How Microsoft Hyper-V and the Cisco UCS changed our lives

Posted on May 25, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

At the end of last year we had our Cisco UCS ordered and in your datacenter. In January we started the testing and made the Clusters ready for the production environment. In February we started the migration of our existing environment, mostly P2V and also some V2V migrations.

Here some interessting facts about our Cisco UCS and Hyper-V project.

We use 12 Cisco UCS Blades this is like 10 HE of rackspace
We migrated 45 Windows Servers and 47 Unix Servers in just one week
We replace 2 racks of server with a half rack of two Cisco UCS Bladecenters
We think we can replace 2-3 racks more with our two Bladecenters.
At the end of this year we think we could replace 4-5 racks with 1/2 rack
We still have a lot of physical and virtual server which will be needed to be migrated to the Bladecenter.
We will get even more out of our Blade Servers by activting Hyper-V Dynamic Memory as a new feature of Hyper-V R2 ServicePack 1

This migration had a lot of positive influence on other things in the datacenter.

Datacenter Power

we need now 4% less energie overall
we need now 6% less cooling overall
we need less space (1 and 1/2 racks at the moment)
now our system administrator travel 50% less to the datacenter, because of hardware defects or other administrative tasks.
We can deploy new servers in minutes instead of hours

I think all of this numbers (except the time we need to deploy new servers )will increase after the next migrations.

Now I started to write a series of blog posts about installing Microsoft Hyper-V R2 on the Cisco UCS system:

Microsoft Hyper-V and the Cisco UCS Bladecenter are a powerful team. The UCS Virtual Hardware takes alot of complexety from the hypervisor in your case Hyper-V. You don’t need NIC teaming and stuff like that. Thats is making it very easy to deploy Hyper-V Clusters. And with the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager you can save a lot of time in managing your clusters, hosts, virtual machine and also in P2V and V2V migrations. Since Microsoft SCVMM supports Windows Powershell you can also do a lot of scripting automation. And with the release of the new Version of SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012) this will even get better for deploying new virtual machines, services and even public and private clouds.

Hyper-V R2 SP1

We started with Microsoft Hyper-V R2 Servers before the release of Service Pack 1. We think we can even get a lot more out of your systems with the new Dynamic Memory feature for Hyper-V which comes in Service Pack 1.

At the end we think choosing the Cisco UCS, Microsoft Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager for our datacenter was the best choice we have made, in terms of costs and technology.

Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Important Updates for the Hyper-V Cluster – Part 9

Posted on May 17, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

Since we have installed our Microsoft Hyper-V Cluster on the Cisco UCS, Microsoft released some patches for Hyper-V, Windows and Clustering.

There are two really important Updates which I would recommend for Hyper-V Clusters.

The first is Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Service Pack 1 brings a lot of Hotfixes for Hyper-V, Failover Cluster Feature and other Microsoft Server features. And it brings also a two new features called Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX.
The second one is a hotfix for Servers with Intel Westmere or Sandy Bridge and has a large amount of physical memory. Most of the Cisco UCS Blades will meet this configuration. You can get more information on this Hyper-V hotfix here.

This two updates will bring you a much better experience with your Hyper-V Cluster. It will improve performance, stability and it will add new features.

Hyper-V Hotfix for Intel Sandy Bridge and Westmere

Posted on April 27, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

If you are using Microsoft Hyper-V with new Intel Sandy Bridge or Intel Westmere processors and our server has over 48GB of physical RAM you may get a performance decrease. Microsoft released a hotfix (KB2517329) for this problem.

This could also be a problem with a lot of Hyper-V installations on Cisco UCS, because the most of them will use more than 48GB of memory.

The performance decrease could show its self in the the following issues:

The CPU usage is high and the server responds slowly when you copy large files on the computer. For example, you copy a 10-GB file
The disk I/O performance of the virtual machines (VMs) is slow
Windows takes a long time to start

The hotfix is not include in Service Pack 1 for Hpyer-V R2 or Windows Server 2008 R2.

For more information about this you can check KB2517329

Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Add Hyper-V Cluster to SCVMM – Part 8

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

In this post we will add the Hyper-V Cluster to our System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 to better manage Virtual Machines and Hyper-V Hosts. We also use System Center Virtual Machine Manager or SCVMM to quick deploy new Virtual Machines.

Download and install System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2
Make sure you don’t have any network problems and a clean Active Directory and DNS environment. This is really important if you work with SCVMM. And remember if something does not really work in SCVMM or SCVMM shows any errors it does not mean that your Cluster is not running perfectly. SCVMM uses DNS for the most things and the Failover Cluster instead uses IP Addresses. So if you see any errors in System Center Virtual Machine Manager first check if there is really a problem in the Failover Cluster Manager.
In the SCVMM 2008 R2 click on the “Add host” link
Select Windows Server-based host on an Active Directory domain and enter the credentials
Search for your Cluster in this case the Failover Cluster is called UCS-HPV-C01. You can also search for a host in this Cluster and it will automatically find the cluster.
Host the host group you where your Hyper-V Failover Cluster should be located in.
Review everything and click next
Now your Cluster will be added to your System Center Virtual Machine Manager and install the System Center Virtual Machine Manager Agent on every host.

After you have done this you should see all your hosts in the SCVMM.

Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Add Nodes to Hyper-V Cluster – Part 7

Posted on March 14, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

Adding Hyper-V Hosts to the Failover Cluster is pretty simple. And I will keep this part very short.

First Setup your Hyper-V Hosts and configure the them (network, storage, etc)
Now open the Failover Cluster Manager and choose “Add Node…”
Select the new Hosts
After you check you have added the right Hyper-V Hosts click next
Now the hosts are added to the Failover Cluster

Now you can add or move virtual machines to the new Cluster Nodes.

Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Create Hyper-V Cluster – Part 6

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

After you have installed your Hyper-V Nodes and enabled the Failover Cluster Feature you can now start two create the Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Cluster.

This is not really difficult but you have two know about some important things.

The Failover Cluster Configuration Wizard will validate your Cluster configuration. If you have created a Hyper-V 2008 R2 Image with the latest drivers from Cisco your totally fine in the drivers check.
All SAN Disks have to be offline on the Hyper-V Hosts. Otherwise the Configuration Wizard can not validate the Cluster Disks.
As usual you need a clean Active Directory and a clean and working DNS Zone.
If you use Hyper-V Server Hosts you will get a warning in the network configuration because the standard firewall rule will not allow ICMP traffic (ping) to answer.
On the Cisco UCS you will also get a Warning which says your Cluster Network is maybe not redundant. This is because we added only one Management Network adapter for the Hyper-V hosts and with normal Hardware this is a single point of failure. But with on the UCS Hardware the Network adapter is virtual and the network connections are redundant in the background, so we can ignore this.

Now basically the setup of the Hyper-V Cluster is the same on the Cisco UCS as on every other Hardware.

First start the Failover Cluster Manager, if you use the Hyper-V 2008 R2 Core Server you need the Failover Cluster Manager console on another Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 client. If you need this on a Windows 7 computer you can download the Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7.
Now you first click validate the Configuration or on Create a Failover Cluster (this will also validate the Cluster Configuration)
Select your Hyper-V Host Servers
Run all tests
Now the Failover Cluster Configuration Wizard will validate your configuration.
After the validation you will get a report about the Configuration. Remember you with the Cisco UCS Solution and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 you can get two warnings. The first about ICMP and the second because you have only one network adapter.
If you get no other warnings or errors you can now start to create the Failover Cluster. Add your Hyper-V Hosts.
Create the Access Point for the Failover Cluster (Clustername and IP Address)
Confirm the Configuration
And now the Wizard will create your Hyper-V Failover Cluster
After you have done this you simply have to add a Quorum Disk and activate Cluster Shared Volumes