recovery from host is configured by the cloud admin

The process works through the Hyper-V heartbeat integration component in the guest OS.  An “application critical flag” goes back to the parent partition via VMMS, and escalated in the host via the VM resource in the cluster, to the Cluster Service.

You can enable VM Monitoring in WS2012 in the VM properties (cluster) in Settings.  The cluster will still get a signal, if configured in the guest OS, but it is ignored.  Basically cloud admin can disable the feature, and it ignores what the tenant does in their VM.

Event ID 1250 will be registered in System log with FailoverClustering source when the application critical flag is sent.

We can set up a trigger for a service failure or an event.

Add-ClusterVMMonitoredItem … Get-, Remove-, Reset- are run by a guest OS admin in the VM.

You can also hit Configure Monitoring action on a VM in Failover Cluster Manager on the cloud.  Assumes you have admin rights in the VM.

Guest Clustering

We can create guest OS clusters.  Protects against faults in the guest layer, e.g. BSOD, registry issue, etc.  Also allows preventative maintenance with high SLAs.

Can use: iSCSI, virtual fiber channel, or SMB 3.0 shared storage.

Guest Clustering and VM Monitoring

You can use both together.

Set cluster service restart action to none for 2nd and 3rd failure in the guest cluster node OS.  First failure is left at Restart the Service.

Then from the host site, enable VM monitoring for the guests’ Cluster Service.

Demo of virtual SOFS

Steven kills the cluster service on a SOFS node using Process Explorer.  The service restarts.  Video being streamed from the SOFS via that node pauses and resumes maybe 2-3 seconds later.  He kills the service a second time.  The host cluster shuts down the VM and fails it over.

Thorough Resource Health Check Interval defaults to 1 minute in the VM properties in Failover Cluster Manager.  You can reduce this if you need to, maybe 20 seconds.  Don’t make it too often, because the check does run a piece of code and that would be very inefficient. 

Jose comes on stage.

Shared Virtual Disks

Before WS2012 R2, the only way we could do guest clustering was by surfacing physical/cloud storage to the tenant layer, or by deploying virtual file servers/iSCSI.  First is insecure and inflexible, second is messy.  Hosting companies just won’t want to do it – and most will refuse.

With WS2012 R2, VMs can share a VHDX file as their shared data disk(s).  It is a shared SAS device from the VM’s perspective.  It is for data disks only.

There are 2 scenarios supported:

  • Using CSV to store the VHDX
  • Using SMB to store the VHDX

The storage location of the CSV must be available to all hosts that guest cluster nodes will be running on.

This solution isolates the guests/tenants from your hosts/cloud fabric. 

Deploying Shared VHDX

Use:

  • Hyper-V Manager
  • PowerSHell
  • VMM 2012 R2

Think about:

  • Anti-affinity, availability sets in VMM service templates.  Keep the guests on different hosts so you don’t have a single point of failure.
  • Watch out for heartbeats being too low.

Deploy the data disk on the SCSI controller of the VMs.  Enable sharing in the Advanced features of the VHDX in the VM settings.

In the VM, you just see a shared SAS disk.  You can use an older version of Windows … 2012 and 2012 R2 will be supported.  This is limited by time to test older versions.

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PowerShell:

  • New-VHD
  • Add-VMHardDiskDrive …. –ShareVirtualDisk < repeat this on all the guest cluster VMs
  • Get-VMHardDiskDrive … | ft VMName, Path, ControllerType, SupportPersistentReservations < the latter setting indicates that it is shared if set to True.

In VMM service template tier properties, you can check Share The Disk Across The Service Tier in the VHDX properties.

Inside the VM, it just looks like a typical disk in Disk Management, just like in physical cluster.

Tip: use different VHDX files for your different data volumes in the guest OS cluster.  It gives you more control and flexibility.  Stop being lazy and do this!

The hosts must be 2012.  The guests are 2012 and 2012 R2, with the latest integration components. 

This is only VHDX – it uses the metadata feature of the disk to store persistent reservation information.  Can use fixed or dynamic, but not differencing.

Backup

Guest-based backup only.  Host based-backups and snapshots of the shared VHDX are not supported.  Same restrictions as with guest clusters using physical storage.

Storage Migration of Shared VHDX

This is not supported – it is being referenced by multiple VMs.  You can Live Storage Migrate the other VM files, but just not the shared data VHDX of the guest cluster.

You can Live Migrate the VMs.

Comparing Guest Cluster Options

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Troubleshooting

  • Performance counters: Added new counters to PerfMon
  • Event Viewer: Hyper-V-Shared-VHDX
  • Filter Manager (FLTMC.EXE): The Shared VHDX filter can be looked at – svhdxflt
  • Actual binaries of the filer: svhdxflt.sys and pvhdparsersys

Online Resize

You can hot resize a non-shared VHDX in WS2012 R2.  You cannot hot resize a shared VHDX.

You can hot-add a shared VHDX.

Unsupported bonus scenario

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TechEd NA 2013–Storage Spaces Performance

Speaker: Brian Matthew

Start was some metrics achieved stuff.  Summary: Lots of IOPS.

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Hardware

It’s simple and cost effective. Goes from basic to OLTP workloads.

Capabilities Overview

Storage Pools support ReFS

2 * JBODs.  We create a single storage pool to aggregate all 48 disks ( 2 * 24 in this example.  We create 1 * 2-way mirror spaces and 1 * parity space.

  • Flexible resilient storage spaces.
  • Native data striping maximizes performance
  • Enclosure awareness with certified hardware.
  • Data Integrity Scanner (aka “scrubber”) with NTFS and ReFS
  • Continuous Availability with Windows Server failover clustering – SOFS

Data is spread around the disks in the storage pool.  They parallelize the rebuild process.

8 * 3 TB disk test bed.  Test the failure of the disk.  Can rebuild in 50 minutes, with > 800 MB/s rebuild throughput.  The line is that hot spare is no longer necessary in WS2012 R2.  Hmm.  Must look into that.

Scale-Out Example

Note: CSV scales out linearly

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Match workload characteristics to drives

  • Capacity optimized drives have lower performance. Higher TB/$
  • High performance drives has lower capacity/host.  Higher IOPS/$

Can we seamlessly merge these?

Tiered Storage Spaces

A single virtual disk can use the best of both types of disk.  High capacity for colder slices of data.  High speed for hotter slices of data.

The most compelling ratio appears to be 4 to 12 SSDs in a 60 slot device, with the rest of the disks being HDDs.

In the background, the file system actively measures the activity of file slices.  Transparently moves hot slices to the SSD tier, and cold slices to the HDD tier.

Tiering (analysis and movement) is done daily.  The schedule is configurable (change time, do it more than daily).  The slices are 1 MB in size.  So tracking watches 1 MB slices, and tiering is done on 1 MB slices.

Administrators can pin entire files to specified tiers.  Example, move a VDI parent VHDX to the SSD tier.

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Write-Back Cache

Per virtual disk, persistent write cache.  It smoothens out write bursts to a virtual disk.  Uses the SSD capacity of the pool for increased IOPS capacity.  Configurable using PowerShell.  Great for Hyper-V which needs write-through, instead of battery powered write cache.

PowerShell Demo

Get-PhysicalDisk to list the possible disks to use “CanPool”attribute.

$disks = Get-PhyscalDisks

New-StoragePool …. $disks

Get-StoragePool to see the disks.  Look at FriendlyName and MediaType attributes.

$SSD_Tier = New-StorageTier … list the SSDs

$HDD_Tier = New-StorageTier … list the HDDs

$vd1 = New-VirtualDisk …. –StorageTiers @($ssd_tier, $hdd_tier) –StorageTierSizes @(150GB, 1.7TB) ….

Now we have a drive with automated scheduled storage tiering.

Pins some files using Set-FileStorgeTier

Optimize-Volume –DriveLetter E –TierOptimize  ….. this will force the maintenance task to run and move slices.

Demo: Write-Back Cache

He increases the write workload to the disk. A quick spike and then the SSD takes over.  Then increases again and again, and the write-back cache absorbs the spikes.

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Question: How many tiers are supported in WS2012 R2?  2.  But the architecture will allow MSFT to increase this in later releases if required.

Right now, certified clustered storage spaces from:

  • DataOn
  • RAID Incorporated
  • Fujitsu

Takeaways

  • WS2012 R2 is a key component in the cloud:cost efficient
  • Scalable data access: capacity and performance
  • Continuously available
  • Manageable from Server Manager, PoSH, and SCVMM (including SOFS bare metal deployment from template.

Q&A

No docs on sizing Write-Back Cache.  They want the WBC to be not too large.  Up to 10 GB is being recommended right now.  You can reconfigure the size of the WBC after the fact … so monitor it and change as required.

On 15K disks: Expensive and small.  Makes sense to consider SSD + 7.5K disks in a storage pool rather than SSD + 15 K in a storage pool.

He can’t say it, but tier 1 manufacturers are scared *hitless of Storage Spaces.  I also hear one of them is telling porky pies to people on the Expo floor re the optimization phase of Storage Spaces, e.g. saying it is manual.

Is there support for hot spares?  Yes, in WS2012 and R2.  Now MSFT saying you should use space capacity in the pool with parallelized repair across all disks in the pool, rather than having a single repair point.

DeFrag is still important for contiguous data access.

If I have a file on the SSD tier, and the tier is full, writes will continue OK on the lower tier.  The ReFS integrity stream mechanism can find best placement for a block.  This is integrated with tiered storage spaces.

On adding physical disks to the storage space: old data is not moved: instant availability.  New writes are sent to the new disks.

A feature called dirty region table protects the storage space against power loss caused corruption.

Should hard drive caches be turned off?  For performance: turn it off.  For resilience, turn it on.  Note, a cluster will bypass the disk cache with write-through.

There is some level of failure prediction.  There are PoSH modules for detecting issues, e.g. higher than normal block failure rates, or disks that are slower than similar neighbours.

Ah, the usual question: Can the disks in a storage space span data centers.  The members of a storage pool must be connected to all nodes in a SOFS via SAS, which makes that impossible.  Instead, have 2 different host/storage blocks in 2 sites, and use Hyper-V Replica to replicate VMs.

Virtual Disk Deployment Recommendations

When to use Mirror, Parity, or Simple virtual disks in a storage space?

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A storage space will automatically repair itself when a drive fails – and then it becomes resilient again.  That’s quick thanks to parallelized repair.

Personal Comment

Love hearing a person talk who clearly knows their stuff and is very clear in their presentation.

—

Holy crap, I have over a mile to walk to get to the next storage session!  I have to get out before the Q&A ends.

TechEdNA – Upgrading your Private Cloud From 2012 to 2012 R2

I am live blogging so hit refresh to see more.

Speakers: Ben Armstrong, Jose Barreto, Rob Hindman

Primary focus of the session is upgrading from from (Windows Server 2012) WS2012 Hyper-V to (Windows Server) WS2012 R2 Hyper-V.  There are scale requirements.

Advice: deploy new designs with upgrades in mind – faster release cadence from Microsoft.

Fabric

  • System Management: System Center on Hyper-V
  • Compute: Hyper-V
  • Storage: Scale-Out File Server on block storage or Storage Spaces

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Upgrade System Center First

It will manage the existing cloud/hosts and enable upgrades.

Question: will users notice if a given SysCtr component is offline for a brief period of time.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj628203.aspx …. should be updated with WS2012 R2 upgrades.  Remember to turn on OpsMgr maintenance mode during upgrades!!!

Upgrading SCVMM

  • Ensure that SCVMM is configured with a seperate (preferably external) database server
  • Uninstall SCVMM 2012 SP1 – leave library/libraries and SCVMM database in place
  • Install SCVMM 2012 R2, and connect to existing database.

Your outage time is minutes.  Deploy SCVMM in a VM.  And deploy SCMM as a HA cluster (pretty sensible in a true cloud where SCVMM is critical to self-service, etc).

Up comes Jose Barreto …

You could do Compute upgrade next but ….

Upgrading Storage

Tools:

  • Storage migration
  • Copy Cluster Roles Wizard
  • Upgrade in place
  • PowerShell scripting

Options for storage upgrade

Extra hardware.  No down time: (easiest) migrate storage.  (2nd fave) Limited downtime: copy cluster role.

Limited extra hardware: No downtime: (4th fave) Migrate pools.  (3rd fave) Limited downtime: upgrade in place.

Option 1 – Migrate Storage

  • Setup new 2012 R2 storage cluster
  • Configure access to new cluster
  • Storage migrate every VM (Live Storage Migration to new storage platform)

Easy and zero downtime.  Easy to automate.  Network intensive.  Needs new storage platform.

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Option 2 – Copy Cluster Roles

Some downtime, but very quick.

  • Setup new 2012 R2 storage cluster.  Connect new cluster to existing storage.
  • Copy cluster roles.
  • Downtime begins: Offline roles on old cluster.  Online roles on new cluster
  • Down time end.

Limited downtime.  No data moved on the network.  Limited additional h/w.  Good for impatient admins. 

3 – Upgrade in place

1 – Prepare

  • HA degraded
  • Evict a node from clsutger
  • Upgrade/clean install evicted node
  • Create new cluster with evicted node

2 – Migrate …. do the previous Cluster Role Copy process.

3 – Rebuild the last remaining node in old cluster and join the domain.

You lose HA for a time.  You could buy 1 extra server if that’s an issue and recycle 1 old server when the process completes. 

4 – Move Pools

No downtime.  Moves data over the network.  Limited additional hardware.

1 – Split cluster

  • Evict node(s) on old cluster – if you have 4 nodes then you can evict 2 nodes and keep HA.
  • Upgrade evicted nodes to new version
  • Forma  site-by-side cluster with shared access to the storage

2 – Migrate storage

  • Evacuate a pool of VMs using storage live migration
  • Evict pool from old cluster
  • Add pool to new cluster
  • Use storage live migration to move VMs to pool on new storage cluster
  • Repeat until complete

You need extra storage capacity to do this … you are moving VM files from pre-evicted pool to other pools in the older cluster, before moving them back to the pool in the new cluster.

Also have 1 pool (minimum) per node member in the storage cluster.

3 – Finalize

  • Destroy the old cluster
  • Rebuild idle nodes and join to new cluster

Why have 3 or 4 nodes …. you provide some cushion for upgrade/migration scenarios.

Note: you can use VMM for any LMs or storage LMs.

Back to Ben for the compute upgrade.

Cross-Version Live Migration

Provides simple zero-downtime way to move a VM across to a new platform.

You can use one of many methods to get a new WS2012 R2 cluster … evict/rebuild, brand new, etc.  Then you can do a Cross-Version Live Migration.

In the demo, Ben fires up the VMM 2012 R2 console (he can also do this using the built-in Server admin tools, e.g. Hyper-V Manager).  VMM is managing the WS2012 hosts and the WS2012 R2 hosts.  He can do a LM of the VM from the old hosts to the new hosts.  Here’s the benefit of upgrading System Center first.  It can manage the new platform and leverage the new WS2012 R2 features.

Another thing with SysCtr …. leverage your templates and logical networks to standardise hosts.  New hosts will be identical config to the old hosts, e.g. the VM Network will have the same name so the VM won’t go “offline” when it has moved to the new hosts.

You can stage the upgrades

WS2012 R2 hosts and use WS2012 R2 storage.  WS2012 hosts can use WS2012 R2 storage.

Upgrade the Guest OS Integration Components

The world won’t end if you don’t …. some new features won’t work if they rely on the new ICs.  Start planning the upgrade around your next maintenance window or planned upgrade.  You can deploy the ICs without rebooting immediately – but the new version won’t work until you do reboot.

d:supportamd64setup.exe /quiet /norestart …. Aidan – add that as an app in ConfigMgr if you have a private cloud, and send the sucker out to a collection of Hyper-V VMs, with a predefined maintenance window.

Cluster Rebuild Options

If you have scale, you can do  2 nodes at a time to maintain HA.

If you are small then do 1 node at a time, but lose HA.

Buy some new hardware to act as the “seed” for a new cluster, and evict/rebuild the older cluster.  You maintain HA, but at a relatively small cost.  You can recycle the last 2 nodes in the old cluster.

For a small shop, take advantage of save state compatibility through:

  • In place upgrade
  • Virtual machine import

Funnily enough, a HUGE shop might also use that last option.  They could also:

  • Save state the VMs
  • Reconnect the storage to new hosts
  • Import/register the VMs

Cluster Validation

Will require downtime unless you are using Windows Server File Storage.  Note that a cluster is not supported until you have a passed cluster validation report.  Block storage will bring down the disks when validated.

Windows Server 2008 R2 to 2012 R2

Here comes Rob Hindman … who has the best job in the world, apparently, cos he works with Ben and Jose Smile

Copy Cluster Roles Wizard

This will move the cluster roles from 2008 R2 to 2012 or 2012 R2.  Basically, it allows you to move cluster resources to a cluster from another cluster that is 2 levels back, e.g. 2008 R2 to 2012 R2.

  • You can test the copy without impacting production/customers
  • The process is reversible if you encounter issues
  • Assumes that your storage will be reused
  • Does not copy data … it remaps disks

You form a new cluster and connect it to the old storage.  You run the wizard against the old cluster.  You copy the roles.  Then you bring online the roles in the new cluster after off-lining them on the old cluster.  Then you can remove the old cluster.

Supports lots including:

  • Hyper-V VMs/VM configuration
  • SOFS
  • CSV
  • Storage pools/spaces

Does not do CAU or Task Scheduler Tasks.

PLEASE READ THE REPORT that the wizard creates.  There might be fix-up steps, e.g. network settings.

Demo:

Does a W2008 R2 – WS2012 R2 migration.  You have to migrate 1 LUN (CSV) at a time.  Make sure that your destination cluster can handle the VM workload that is on the CSV that you are migrating.  If it detects a VM workload, it’ll prompt you to select a destination virtual switch.  The copy is done … no downtime, yet.  Read the report, as advised.

The VM appears on the new cluster, but it’s showing as off.  So is the CSV.  On the original cluster, you take the resource offline – shutdown the VM.  Take the CSV disk offline.  Some customers prefer to unmask the CSV at this point from the old cluster.  Bring the CSV online in the new cluster.  Then power up the VMs on the new cluster.  Done!

Other than a MS IT VPN blip, the demo worked perfectly.

Summary

You can do the upgrade with no downtime if you have lots of resources.  More likely you’ll do with with few/no new resources with minimal downtime.

Q&A

Clarification: you are not abandoning CSV.  You are putting an active/active file server cluster (SOFS) and SMB 3.0 between the Hyper-V hosts and the CSVs.  This layer adds sooooo much and makes you very flexible.

Smaller deployments, such as 2 nodes, then you continue to direct attach your CSVs to your hosts, e.g. CiB Hyper-V deployment.

TechEd NA 2013: Building Cloud Services with Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 and the Windows Azure Pack

Spakers: Bradley Bartz, Nagender Vedula, and an army of others.

1 consistent cloud experience

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Service Bus coming to WS2012 R2.  There are 2 UIs:

  • Admin
  • Consumer portal

Cloud OS Consistent Experiences.

Heres Azure versus on-premise:

Continuity of experience and services being deployed.  Note that Windows Azure Pack portal is customizable.

