Month: March 2012

Hyper-V Replica (Demo Video) Proving To Be The Killer Feature I Expected

This week I clocked up a lot of miles doing another 4 corners tour of Ireland, with the MSFT partner team, speaking to MSFT partners in Belfast, Galway and Cork.  It covered a number of things with different speakers, cloud, Windows 8, Windows Server 8, and I spoke for around an hour on System Center 2012 and Windows Server 8 Hyper-V.  The audience was mostly a manager/sales audience so we kept more to the business side of things, but some tech just proves the argument, and I had a feeling that nothing would do that better than Hyper-V Replica.

If you’re presenting to this kind of audience, it’s one thing to show them a new product they can sell, and that will get some interest/traction.  But if you can show them a whole new service that they can develop and use to do develop yet another service, and be able to sell this to the breadth audience that hears way too much about Fortune1000 tech, then you really have a winner.  And that’s Hyper-V Replica:

  • A DR replication solution built into Hyper-V, at no extra cost, designed for small/medium businesses with commercial broadband
  • Replicate from host-host, host-cluster, cluster-host, or cluster-cluster.
  • Replicate office to office, data centre to data centre, branch office to HQ, or customer to hosting provider (which could be a managed IT services company with some colo hosted rack space) … and maybe use that as an entry point into a cloud/IaaS solution for SMEs.

And that’s the hook there.  Most MSFT partners have experience with s/w based replication in the past.  It’s troublesome, and often assumes lots of low latency bandwidth and a 3rd witness site.  Not so with Hyper-V Replica, as I demonstrated in this video:

Of all the stuff I’ve presented in the last 2 weeks, Hyper-V Replica was the one that caused the most buzz, and rightfully so in my opinion.  It’s an elegant design; the genius is the “simplicity” of it.  It should prove to be reliable, and perfect for the audience it’s being aimed at.

Hyper-V Replica Test Failover Is Like Jean-Claude Van Damme in Time Cop

That got your attention Smile In the movie Time Cop, the catch with time travel was that a person who went back in time could not be in the same place as their past self or the universe would implode or something.

Note: Movie nerds and Dr. Sheldon Cooper wannabes can save their efforts and keep the correction comments to themselves.

The same is true with a server or application.  It really can’t exist twice in the same network or your career might implode or something.  Think about it, you enable DR replication of virtual machines from one place to another.  You want to test your DR, so you bring the replica VMs online … on the same network.  Good things will happen, right, won’t they?!?!?!  Two machines with identical names, identical application interactions on the network, identical IP addresses, both active on the same network at the same time during the work day … nope; nothing good can come of that.

Hyper-V Replica has you covered.  You just need to remember to configure it after you enable VM replication and if testing failover is even a slight possibility (I”m sure you could automate this with POSH but I’m too lazy to look – it is after 9pm no a Sunday night when I’m right this post).

You’ll be auto asked after you enable Replica if you want to configure network settings.  If you do (you can revisit later by editing the settings of the VM and expanding Network Adapter) then you’ll see this:

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In Network Adapter – Test Failover you’ll have the option to set a Virtual Switch.  See how it is not configured to connect to a network by default?  Phew!  When you do a test failover of a Replica VM, then the VM will power up on this virtual switch.  Obviously this should be an isolated virtual switch (e.g. Internal or Private), and it should exist on all possible replica hosts (if the DR site is clustered), to avoid the Time Cop rule.

Three System Center 2012 Exams On The Way

I was checking out the details of the new Microsoft partner Management And Virtualisation competency when I saw that three new System Center 2012 exams are coming soon after the GA of System Center 2012:

Get studying!

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Ubuntu 12.04 Will Have Hyper-V Drivers By Default

Over the weekend, Mike Sterling (PM for the open source side of Hyper-V), tweeted that:

Since it has been a while, will make it worth it…Ubuntu 12.04 has Hyper-V drivers included by default for easy VM deployment.

Pretty good news for the heterogeneous data centre!  Ubuntu 12.04 is not RTM yet (nearly).  According to Softpedia News this is the release schedule for Ubuntu 12.04:

  • April 19th, 2012 – Release Candidate release
  • April 26th, 2012 – Final release of Ubuntu 12.04

This follows the recent news that the Hyper-V components are now live in Linux Kernel 3.3 (under heading “2.6. Input”):

Move the hid-hyperv driver out of staging(commit)

Add another couple of notches to the Hyper-V belt.  Well done Mike & team!

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Weird Browsing Mix: Google Chrome and Bing

Quite a while ago, I switched from using Internet Explorer to Google Chrome as my default browser of choice.  I just got tired of IE being slow and crashing.  That switch has worked out pretty well.  In fact where it’s most noticeable is when logging into services like Microsoft Connect where IE can get it’s knickers into a twist and refuses to let you log in because of “site problems”.  It’s kind of ironic that I don’t get that with Chrome on a Microsoft site Smile

Yeah, yeah, I’m an MVP and I work in a Microsoft centric world … but I also want to use a dependable tool … and MVPs are defined as being independent experts – my advice is worthless if I just tout the “company line” and I don’t actually work for “the company”.

I have been using Google as my default page and search engine since I first became aware of the service.  I decided to switch to Bing a couple of months ago.  Yeah … Bing is my default site and search engine on Chrome!  For the most part, it’s fine.  But there are times when I’m after something precise when it fails me, and I have to switch to Google to get the result I want.  I’d say I’m about 80% confident in Bing where I’d be 90% confident in Google.

When in the USA for the MVP Summit the Curse of Zune (things that work one way or are available in the USA, and aren’t available or work differently outside of the USA) that Bing suffers from was very noticeable.  Bing in the USA is a completely different creature than Bing from Ireland.  I wish Microsoft would realise that the vast majority of customers reside outside the 50 states, and realising this is how Google (search) and Apple (iTunes) have dominance in their respective fields.

