I recently came across a blog post by a Microsoft engineer which showed his 5^th grade son creating a virtual machine with Hyper-V 2012. Now, I am sure this child is hereditarily blessed when it comes to intelligence, but the ease in which he navigates through the Windows 2012 and the Hyper-V manager is impressive.

You can watch the video here.

A take away after watching this is how Hyper-V can be used as a training tool for anyone attempting to learn server administration or virtualization. Microsoft has made it very easy to roll out a training platform in a very short amount of time.

There are 1000s of web pages on the Internet that describe how schools are using Hyper-V. The vast majority of them discuss server consolidation, power consumption, reducing administrative costs, etc., all of the reasons any organization choses to virtualization their data center.

Hyper-V is making it easier for schools to build technology labs. The ability to easily create and deploy servers and virtual desktops in classrooms provides the opportunity to present the latest computing environments to more students at affordable prices.

But, when you see a video of a fifth grader creating virtual machines with ease, you can see the real power of a virtual environment like Hyper-V. Schools can spin up labs that allow students to deploy their own virtual machines, learn information technology skills, work in different operating system environments and wipe it all out at the end of a semester to start over with the next group of students. Pretty cool stuff.

Unitrends makes it easy to deploy and work with our backup software, Unitrends Enterprise Backup. Deploy UEB on Hyper-V, back up four virtual machines for free, forever and do this over and over again. Also, pretty cool stuff.

Share this:

Once a backup job has been started, you can optionally monitor its progress in the Jobs pane:

In a blog post awhile back, I talked about the new feature to show VMs in the navigational tree and how it was used in restoring VMs to an alternate Hyper-V server.

To set up this view, you need to click on the gear at the bottom of the Navigation Pane to bring up the System Preferences menu:

Prior to Release 7.1, you would see your Windows server in the tree, and underneath it, a node indicating that the Hyper-V 2012 role was present.  Now, if the system preference “Show Virtual Machines in Navigation Tree?” is checked, you will also see your VMs.  For example, on this system, “centos5″ is a VM on the Windows Hyper-V 2012 server named “UI_HyperV”.

On the user interface’s status pane you can filter backup statuses at the VM level.  This is particularly helpful if you have a lot of VMs on a single Hyper-V server and you want to be able to quickly see if a particular backup failed or not:

 
Note that in this example, while there were other backups on March 2, only the backups for the VM “Refs_CSVF” are displayed in the calendar when that VM is selected in the navigational pane.  Also, there is a new column to quickly let the user know which VM has been backed up, so that even if the “Hyper-V 2012″ node is selected in the left-hand-side, the user can quickly see which VM were backed up that day.  As you can see in the following status view, backups have completed for two different VMs, and the backup of a third is in progress:

Restores are easily started by selecting the Restore button and then picking the point in time to which you want to restore.  The calendar shows which Hyper-V 2012 VMs have backup for a given day and the times the list of backups for that day.  You pick the point-in-time, then optionally you can either restore the VM to the original (or in Release 7.1 an alternate) Hyper-V server, or you can expose the files of the VM so that a client can selectively restore the files needed.

As seen here, the Unitrends system can protect your Hyper-V VMs or even a mixed physical/virtual environments seamlessly, and there are many more capabilities than those listed here to help you ensure that your Hyper-V environment is fully protected.

Share this:

Cisco recently announced the availability of the Nexus 1000v for Hyper-V 2012. The Nexus 1000v supporting Hyper-V is significant for a few reasons:

• Cisco’s UCS (Unified Computing System) is taking the storage world by storm by having a great penetration in a market that is relatively new to Cisco.
• Cisco is known for networking and has a majority share in advanced switching equipment
• Cisco’s UCS systems are certified (and can come preconfigured) for Hyper-V, giving the Nexus 1000v further significance.
• Hyper-V is growing rapidly in market share, with a recent report indicating that it has more than 30% of the virtualization market.

Source: Cisco

The integration of the Nexus 1000v in the Hyper-V networking stack significantly reduces the operational expense of managing virtual and physical networks.  The same command set utilized for managing the physical switches is compatible with the Nexus 1000v. The Nexus 1000v is deeply integrated with SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager), allowing administrators to monitor network traffic patterns between virtual machines, even during live migration of virtual machines between hypervisor hosts. This is achieved by preserving the association of port profile configurations for the virtual machine across live migration. The Nexus 1000v thus provides a truly distributed switch framework that allows a consistent set of virtual ports to be exposed to the virtual machines.  These are just some of the features with Nexus 1000v. For more information, the Cisco webinar introducing Nexus 1000v is very informative, which can be viewed here.

Share this:

Microsoft introduced “shared nothing” for Live Migrations in Server 2012. This is simply the ability to move a running virtual machine/guest from one hypervisor host system to another with no requirement for shared storage between the two hosts. This means you no longer have to have a fancy, expensive storage device like a SAN or even a cluster of hosts to be able to take advantage of the Live Migration functionality.