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The right hand side is powered by:

  • Windows Server
  • Hyper-V
  • System Center – VMM and Operations Manager
  • Service Provider Foundation
  • Windows Azure Pack

Service Consumers

People centric computing – self-service administration, acquire capacity on demand, empowered operations, predictable costs, get up and running quickly.

Difference between Azure and on-premise.  On-premise has limits of scalability.  So we set quote a limits to control how much resources the consumer can take.

Service Consumers:

  • Build highly scalable web apps
  • Iterate with integrated source control
  • Manage app with real-time telemetry
  • Use the languages and open source apps of your choice (supported by Azure pack)

Service Providers

Extreme focus on cost. Maximize per-customer profitability, hardware efficiency, automate everything, differentiate on SLAs.  All makes sense for the hoster.  What about the enterprise private cloud?  Same goals apply – IT needs to be efficient and effective.  Doubly so when doing cross-charging … and to be honest, IT doesn’t want to become more expensive than outsourced services!

Service Bus

  • Messaging service for loud apps
  • Guaranteed message delivery
  • Publish-subscribe messaging patterns
  • Standard protocols (REST, AMQP, WS*)
  • Interoperability (.NET, JAVA/JMS, C/C++)
  • Now integrated with management portal

An elastic message queuing system.  A dev building a modern app in Azure will feel right at home on your WSSC 2012 R2 cloud.

Virtual Machines

  • Consistent with IaaS Azure
  • Roles: portable, elastic, gallery, Windows & Linux support
  • Virtual networks: site-site connectivity, tenant supplied IP address

Additional services in Windows Azure Pack

  • Identity: AD integration, ADFS federation, co-administrator – huge for on-premise
  • Database services: SQL Server and MySQL
  • Value add services from gallery – you can curate a set of add-ons that your customers can use.
  • Other shared services from provider
  • Programmatic access to cloud services – Windows Azure consistent REST APIs

There is a model on acquiring capacity. There is a concept of offers and plans, and that dictates what’s being deployed.  A subscriber will get billed.  Concept of teams is supported with co-administration.  Teams can be large, and membership can change frequently.  With ADFS, you can use an AD group as the co-administrators of the subscription.

Demo

Azure supports ADFS – so he logs into Azure portal using his MSFT corporate ID.  He deploys a new website, goes to a store in Azure, and installs a source code control app: Git.  Now there’s a dedicate Git repository for that website.  It’s the usual non-modified Git.  He adds a connection to the repository locally.  Then he pushes his source code up to the repository from his PC.  That’s done in around a minute.  The website launches – and there’s the site that he pushed up.

This is more than just an FTP upload.  It’s cloud so it scales.  Can scale out the number of website instances.  By default they run on a shared tier, basically the same web server/pool.  Can change that through the GUI.  Can scale the site easily with a slider, with content and load balancing.

Now logs into the Katal portal.  Can sign in with AD user account, Email account (ASP membership of email and password), and ADFS.  The same login appears as on the Azure portal as on Azure.  Same end user experience (can be skinned).  Creates a web site.  Sets up Git source code control, as on Azure.  Basically repeats the same steps as on Azure – the customer is getting the same experience. 

In Katal, scalability can be limited by the admins, won’t have the same infinite resources as Azure.

Now he logs out, and Mark Umeno logs in as a co-admin.  He can see the resources that were just deployed by Bradley.  He can also see some other stuff that he owns. 

I get bored here … there’s no cloud building going on.  It’s turned into a user experience demo which does not match the title of the session.

TechEd 2013: System Center 2012 R2–Virtual Machine Manager

Speaker: Vijay Tewari, VMM PM.

Boostrapping a repeatable architecture

VMM becomes the heart of the data centre.  You deploy everything from VMM console/library.  For example, MSFT will be supplying service templates for deploying the reset of System Center from VMM.

Network Architecture

A sample one:

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Storage

Using SOFS service templates, SMB 3.0 management, SMI-S (including fiber channel support), VMM 2012 R2 can manage the entire storage stack from bare metal to zoning/permissioning.

Demo

Host Profiles has become Physical Computer Profiles.  You can create a file server profile for a SOFS bare metal deployment.  He reaches out to the BMC (DRAC, ILO, etc) to discover, power up, and deploy the OS of the cluster nodes.  If the process completed, a new SOFS would be running and managed by VMM.  Now you can use VMM to provision and permission file shares.  Once done, you can start to place/move VMs on the file share on the permitted hosts.

Note: you don’t touch the file servers, log into them, use Server Manager, use a PoSH cmdlet.  It’s all done from the VMM console.  Very sweet.

See Datacenter Abstraction Layer (DAL).

Synthetic Fiber Channel In The Guest

VMM 2012 R2 adds support for guest fiber channel in Hyper-V.  Uses SMI-S to talk to the SAN.  Involves 2 things:

  • Project a fiber channel virtual adapter in the guest
  • You need to be able to program the fiber channel network

Simplified zone management from the VMM console.

Storage

  • Offloaded data transfer is now supported in VMM 2012 R2 to provision resources from the library.
  • VMM supports WS2012 R2 Hyper-V to create guest clusters using a shared VHDX.  Remember the VHDX is stored on shared storage (CSV or SMB).  MSFT uses this kind of SQL cluster for testing SysCtr.  It’s a check box: Share this disk across the service tier … yes, you can deploy a guest cluster from a service template.

New in Service Templates: the first node online will initialize the cluster, and additional nodes join the cluster.  Service templates understand the need for different tasks on the first and subsequent nodes.  In the demo, he talks about how SQL can be installed on the guest cluster as part of the service template.

IP Address Management

You can create networks in VMM and IPAM will detect it.  Or you can use IPAM to model your networks and VMM will pull in the configuration.

Top of Rack Switches

More DAL.  This is where VMM can configure/manage physical switches using OMI.  In the demo, a host cannot respond to a ping.  In VMM, the host is non-compliant.  The reasoning is that the required VLAN is not piped through the switch port to the host NIC.  There is a “remediate” button – press it and VMM can reach out to an OMI switch to fix the issue …. assuming you have a RunAs account for the switch.  Otherwise you beat your network admin with some Cat5 cables until he relents.

Hybrid Networking

This builds on things like virtual switch extensions, NVGRE, etc.  The ability to move a VM from one network to another without changing the IP, and the VM stays online using HNV.

Windows Azure Pack is shown in the demo.  Vijay spins up a network in a hosting company public cloud.  He configures the IP stack of the new virtual subnet (a subset of a VM network).  A site-site tunnel (VPN) is configured.  Remember, WS2012 R2 RRAS will do this for us (NGVRE gateway too). 

He configures IBGP for routing, and then configures the VPN connection properties (IP, shared key, etc).  Now he has extended his on premise network into the hosting company.

Gateway Service Templates

An out of the box SCVMM 2012 R2 service template will automate the deployment of the WS2012 R2 NVGRE gateway. 

Hyper-V Recovery Manager

This is Hyper-V Replica management via a new SaaS product in the Azure cloud (Recovery Services).  It is in preview at the moment.  A provider (an agent) is installed in the VMM servers in production and DR sites – VMM must manage the production cloud and the DR cloud, with a VMM server in each site.  This only does management; all data replication goes directly from production to DR site, never going to Azure.

He configures cloud to cloud replication policies.  Now from in the VMM console, he can enable replication on a per-VM basis using Enable Recovery or Disable Recovery in the ribbon.  Replica VMs have a slightly different icon than production VMs.

HRM can be used to create recovery plans and be used to invoke them.

Operations Manager Dashboard Monitoring

A new OpsMgr MP, with rich dashboards.  Demo: Drive down into the fabric health.  Clicks on a network node and looks at the network vicinity dashboard to browse the health of the network.  Can diagnose networking issues in the VMM console. 

Summary

Built on features of WS2012 and added support for WS2012 R2 features.