If The Mountain Won’t Come To … Then Use TechSmith Camtasia For Your Demos

If you read this blog or follow me on Twitter then you know I do a lot of demos.  You might also know that my work laptop, aka “The Beast”, is pretty powerful and I’ve been using it to demo stuff like Windows Intune, Windows 8 Hyper-V, and System Center 2012 Configuration Manager.  But sometimes you need more …. like a couple of servers so you can demo NIC teaming, clustering, Hyper-V Replica, Live Migration, and so forth.  It’s one thing to lug around The Beast, but it’s a whole other deal to ship around servers and their networking!

So how am I going to demo this stuff on the road?  The answer should be be The RDS Gateway to remotely log into the environment and show it off.  Regular followers know that I couldn’t even get reliable Internet access in hotels when I was trying to log into the Windows Intune portal on a recent Intune roadshow for partners.  1 of the 3 hotels worked OK, 1 I had to use y 3G “Mi-fi” (barely got a signal), and 1 required me distracting with 1 hand while tricking with the other.  Hotel internet on this island (Belfast is actually worse than The Republic, which is surprising to me) is awful and cannot be depended on for a live demo.

So if I can’t carry servers about, and I can’t reliably RDP into them (like I should be able to), then what do I do?  Unfortunately, the answer is canned demos.  I don’t like doing this; the audience appreciates it less and I don’t get the same buzz when pressing CTRL + P to pause and un-pause a recorded video.  Though there was a lot of fun during the W2008 launch in Dublin …. but that’s a whole other Oscar-esque story.

So what tool do I use for this?  I’ve acquired a copy of TechSmith Camtasia to record videos (can do sound as well) of my demos.  Instead of doing the usual demo, I’ll play the resulting videos and pause where required to speak over them.

I needed some Hyper-V demos for a road show next week so I started recording as soon as I got Camtasia yesterday.  It was so easy to use.  It wouldn’t work on Windows Server 8 but I wasn’t surprised … it’s a whole new OS still in Beta.  I’m sure that support will come in time.  Instead, I installed it on my Windows 7 installation on my laptop, RDPd into my server and recorded.  Recording and editing was such a breeze.  I wish everything was this intuitive and easy.  Pick your screen selection (full screen or area), sound or not, hit record.  Stop the recording, save the raw data, and then edit to clip out bits where required.  I’ve used this to clean up the start/ends and to trim out the progress bar stuff that kills precious time in a presentation.  You then can “produce” a final video in a size/quality of your choosing depending on purpose (presentation, web, etc).  I recorded (set the laptop resolution) in a projector friendly resolution of 1200 * 768; the natural 1900 * whatever would have produce a few dots on the screen for viewers of the presentation.  The resulting MP4 files were actually only a few MB which is great.

I tweeted that I was recording with it and almost immediately I was asked if I’d be sharing videos.  Yeah, I will – after I’ve done the partner road show next week – there’s no audio so you won’t learn much but you will see a few Windows Server 8 things in action I suppose.

Anyway, based on my experience so far, Camtasia has been a nice acquisition.  I haven’t even learned what it can actually do beyond the basics that I’ve used it for.  I expect there’s much more!

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Damn You Windows 8 – I’ve Started Touching My TV

We’ve all started touching our laptops after playing with Win8 touch.  I can beat that.

I keep my Windows 8 Build slate PC front and central … sitting in its docking station connected to my LCD TV by a HDMI cable.  I use it to watch stuff that I can’t get through my XBox 360, such as tonight when I decided to watch yesterday’s TWiT Windows Weekly.

I got the stream going and moved IE half way over to the TV.  And then … *sigh* … and then I reached out to my TV to maximize the streaming video on the TV.

Grr!  There’s a special place in hell for you Steven Sinofsky! Smile with tongue out

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Looking Back At System Center 2012 Launch In Dublin

That was one seriously full day today.  In a nutshell we had:

  • Introduction and setting the scene by Art Coughlan (MS Ireland sales)
  • The System Center story and licensing by Gavin McShera (MS Ireland sales)
  • A story from the real world by Damian Flynn (MVP, Cloud & Datacenter management)
  • Windows Server 8 by Dave Northey (MS Ireland DPE)

With the PowerPoint done, we moved on to a demo-centric afternoon based on real-world scenarios:

  • Device lifecycle management featuring ConfigMgr and Endpoint Protection by me
  • Application models and monitoring by Kevin Greene (Ergo)
  • Orchestration & automation of cloud by Damian Flynn (again)
  • Orchestration & self service by Paul Keely (MVP, Cloud & Datacenter management)

We repeat the show in Belfast next Tuesday.  If you’re registered, you really do not want to miss this show.  The material and gathering of speakers will not be repeated.

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The New Hyper-V Gotcha – No Permission to Remotely Manage VMs on SMB Shared Folder

Windows Server 8 allows us to store virtual machines on file shares.  As Taylor Brown explains, when you are managing VMs from RSAT on your desktop, and those VMs are running on a host and stored on a file server, then your authentication is between you and the host.  The file server doesn’t know who you are and rejects your efforts.

Up to now, un-merged snapshots were the big gotcha in Windows Server 2008/R2 Hyper-V.  I suspect this Kerberos “issue” will be the new one, especially because SMB for storing VMs will probably be widely adopted in the breadth market.

The solution is constrained delegation, which is something you’ve been doing if you’ve been sharing ISO files so that VMs can mount them across the network.  Taylor Brown goes into some detail on a best practice method for enabling constrained delegation for correctly managing VMs that are stored on an SMB file share.