Windows Server 2012 now also allows multiple simultaneous live migrations to occur, and they can also leverage higher speed network connections (like 10Gb). The requirements for share nothing live migration are pretty simple and straightforward:

• Need 2 or more servers running Hyper-V
  • must support hardware virtualization
  • must have like processor family (like Intel)
  • must be part of the same domain or be part of separate domains that have established trust between domains
• The VM’s which will be part of the live migration cannot use physical disks. They must use either:
  • Virtual hard disks
  • Virtual fibre channel disks

And that’s it. No shared storage or cluster requirements to use shared nothing configuration. Microsoft does recommend using a private network for the live migration traffic, and I’d say that’s a pretty good idea. This is kind of like how Unitrends recommends configuring separate subnets or “backup” networks if the IT infrastructure can support it. With physical servers, this sometimes means installing or configuring an additional NIC, but it’s simplified to a configuration and setup parameter with the Hyper-V private network feature. This keeps backup traffic (or live migration traffic) off your primary user network, which can impact performance during a heavy load.

Here’s a link to a pretty good demo video on how to configure a Shared Nothing Live Migration with Windows Server 2012.

I think this is a pretty cool feature, and it allows IT shops with small budgets to leverage some of the more powerful features available in virtualization. Don’t forget Unitrends Enterprise Backup free software also runs on Hyper-V 2012 and can protect up to 4 VMs for free forever! Requirements are here but include:

Hyper-V host OS:
Windows Server 2012
Windows 2008 R2 SP1
Windows 2008 R2 SP1 Server Core
Hyper‐V Server 2008 R2 SP1

Resources:
Requires 64 bit hypervisor / environment
100 GB of provisioned disk space
2 processors for the virtual machine
4 GB Memory for the virtual machine

Share this:

Once enabled, these metrics are gathered automatically and remain associated with the VM even if it is migrated.  The most frequent tracking is hourly, defined for the host, and the time interval can be changed using PowerShell.  In this example, we are changing the host’s tracking interval from every three hours to hourly.

If you try to set tracking for less than one hour, you do not see an error, but you’ll see that your changes do not take effect:

Metering must be enabled on a per-VM basis.  In this example, we will turn on metering for VM centos5:

Once metering is enabled, users can report as earlier described on CPU, memory, and disk utilization over time.  This data can be used for tuning and potentially as input to a billing system:

As you can see, this can type of information can be used by hosting providers in various ways to optimally manage their environments.  The data can be used as inputs to a billing solution instead of building a custom solution.  In addition, there are free graphical reporting tools like PoSHStats that have been designed to take advantage of this new feature in Hyper-V 2012.

Share this:

Hyper-V 2012 replica is a feature which delivers asynchronous replication of virtual machine data from one site to another. Hyper-V 2012 replica is agnostic of the underlying storage, network or server make and model, which makes it extremely flexible to deploy. Since Hyper-V replica operates at the block level of the virtual machine, in the event of an outage at the primary site, the virtual machines at the replication site can be immediately powered on.  Most storage vendors offer replication (typically for an additional license fee), but run into the following problems:

1. They are agnostic of the applications that use the storage, causing the application data to be inconsistent at the replication target.
2. If there is logical corruption at the source, the corruption is replicated to the target. Oftentimes storage based replication, does not have the provision to maintain multiple recovery points at the target.

Hyper-V 2012 replica addresses both the above concerns.  Since it runs agnostic of hardware, it is inherently integrated with VSS (Volume Shadow copy Service) running on the host as well as in the guest operating system, ensuring consistency of application data on the replication target.  Secondly, it has the provision of maintaining configurable recovery points, which are snapshots in time of the virtual machine data that allow a user to spin-up a virtual machine at the target at a point before the occurrence of the corruption. For a business which is planning to virtualize their infrastructure, Hyper-V replica brings a very cost effective way to have high-availability and offsite spin-up.

But Hyper-V replica did not stop there. The team at Microsoft realizes that not all networks for replication are high speed reliable networks.  They understand that in the mid-market, customers are going to have T1 and T3 connections to their target site and the initial transfer of data to the target could take weeks or months.  Hyper-V replica has the ability to seed the initial data using an external drive which greatly helps speed up the initial transfer of replication data.  With planned and unplanned failover and failback capabilities, Hyper-V replicas offer a robust feature set for high availability.

The following picture explains Hyper-V replicas at an architectural level.

 [Source: Microsoft ]

Talking about great Hyper-V resources, Aidan Finn, a well-respected industry expert and MVP, recently released a book on Hyper-V 2012 configuration and installation that covers Hyper-V replicas. You can find it here.

Share this:

I had a chance this week to read an interesting interview with Microsoft MVP Aidan Finn on how Hyper-V is shaking up the virtualization world. The interview was done by TechTarget writer Nick Martin and reported online in an article titled “How Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V is changing the virtualization market.”

Much of what is in this article has been written about in this blog. The current version of Hyper-V is winning market share because it delivers some very cool features. Features like shared-nothing live migration, network virtualization, improved security, simplified cluster shared volumes management and many more have allowed Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V to step up and take on VMware at the enterprise level.

Last week, Unitrends blogger, Maria Pressley, posted a chart comparing Hyper-V 2012 with vSphere 5.1 that shows in detail just how aggressive Microsoft has become at going after VMware with enterprise worthy features.

When 20% of those surveyed at VMworld say they are currently implementing Hyper-V in production and test and development environments and another 21% are evaluating Windows Server 2012, then you know VMware is going to pay attention. I guess VMware users can thank Hyper-V for some of the changes VMware made in licensing this past six months. When vSphere 5.1 was released, VMware eliminated the vTax, going back to per-socket licensing and they now offer features such as Storage vMotion and Enhanced vMotion with a standard license, making this functionality more affordable for smaller businesses.

We are seeing technology writers like Elias Khnaser come full circle on Hyper-V. Bemoaning its inadequacies just a few years ago and praising Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V as Enterprise-class.  All of this is making long time VMware users take a look at Hyper-V.

However the current virtualization war ends, you can be assured we are in for an exciting time watching the battles. And we know, with giants like Microsoft and VMware slugging it out on features, licensing and cost, the fight can only mean good things for consumers.

Share this:

It sure seems that Hyper-V, while still playing catch-up in market share to VMware, is making a really good play for a great portion of the hypervisor space. The price is certainly right, and helps the smaller shops out there take their first steps into virtualization with a feature-rich host platform.

Here’s the original chart, updated with free 5.1 and Enterprise Plus 5.1:

Share this:

Using the new alternate restore option, I was able to restore this backup of one Hyper-V server and to a specified location on a different Hyper-V server, as seen in this picture:

I was able to get the VM restored and running quickly on the target server, ui-hyperv, which happens to be a Windows 2012 server configured with a Hyper-V role.

As part of my new project, I would like to access the VM (which runs Windows 7) at the kernel level.  In the past, with physical systems, this has required the use of a serial cable, but with Hyper-V, I was able to dig around and find that I could use a virtual connection, described at this link.

As you see in the Settings for my VM, you can configure COM1 to communicate with the host through a named pipe, in my example, called “debug”:

Now, from the host, I configure the debugger to connect to the named pipe, and break into the kernel of the running VM:

With this setup, I am able to debug, set breakpoints, and do whatever I need to the kernel running in this VM.

Share this:

Server Message Block (SMB), also known as Common Internet File System (CIFS, /ˈsɪfs/) operates  as an application-layer network protocol^[1] mainly used for providing shared access to files, printers, serial ports, and miscellaneous communications between nodes on a network.  [Wikipedia]

The CIFS protocol is widely used in the context of a file server, where a central repository hosts the files that can be accessed by many computers over the network.  Until now, the CIFS protocol was not used for applications like SQL server, Exchange or Hyper-V where the workloads are more intense than a file server.  The workload profiles for applications like SQL Server, Exchange and Hyper-V required a DAS (Direct Attached Storage) or a SAN (Storage Area Network) that exposed a block device interface to achieve the high transfer rates from the storage layer for these applications.  Another drawback of the CIFS protocol was that the data on the network shares could not be queiesced for backup in a consistent manner since the VSS (Volume Shadow copy Service) infrastructure was not compatible with the shared storage.

SMB v3 introduced in Windows 2012 and Windows 8 changes this landscape completely.

The introduction of SMB 3.0 in Windows 2012 now enables the following (summarized):

1. Ability for SMB 3.0 network shares to host application data for SQL Server databases and Hyper-V virtual machines.
2. Ability to support live migration of virtual machines across hypervisor hosts that share a CIFS network share connection.
3. Increased performance of network shares by using SMB over RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) and SMB multichannel, which utilizes all the network interfaces on the server to provide maximum throughput for data transfer across server nodes.
4. VSS over SMB file shares provides the infrastructure to consistently queisce the data stored on the network shares. This allows consistent backups of the application (structured) data and file (unstructured) data that is hosted on the network share.

You can read about the changes to SMB v3 more in this blog post.

Now, most of the applications that are making use of the SMB v3 protocol are required to have a Windows 2012 / 8 server at both end-points – the computer that hosts the share as well as the computer that accesses the share.   All of the major storage vendors have already begun to incorporate the SMB v3 protocol into their NAS product portfolios, since Windows 2012 now enables their storage arrays to be utilized for use cases other than just file services.  The open source samba community is also actively working on incorporating the SMB 3.0 protocol into the Linux distributions, which when done will receive mass adoption of the protocol standard.  I can’t wait for the mainstream Linux distributions to include support for SMB 3.0 with its rich feature set. Hopefully very soon!

Share this: