Tag: Virtualisation

Microsoft News – 24 February 2015

Here is the latest news in the world of Microsoft infrastructure:

Hyper-V

Windows Server

System Center

Azure

Office 365

Miscellaneous

Why I’m Diving Into Azure

Two years ago, if you’d asked me which direction I would expand into from Hyper-V, it wouldn’t have been into Azure. But, things change. Back in 2007, I believe that I blogged that I wouldn’t work with Hyper-V and would be sticking with VMware. Then a year later I’m working with Hyper-V, blogging about it, and eventually evangelizing about it too!

But what got me to change my mind about switching to Hyper-V? It was System Center. I was a fan of System Center and I saw the potential of Microsoft big picture thinking for the data centre. How times have changed. In recent years, I have moved more and more away from using System Center. While I still love the potential power of the suite, it has become less and less relevant for me and my customers. Microsoft saw to that back in 2012 when they changed the licensing of System Center. Other things, such as increased complexity of installation and maintenance (hiding necessary upgrade steps while pushing automated upgrades via Windows Update) makes owning System Center more of a complexity than it should be. And meanwhile, the Windows Server group has made the automation of System Center less necessary by giving us PowerShell. The market of System Center has shrunk to a relatively small number of very large sales. And that doesn’t include my market here in Ireland.

Unlike many of my fellow MVPs, who are gravitating to the small amount of but large profit System Center work that is out there, I’m moving in my own direction. The writing is on the wall. The cloud is here, real, and relevant to businesses of ALL sizes. I’ve been adding Microsoft Azure IaaS to my arsenal of Hyper-V, clustering, and Windows Server storage/networking skills over the past year or so. Once again, it appears that I’m swimming in a small pool but I’ve been there before; I swam in the Hyper-V puddle that became an ocean.

There’s so much to Azure and it’s growing and evolving at an incredible pace. It’s not an alien technology. There is the fact that Azure is based on Hyper-V (WS2012 to be exact). But Azure compliments on-premises deployments too. Need off-site backup? Want an affordable DR site? Need burst compute/storage capacity? Azure does all that … and much more … with or without System Center, for SMEs, large enterprises, and hosting companies.

I’ve been running a lot of Microsoft partner training locally since last August. I’ve been doing quite a bit of Azure writing for Petri.com. Expect to see some of that appear here too. Oh!, before you ask, yes, I will still centre on Hyper-V and I’ll continue to talk about the new stuff when the time is right Smile

Microsoft News – 19 February 2015

Here’s the latest in the Microsoft world. Shame on Lenovo for pre-installing adware that is a man-in-the-middle attack. Crapware must die!

Hyper-V

System Center

Azure

Office 365

Microsoft Partners

Miscellaneous

Microsoft News – 16 February 2015

I was away on vacation for a little bit, photographing eagles in Poland. And then I came back and had to dive deep into Azure Site Recovery to prep a training class.

I’m back in the normal swing of things so here we go …

Hyper-V

Windows Server

Windows Client

System Center

Azure

Office 365

Intune

  • How to Set Up Per-App VPN using Microsoft Intune: IT Professionals can specify which managed apps can use VPN on an Intune managed iOS device and makes the connection experience seamless for the user by abstracting the steps taken to connect to a VPN server when accessing corporate documents.
  • February update to Microsoft Intune: New Intune standalone (cloud only) features were made available as part of this service.

Miscellaneous

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.

image

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.

Microsoft News – 9 January 2015

3 big announcements from Azure last night plus a useful Hyper-V reporting script feature today.

Hyper-V

System Center

Azure

  • Azure Storage to start disabling SSL 3.0 on February 20th, 2015: Protecting against the SSL 3.0 vulnerability. You need TLS 1.0 or higher to continue.
  • Azure is now bigger, faster, more open, and more secure: Azure Key Vault helps customers safeguard and control keys and secrets using HSMs in the cloud, with ease and at cloud-scale. Furthermore, customers can deploy an encrypted Virtual Machine with CloudLink SecureVM with the master keys in Key Vault. The "Goliath" G-series VMs have gone GA. And an image of a Docker-enabled Ubuntu VM is in the Marketplace.
  • Largest VM in the Cloud: G-series sizes provide the most memory, the highest processing power and the largest amount of local SSD of any Virtual Machine size currently available in the public cloud.
  • Introducing Docker in Microsoft Azure Marketplace: Microsoft announced the first Ubuntu image fully integrated with the Docker engine available for fast deployment from the Microsoft Azure marketplace.

Security

MVP Carsten Rachfahl Interviews Me About Windows Server vNext

While at the MVP Summit in Redmond, my friend Carsten Rachfahl (also a Hyper-V MVP) recorded a video interview with me to talk about Windows Server vNext and some of our favourite new features.

image

Windows Server Technical Preview – Replica Support for Hot-Add of VHDX

Shared VHDX was introduced in WS2012 R2 to enable easier and more flexible deployments of guest clusters; that is, a cluster that is made from virtual machines. The guest cluster allows you to make services highly available, because sometimes a HA infrastructure is just not enough (we are supposed to be all about the service, after all).

We’ve been able to do guest clusters with iSCSI, SMB 3.0, or Fiber Channel/FCoE LUNs/shares but this crosses the line between guest/tenant and infrastructure/fabric. That causes a few issues:

  • It reduces flexibility (Live Migration of storage, backup, replication, etc)
  • There’s a security/visibility issue for service providers
  • Self-service becomes a near impossibility for public/private clouds

That’s why Microsoft gave us Shared VHDX. Two virtual machines can connect to the same VHDX that contains data. That disk appears in the guest OS of the two VMs as a shared SAS disk, i.e cluster-supported storage. Now we have moved into the realm of software and we enable easy self service, flexibility, and no longer cross the hardware boundary.

But …

Shared VHDX was a version 1.0 feature in Windows Server 2012 R2. It wasn’t a finished product; Microsoft gave us what they had ready at the time. Feedback was unanimous: we need backup and replications support for Shared HDX, and we’d also like Live Migration support.

The Windows Server vNext Technical Preview gives us support to replicate Shared VHDX files using Hyper-V Replica (HVR). This means that you can add these HA guest clusters to your DR replication set(s) and offer a new level of availability to your customers.

I cannot talk about how Microsoft is accomplishing this feature yet … all I can report is what I’ve seen announced.

Microsoft News – 6 January 2015

A few little nuggets to get you back in the swing of things. And yes, I have completely ignored the US-only version 1.2 Azure Pricing Tool that suffers from “The Curse of Zune”.

Hyper-V

Windows Server

System Center

Windows Client

Azure