Category Archives: Work

All about my Work

Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter Solution Accelerator Beta

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Hyper-V R2 SP1

Microsoft released a beta of a new Solution Accelerator called “Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter”. The Converter helps you to migrate Virtual Machines from VMware vSphere to Microsoft Hyper-V.

About the Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter Solution Accelerator

The Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter (MVMC) provides a Microsoft-supported, freely available, standalone solution for converting VMware virtual machines (VMs) and VMware virtual disks (VMDKs) to Hyper-V virtual machines and Hyper-V virtual hard disks (VHDs). MVMC supports converting virtual machines using the following guest operating systems:

  • Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 2
  • Windows Server 2003 R2 with Service Pack 2
  • Windows Server 2008 R2
  • Windows 7

The Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter converts VMware virtual machines created with:

  • VMware vSphere 4.1
  • VMware vSphere 5.0

To virtual machines for:

  • Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V
  • Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1

The Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter:

  • Provides a quick, low-risk option for VMware customers to evaluate Hyper-V
  • Converts the virtual disks and the VMware VMs configuration, such as memory, virtual processor, and other machine settings from the source
  • Uninstalls the VMware tools on the source VM and installs the Hyper-V Integration Services as appropriate
  • Includes an easy-to-use wizard-driven GUI simplifying VM conversion
    Supports offline conversions of VMware virtual hard disks (VMDK) to a Hyper-V based virtual hard disk file format (VHD)
  • Includes a scriptable Command Line Interfaces (CLI) for performing machine conversion and offline disk conversion which integrates with datacenter automation workflows, such as those authored and executed within System Center Orchestrator. The command line can also be invoked through PowerShell.

 

Check it out on Microsoft Connect: https://connect.microsoft.com/site14/MVMC

Windows Server 8: CSV Cache Benchmark

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Windows Server 8

Some days ago I wrote a blog post about how you can enable CSV Cache on the new Windows Server 8 beta. Now a lot of people asked me about some benchmarks.

Here a test inside the Virtual Machine:

Without CSV Cache:

CSV Cache disabled

With CSV Cache enabled:

CSV Cache enabled

As you can see CSV Cache does work really well. In some cases you can get 4-5 times the read performance.

Replace Diskpart with Windows PowerShell – Basic Storage cmdlets

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Windows Server 8

Last week I made a blog post about how you can create a USB drive for Windows To Go. In my post I used diskpart.exe to format the USB drive. Now we don’t live in the stone age anymore, so I did the same with the new version of Windows PowerShell coming in Windows 8 and Windows Server 8.

Now here some basic cmdlets to do some simple storage operations, like clean a disk, create a partition and so on.

Lets start simple

List all disks

Get-Disk

get-disk

Now get all partitions

Get-Partition

get-partition

Now get all partitions of disk 0

Get-Partition -DiskNumber 0

get-partitiondisk

Clear a Disk

Get-Disk 1 | Clear-Disk -RemoveData

clear-disk

Create a new partition

New-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -UseMaximumSize

new-partition

Format this volume

Get-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -PartitionNumber 1 | Format-Volume -FileSystem NTFS

format-volume

Create new partition and format it with the label “USB”:

New-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -UseMaximumSize | Format-Volume -FileSystem NTFS -NewFileSystemLabel USB

format-volume1

Change driveletter

Set-Partition -DriveLetter E -NewDriveLetter T

set-partition

Set a partition active

Set-Partition -DriveLetter T -IsActive $ture

set-partition1

Remove a partition

Remove-Partition -DriveLetter T

remove-partition

Bring a disk online

 Set-Disk 1 -isOffline $false 

Remove Readonly flag

 Set-Disk 1 -isReadOnly $false

Initialize Disk with GPT

 Initialize-Disk 1 -PartitionStyle GPT

online disk

This is some basic knowledge about the storage module in PowerShell v3. Lets see how we can change the commands from using diskpart to Windows PowerShell.

Diskpart.exe

select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
format fs=ntfs quick
active
assign letter=e

PowerShell:

Get-Disk 1 | Clear-Disk -RemoveData
New-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -UseMaximumSize -IsActive -DriveLetter E | Format-Volume -FileSystem NTFS -NewFileSystemLabel USB

replace-diskpart

Microsoft Case Study: HCI Solutions

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logo_itnetx

Just a quick link to a Private Cloud Case Study done by Microsoft about one of our partners.

Microsoft Case Study: HCI Solutions

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Microsoft-System-Center-2012/HCI-Solutions/Healthcare-Firm-Gains-More-Efficiency-Cuts-Costs-with-Private-Cloud-Environment/710000000186

 

d-on-d – Datacenter On Demand

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d-on-d

This week I could present some of the new features in Windows Server 8 Hyper-V on an event organized by Microsoft Switzerland in a very cool location. I am talking about D-ON-D (Datacenter on demand) which is run by Kybernetika.

D-ON-D offers you to rent servers and rooms for events, workshops, test project or demos.

If you want to know more about what D-ON-D offers check out the websites: