Tag: Failover Clustering

Ignite 2015–Nano Server: The Future of Windows Server

Speaker: Jeffrey Snover

Reasons for Nano Server, the GUI-less installation of Windows Server

 

  • It’s a cloud play. For example, minimize patching. Note that Azure does not have Live Migration so patching is a big deal.
  • CPS can have up to 16 TB of RAM moving around when you patch hosts – no service interruption but there is an impact on performance.
  • They need a server optimized for the cloud. MISFT needs one, and they think cloud operators need one too.

Details:

  • Headless, there is no local interface and no RDP. You cannot do anything locally on it.
  • It is a deep ra-factoring of Windows Server. You cannot switch from Nano to/from Core/Full UI
  • The roles they are focused on are Hyper-V, SOFS and clustering.
  • They also are focusing on born-in-the-cloud applications.
  • There is a zero-footprint model. No roles or features are installed by default. It’s a functionless server by default.
  • 64-bit only
  • No special hardware or drivers required.
  • Anti-malware is built in (Defender) and on by default.
  • They are working on moving over the System Center and app insights agents
  • They are talking to partners to get agent support for 3rd party management.
  • The Nano installer is on the TP2 preview ISO in a special folder. Instructions here.

Demo

  • They are using 3 *  NUC-style PCs as their Nano server cluster demo lab.  The switch is bigger than the cluster, and takes longer to boot than Nano Server. One machine is a GUI management machine and 2 nodes are a cluster. They use remote management only – because that’s all Nano Server supports.
  • They just do some demos, like Live Migration and PowerShell
  • When you connect to a VM, there is a black window.
  • They take out a 4th NUC that has Nano Server installed already, connect it up, boot it, and add it to the cluster.

Notes: this demo goes wrong. Might have been easier to troubleshoot with a GUI on the machine Smile

Management

  • “removing the need” to sit in front of a server
  • Configuration via “Core PoSH” and DSC
  • Remote management/automation via Core PowerShell and WMI: Limited set of cmdlets initially. 628 cmdlets so far (since January).
  • Integrate it into DevOps tool chains

They want to “remove the drama and heroism from IT”. Server dies, you kill it and start over. Oh, such a dream. To be honest, I hardly ever have this issue with hosts, and I could never recommend this for actual application/data VMs.

They do a query for processes with memory more than 10 MB. There are 5.

Management Tools

Some things didn’t work well remotely: Device Manager and remove event logging. Microsoft is improving in these tools to improve them and make remote management 1st class.

There will be a set of web-based tools:

  • Task manager
  • Registry editor
  • Event viewer
  • Device manager
  • sconfig
  • Control panel
  • File Explorer
  • Performance monitor
  • Disk management
  • Users/groups Manager

Also can be used with Core, MinShell, and Full UI installations.

We see a demo of web-based management, which appears to be the Azure Stack portal. This includes registry editor and task manager in a browser. And yes, they run PoSH console on the Nano server running in the browser too. Azure Stack could be a big deal.

Cloud Application Platform:

  • Hyper-V hosts
  • SOFS noes
  • In VMs for cloud apps
  • Hyper-V containers

Stuff like PoSH management coming in later releases.

Terminology

  • At the base there is Nano Server
  • Then there is Server …. what used to be Server Core
  • Anything with a GUI is now called Client, what used to be called Full UI

Client is what MSFT reckons should only be used for RDS and Windows Server Essentials. As has happened since W2008, customers and partners will completely ignore this 70% of the time, if not more.

The Client experience will never be available in containers.

The presentation goes on to talk about development and Chef automation. I leave here.

Altaro Webinar Recording and Slides – What’s New in Hyper-V vNext

I recently co-presented a webinar by Altaro with Rick Claus (Microsoft) and Andrew Syrewicze (MVP) on what’s coming in the next version of Windows Server Hyper-V. Altaro has a recording of the webinar online. That page will be updated soon with a written Q&A from the ssession; we had A LOT of questions and Altaro asked me to write out responses which I did last Friday night. You can also download a PDF copy of the slides from the session.

Thank you to everyone that joined us. We had a great number of people tuned in – I was stunned when the folks at Altaro broke down the numbers. Hopefully, I’ll see some of you tomorrow night in the webinar I am co-presenting for StarWind on using ODX or VAAI to enhance storage performance for Hyper-V or vSphere respectively.

Microsoft News – 8 April 2015

There’s a lot of stuff happening now. The Windows Server vNext Preview expires on April 15th and Microsoft is promising a fix … the next preview isn’t out until May (maybe with Ignite on?). There’s rumours of Windows vNext vNext. And there’s talk of open sourcing Windows – which I would hate. Here’s the rest of what’s going on:

Hyper-V

Windows Server

Windows Client

Azure

My Hyper-V Presentation On Ignite Schedule Builder

Microsoft has posted my Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V session on the Microsoft Ignite schedule builder.

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Note that it should read “Windows Server 2012 R2”.

Currently, the day/time is January 1st at 12am. Yup, there will be fireworks and some auld lang syne. Please ignore the day/time and add the session to your builder if you are interested in the content. Hopefully a day/time will be fixed soon.

My session is on Tuesday May 5th at 5:00 pm – 6:15 pm.

My Hyper-V Session at Microsoft Ignite

The details of my session have been confirmed. The session is called “The Hidden Treasures of Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V”, and the description is:

It’s one thing to hear about and see a great demo of a Hyper-V feature. But how do you put them into practice? This session takes you through some of those lesser-known elements of Hyper-V that have made for great demonstrations, introduces you to some of the lesser-known features, and shows you best practices, how to increase serviceability & uptime, and design/usage tips for making the most of your investment in Hyper-V.

Basically, there’s lots of stuff in Hyper-V that many folks don’t know exists. These features can make administration easier, reduce the time to get things done, and even give you more time at home. These are the hidden treasures of Hyper-V, and are there for everyone from the small biz to the large enterprise.

I went WS2012 R2 because:

  • That’s the Hyper-V that you can use in production now.
  • We’re a long way from the release of vNext.
  • There’s lots of value there that most aren’t aware of.
  • Plenty of excellent MSFT folks will be talking about vNext.

The session isn’t on the catalogue yet but I expect it to be there soon.

Windows Server Technical Preview – Distributed Storage QoS

One of the bedrocks of virtualization or a cloud is the storage that the virtual machines (and services) are placed on. Guaranteeing performance of storage is tricky –some niche storage manufacturers such as Tintrí (Irish for lightning) charge a premium for their products because they handle this via black box intelligent management.

In the Microsoft cloud, we have started to move towards software-defined storage based on the Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) with SMB 3.0 connectivity. This is based on commodity hardware, and with WS2012 R2, we currently have a very basic form of storage performance management. We can set:

  • Maximum IOPS per VHD/X: to cap storage performance
  • Minimum IOPS per VHD/X: not enforced, purely informational

This all changes with vNext where we get distributed storage QoS for SOFS deployments. No, you do not get this new feature with legacy storage system deployments.

A policy manager runs on the SOFS. Here you can set storage rules for:

  • Tenants
  • Virtual machines
  • Virtual hard disks

Using a new protocol, MS-SQOS, the SOFS passes storage rule information back to the relevant hosts. This is where rate limiters will enforce the rules according to the policies, set once, on the SOFS. No matter which host you move the VM to, the same rules apply.

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The result is that you can:

  • Guarantee performance: Important in a service-centric world
  • Limit damage: Cap those bad boys that want everything to themselves
  • Create a price banding system: Similar to Azure, you can set price bands where there are different storage performance capabilities
  • Offer fairly balanced performance: Every machine gets a fair share of storage bandwidth

At this point, all management is via PowerShell, but we’ll have to wait and see what System Center brings forth for the larger installs.

Windows Server Technical Preview – Cluster Quarantine

Most of us have dealt with some piece of infrastructure that is flapping, be it a switch port that’s causing issues, or a driver that’s causing a server to bug-check. These are disruptive issues. Cluster Compute Resiliency is a feature that prevents unwanted failovers when a host is having a transient issue. But what if that transient issue is repetitive? For example, what if a cluster keeps going into network-isolation and the VMs are therefore going offline too often?

If a clustered host goes into isolation too many times within a set time frame then the cluster will place this host into quarantine. The cluster will move virtual machines from a quarantined host, ideally using your pre-defined migration method (defaulting to Live Migration, but allowing you to set Quick Migration for a priority of VM or selected VMs).

The cluster will not place further VMs onto the quarantined host and this gives administrators time to fix whatever the root cause is of the transient issues.

This feature, along with Cluster Compute Resiliency are what I would call “maturity features”. They’re the sorts of features that make life easier … and might lead to fewer calls at 3am when a host misbehaves because the cluster is doing the remediation for you.

Two New Hyper-V Books

I am not writing a WS2012 R2 Hyper-V book, but some of my Hyper-V MVP colleagues have been busy writing. I haven’t read these books, but the authors are more than qualified and greatly respected in the Hyper-V MVP community.

Hyper-V Security

By Eric Siron & Andy Syrewicze

Available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

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Keeping systems safe and secure is a new challenge for Hyper-V Administrators. As critical data and systems are transitioned from traditional hardware installations into hypervisor guests, it becomes essential to know how to defend your virtual operating systems from intruders and hackers.

Hyper-V Security is a rapid guide on how to defend your virtual environment from attack.

This book takes you step by step through your architecture, showing you practical security solutions to apply in every area. After the basics, you’ll learn methods to secure your hosts, delegate security through the web portal, and reduce malware threats.

Hyper-V Best Practices

By Benedict Berger

Available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

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Hyper-V Server and Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V provide best in class virtualization capabilities. Hyper-V is a Windows-based, very cost-effective virtualization solution with easy-to-use and well-known administrative consoles.

With an example-oriented approach, this book covers all the different guides and suggestions to configure Hyper-V and provides readers with real-world proven solutions. After applying the concepts shown in this book, your Hyper-V setup will run on a stable and validated platform.

The book begins with setting up single and multiple High Availability systems. It then takes you through all the typical infrastructure components such as storage and network, and its necessary processes such as backup and disaster recovery for optimal configuration. The book does not only show you what to do and how to plan the different scenarios, but it also provides in-depth configuration options. These scalable and automated configurations are then optimized via performance tuning and central management.

Microsoft News – 20 January 2015

I’ve let the news build up a little bit. I think the holiday lull is starting to lift.

Hyper-V

Windows Server

Windows Client

  • Windows 10: What We Know So Far: I’ll give a hoot about Cortana when it works outside of 4 or so countries. Microsoft should either fix that limitation or move the developers to something more important than a gadget feature.

System Center

Azure

Office 365

Intune

Events

  • #GlobalAzure Bootcamp 2015: The 2015 #GlobalAzure Bootcamp kicks off on April 25th and you can participate and organize a location too!

Miscellaneous

Windows Server Technical Preview – Distributed Storage QoS

In a modern data centre, there is more and more resource centralization happening. Take a Microsoft cloud deployment for example, such as what Microsoft does with CPS or what you can do with Windows Server (and maybe System Center). A chunk of a rack can contain over a petabyte of RAW storage in the form of a Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) and the rest of the rack is either hosts or TOR networking. With this type of storage consolidation, we have a challenge: how do we ensure that each guest service gets the storage IOPS that it requires?

From a service providers perspective:

  • How do we provide storage performance SLAs?
  • How do we price-band storage performance (pay more to get more IOPS)?

Up to now with Hyper-V you required a SAN (such as Tintrí) to do some magic on the backend. WS2012 R2 Hyper-V added a crude storage QoS method (maximum rule only) that was performed on at the host and not at the storage. So:

  • There was no minimum or SLA-type rule, only a cap.
  • QoS rules were not distributed so there was no accounting on host X what Hosts A-W were doing to the shared storage system.

Windows Server vNext is adding Distributed Storage QoS that is the function of a partnership between Hyper-V hosts and a SOFS. Yes: you need a SOFS – but remember that a SOFS can be 2-8 clustered Window Servers that are sharing a SAN via SMB 3.0 (no Storage Spaces in that design).

Note: the hosts use a new protocol called MS-SQOS (based on SMB 3.0 transport) to partner with the SOFS.

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Distributed Storage QoS is actually driven from the SOFS. There are multiple benefits from this:

  • Centralized monitoring (enabled by default on the SOFS)
  • Centralized policy management
  • Unified view of all storage requirements of all hosts/clusters connecting to this SOFS

Policy (PowerShell – System Center vNext will add management and monitoring support for Storage QoS) is created on the SOFS, based on your monitoring or service plans. An IO Scheduler runs on each SOFS node, and the policy manager data is distributed. The Policy Manager (a HA cluster resource on the SOFS cluster) pushes (MS-SQOS) policy up the Hyper-V hosts where Rate Limiters restrict the IOPS of virtual machines or virtual hard disks.

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There are two kinds of QoS policy that you can create:

  • Single-Instance: The resources of the rule are distributed or shared between VMs. Maybe a good one for a cluster/service or a tenant, e.g. a tenant gets 500 IOPS that must be shared by all of their VMs
  • Multi-Instance: All VMs/disks get the same rule, e.g. each targeted VM gets a maximum of 500 IOPS. Good for creating VM performance tiers, e.g. bronze, silver, gold with each tier offering different levels of performance for an individual VM

You can create child policies. Maybe you set a maximum for a tenant. Then you create a sub-policy that is assigned to a VM within the limits of the parent policy.

Note that some of this feature comes from the Predictable Data Centers effort by Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK.

Hyper-V storage PM, Patrick Lang, presented the topic of Distributed Storage QoS at TechEd Europe 2014.