Month: March 2010

New Linux Integration Components Beta

A while ago, I asked for some feedback on Hyper-V and VMM.  Some of the strong feedback came on the Linux guest side.  In particular, the integration components:

  • The lack of shutdown integration.
  • Only 1 virtual CPU supported.
  • The lack of time synch between host and guest recently affected me.

Never fear, MS was ahead of me.  Ben Armstrong just let the public know that new integration components are in the works and you can download these new beta (test) IC’s from Connect now.  The IC’s are for the usual supported Linux distros (SLES and RHEL).  Supported is different to “it works”, i.e. these will probably work just as well on Ubuntu and CentOS but MS cannot support them.  They will also support all Hyper-V variants.  The new features are:

  • SMP support for up to 4 virtual CPU’s (Yay!)
  • Shutdown integration between host and guest, e.g. host shutdown or from VMM
  • Clock synch between host and guest (no more run away clock and NTP fixes)

Ben also says that the new functionality will be submitted to the Linux kernel.  Here’s hoping the Linux distros keep up to date.

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Microsoft and the New AMD 8 Core and 12 Core CPU’s

Microsoft has said that they are seeing good results with Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V.  12 cores – I’m not surprised!!!!  Jeez, I’ve trouble making use of dual quad core CPU’s with the typical hosting virtual machine on our cluster.  I can’t imagine us needing 8 or 12 core CPU’s without some mad (and I mean laughing cuckoo smacking itself in the head with a frying pan mad) amounts of RAM.  But I guess that we are not the typical corporation.  The chips are also providing some new power efficiencies that sound like core parking.

MS Ireland Virtualization Summit

Yesterday, MS Ireland held the local instance of the Virtualisation Summit that MS is running in many cities around the world.  It was keynoted by Ian Carlson, a senior program manager from Redmond (nice guy too).

The usual slide decks were presented, probably the first time many of the attendees (around 140 I think, standing room only) had seen them.  For those of us “on the inside” this can be a bit tiresome but that’s what happens when you attend every MS event going to get your free cup of coffee and pastry for brekkie!  The end of the morning session feature Gerry from Lakeland Dairies, an interesting case study because they make the most of System Center and use the Compellent SAN to replicate their VM’s across their campus for DR.  They are also a fine example of a company that had a plan and knew their requirements going into the project, allowing them to make good decisions.

After the break there was a split into desktop virtualization and server virtualisation.  *I must stop using Z’s in the American way – too much writing for Sybex*  Ronnie Dockery from MS and Citrix ran a breakout on desktop virtualisation and VDI.  Wilbour Craddock, a techie in the MS Ireland partner team, ran the server virtualisation breakout and went through a number of best practices and tips on a successful solution.  Maybe 60% went into the desktop room. 

I did the last 15 or so minutes in the server room, talking about our Hyper-V, OpsMgr, VMM and HP deployment at C Infinity.  I talked through the relevant bits of the infrastructure and had a cool snazzy animated slide deck to talk through how HP SIM, OpsMgr, VMM and highly available Hyper-V VM’s allowed for no interruption of service back in January when we detected a degraded memory board (via HP SIM agent and OpsMgr management pack), got the alert, used Live Migration to move VM’s from the host, HP (via RedStone) replaced the affected board within the 4 hour support response window and we continued on without missing a beat.  Some talk of PRO was also in there.  I also stressed how Hyper-V with System Center makes this a solution for applications, which is what the business really cares about – not NIC’s and memory boards.

I haven’t posted the slide deck – animations don’t work on Slideshare, and to be honest, my slides are nothing but cue cards for me to rattle on until someone rings a bell to shut me up.

I talked to a few people afterwards and the response to the morning was positive.  I think a lot of people either got a fresh view on hearing about the complete solution (it’s more than “just” hardware virtualisation) or were happier after hearing the experiences of two Irish customers using the suites – not just the usual “Here’s XYZ Giganto Corporation from the USA or Germany” that Irish customers cannot relate to.  MS Ireland does a great job on that.

Been A Little Quiet

*cough* I’ve been out of the country for a few days.  I was on a panel at Eurocloud UK and then I had the chance to go on a trip to Scotland to do some photography.  And last week, I picked up a cold while judging a photo competition *sneeze*  You’ll have to understand that when I get a chance to do something like the below, I’m going off the air 🙂

Northshots_Raptor_Weekend_4381[1]

That’s a Golden Eagle devouring a Mountain Hare.  I’ve some writing to do this week that will also consume some time.  Hmm, I’m peckish; time for really spicy pizza.

Big Virtualisation Announcements By Microsoft

A press release was issued today by Microsoft.  It has a whole bunch of new statements on the MS front, including licensing, new features, and requirements changes.  The big ones are:

  • Hyper-V Dynamic Memory will be added in W2008 R2 SP1.
  • A new smoother VDI experience for VDI customers in W2008 R2 SP1.
  • VDI licensing for SA customers won’t require and additional license for PC clients.
  • XP Mode will no longer require CPU assisted virtualisation.

That last one was a pain in the butt when it came to Virtual PC for Windows 7.  You had to dig deep to find out if your Dell, HP, etc, machine had a supported CPU.  And manufacturers like Sony produced machines quite recently that hid the functionality if it was there.  This change by Microsoft removes the guess work.

No schedules were announced.  Check out the press release to see all of the announcement.

Credit to Mark Wilson (MVP) for making me aware of this.

Considering This For A Hyper-V Cluster At Home

One of the things I need to do at home is do some Hyper-V clustering.  As you can guess, I have not won the lottery so a C3000 blade chassis with LeftHand storage is not on the cards.  If I do get around to this it will be done on a shoestring.  Here’s what I am considering:

  • HP Microtower 3010 * 2: I checked and the 2.8GHz CPU has Intel-VT and DEP features.
  • Intel 1GB NIC * 6: I want 4 NIC’s per host.  The 3010 has 3 * PCIx1 slots.
  • A Netgear 16 port GB switch.
  • I’ll use an old PC as a iSCSI target.

I want Live Migration to work.  4 NIC’s (parent, private network, VM network and iSCSI) should do the trick.  The total price comes in at around €1500 retail including tax.

Any opinions on a better solution?

Hyper-V, ML370 and Wireless

The after-work project I’m working on right now requires as many VM’s as I can throw at it.  I’ve got my previously mentioned Latitude E6500 laptop running W2008 R2 Hyper-V.  It’s also my domain controller and my VMM 2008 R2 server/library.  Not best practice but it’s fine for a domestic lab.

I need even more VM’s than I can run on there.  So I’ve got a HP ML370 G5 that was spare from work.  It’s got as much memory as I could scrape together and I put Windows Server 2008 R2 on it.  One problem: I do not have a wired house.  And I do not want to work beside the noisy server.  I’ll be using Office on my laptop for documentation and I can sit with that in my sitting room.  The server will stay upstairs in my office.  Just how will the communicate?

That’s easy.  I have an old Belkin 11G wifi NIC which I put into the ML370.  Windows detected it as a Broadcom.  That aint right but it works!  I’m going to set the server up as a member of my laptop’s domain.  That will allow me to put a VMM agent on there for remote management. 

My VM templates are small enough (dynamic VHD’s) but I probably might not want to copy them over wifi.  I might just configure the wired NIC’s with another subnet range and connect the machines with a hub/switch when I need to deploy stuff.  Or maybe I’ll copy the templates over to the server using a USB disk and set up a library share on the server for a faster local copy.  That might just work!

The Sanbolic Melio FS (File System) With Hyper-V

I was contacted last month by Eva Helen in Sanbolic to see if I’d be interested in learning more about their Melio FS product.  I knew little about it and was keen to learn.  So Eva got David Dupuis to give me a demo.  Dave just ran an hour long demo on LiveMeeting with me and I learned a lot.  I gotta say, I’m impressed with this solution.

There were two Sanbolic products that Dave focused on:

  • La Scala = Cluster Volume Manager used instead of disk manager.  It’s a shared volume manager.  It is aware of what nodes are attached to it. 
  • Melio = Cluster File System. 

La Scala

  • La Scala can mirror volumes across 2 SAN’s, allowing for total SAN failure.  Each server has two controllers or a dual channel HBA, one path going to each SAN.  1 write is converted to two writes on two paths.  In theory, there’s no noticeable performance hit for amazing fault tolerance.
  • On the fly volume expansion
  • Can use any block based shared storage iSCSI or fibre channel system
  • You can set up a task, e.g. expand disk, and review it before committing the transaction.
  • Windows ACL’s are integrated in the interface to control volume access rights.

I’ve got to say, the SAN mirroring is pretty amazing technology.  Note the performance will equal the slowest SAN.  It can take cheap storage solutions that might not even have controller/path fault tolerance and give them really high fault tolerance via redundant arrays and mirrored storage with an unperceivable performance hit due to the mirroring being done by simultaneous writes by 2 independent controller paths.

Melio

  • This is 64-bit symmetrical cluster file system.
  • There is no coordinator node, management server, metadata controller, etc, that manages the overall system.  So there’s no redirected I/O mode *cheers from Hyper-V admins everywhere*
  • Metadata is stored on the file system and every node in the cluster has equal access to this.  This is contrary to the CSV coordinator in W2008 R2 failover clustering.
  • QoS (quality of service) allows per process or per file/folder file system bandwidth guarantees.  This allows granular management of SAN traffic for the controlled resources.  In the Hyper-V context, you can guarantee certain VHD’s a percentage of the file system bandwidth.  You can also use wildcards, e.g. *.VHD.  This is another very nice feature.
  • There is a VSS provider.  This is similar to how SAN VSS providers would work.  Unlike CSV, there is no need for redirected I/O mode when you snap/backup the LUN. 
  • There is a bundled product called SILM that allows you to copy (via VSS) new/modified files to a specified LUN on a scheduled basis.
  • Backups solutions like BackupExec that recognise their VSS provider can use it to directly backup VM’s on the Melio file system.
  • MS supports this system, i.e. Failover Clustering and VMM 2008 R2.  For example, Live Migration uses the file system.  You’ll see no CSV or storage in Failover Clustering.  The Melio file system appears as a normal lettered drive on each node in the cluster.
  • By using advance exclusive lock detection mechanisms that CSV doesn’t have, Melio can give near raw disk performance to VHD.  They say they have faster (57%) VHD performance than CSV!
  • You can provide iSCSI accessed Melio file systems to VM’s.  You can license the product by host –> gives you 4 free VM licenses.
  • Melio isn’t restricted to just Hyper-V: web servers, SQL, file servers, etc.
  • Issues seen with things like AV on CSV aren’t likely here because there is no coordinator node.  All metadata is available to all nodes through the file system.  You need to be aware of scheduled scans: don’t have all nodes in the cluster doing redundant tasks.  The tip here: put a high percentage guarantee for *.VHD and the AV has been controlled.

It’s got to be said that you cannot think of this as some messy bolt on.  Sanbolic has a tight relationship with Microsoft.  That’s why you see their Melio file system being listed as a supported feature in VMM 2008 R2.  And that can only happen if it’s supported by Failover Clustering – VMM is pretty intolerant of unsupported configurations.

Overall, I’ve got to say that this is a solution I find quite interesting.  I’d have to give it serious consideration if I was designing a cluster from scratch and the mirroring option raises some new design alternatives.

My $64,000,000 question has probably been heard by the guys a bunch of times but it got a laugh: “when will Microsoft buy Sanbolic and have you invested a lot in the company share scheme?”.  Seriously though, you’d think this would be a quick and superb solution to get a powerful cluster file system that is way ahead of VMFS and more than “just” a virtualisation file system.

Thanks to the kind folks at Sanbolic for the demo.  It’s much appreciated!

Data Protection Manager 2010 Webcast

I joined this late due to a phone conference.

This is a System Center Influencers briefing on Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010.

The Aims

  • Single supported solution for Microsoft workloads
  • Single agent, no workload licensing
  • Enterprise scalability in the 2010 release

New Workload Additions

  • Cluster Shared Volume
  • Exchange 2010
  • SharePoint 2010

It supports OS’s going back to XP SP2.

Features

  • Self-service end user restore from Explorer or Office
  • Self-service DBA restrore from within SQL
  • Auto protection of new databases
  • Protect 1000’s of databases per DPM server
  • Recover 2005 DB’s to SQL 2008
  • Auto protection of new content databases in SharePoint farms
  • Protect the farm, restore the document
  • Optimizations for the new and many Exchange architectures

Hyper-V

  • CSV support
  • Item level recovery from within a VHD
  • Alternate host recovery

Client Protection

  • 1000 clients per DPM server
  • “User data only”.  Don’t protect the entire machine.
  • Uses VSS in Vista and Windows 7
  • Policy allows you to protect specific folders, so there’s no end user set up.
  • User can restore from local VSS while offline, or DPM while online.
  • While offline, the PC continues to make VSS copies and will sync them to DPM when it is online again.
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Fujitsu “My Very First Hyper-V”

Fujitsu has launched a bundle for SME’s (small/medium enterprises) that want to do Hyper-V virtualisation for the very first time.  They’ve called it the “My Very First Hyper-V”.  It includes, servers, external storage, Windows Server 2008 R2 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Work Group Edition.  A flyer can be found here.

I wonder if they’ll replace the VMM installation with System Center Essentials 2010 when it is released.  That would make sense to me seeing as it’s aimed at this market and it gives software management, health & performance monitoring and VMM functionality.