Altaro launching Hyper-V Backup 3.5 Beta with Windows Server 2012 support

Posted on August 7, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

Altaro Logo

Today Altaro is launching the public beta of Altaro Hyper-V Backup 3.5 with a contest where you can win a free Nexus 7 tablets. Altaro Hyper-V Backup is a powerful Hyper-V aware backup solution that easily backs up Microsoft Hyper-V Virtual Machines. With the next version Altaro will start supporting Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.

I had the chance to already test the new Hyper-V Backup 3.5 beta, and if you are interested in a simple and fast Hyper-V backup solution, you should definitely have a look at Altaro solution.

First of all Altro Hyper-V Backup is very easy to setup. The installation takes about 2 minutes, the installer need to be run on the Hyper-V server or one of the cluster hosts. The installer does automatically detect cluster installations.

After the installation you have to do some very simple configuration steps. First you have to add a backup destination, this can be a folder on a local drive, a USB drive or a network share. Next you have to select which Virtual Machines should be protected by Altaro Hyper-V Backup and the last one is to configure the backup schedule for the Virtual Machines. And yes that’s how simple this solution is.

I did some test backup of virtual machines which I use in my lab and I was really surprise by the performance. One of my test Virtual Machines was a Windows Server 2012 server hosted on a Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V hosts and the size was something like 8.25 GB and the backup initial backup was done in around 3 minutes.

One of the most important parts of a backup solution is how you can restore you backups. In my lab I backed up and restored some Virtual Machines and everything worked as expected. But there are some great restore features. For example Altaro Hyper-V Backup does not only backup your current VM, it does also allow you to backup snapshots. This is great if you run a lab environment for testing or for software packaging where your snapshots are a very important part.

Another great thing is the option to restore backups from other Altaro backups. For example if you lose your Altaro Hyper-V Backup server during a disaster or a hardware failure. You can easily setup a new server with Altaro Hyper-V Backup and select your previous backups and restore them.

Altaro Hyper-V Backup features

Altaro Hyper-V Backup is not just a simple backup to for Hyper-V Virtual Machines it also has some cool extra features.

ReverseDelta – Transfers only changes at the block level, whilst performing on-the-fly deduplication. This is great to save a lot of space while backup up Virtual Machines which are using the same operating systems.
Exchange & MS SQL VM backups – Commits databases in VMs that host Exchange, MS SQL or other applications compatible with the Hyper-V VSS Writer, which offer application consistent backups.
Backs up Hyper-V Snapshots – If your VMs have snapshots than you can back up the snapshots as well.
Live Backups of Linux VMs – Back up crash consistent Linux VMs without shutting down the machine.
File Level Restore – Mount backed up VHDs and restore files without having to restore a whole Virtual Machine.
Restore to different Hyper-V host – Restore an individual or a group of VMs to a different Hyper-V Host.
FireDrill Restore Tests – Build a plan to make sure that in case of disaster you’re fully covered.
Backup Drive Swap Rotation- Drive Swap functionality allows the customer to rotate backups drives on a daily basis.

What’s new in Altaro Hyper-V Backup 3.5

Windows Server 2012 Support, including support for VHDX files.
Windows Server 2012: support for backup and restore of VMs located on network paths.
Windows Server 2012: support for Volume Shadow Copies of SMB3.0 network paths.
Windows Server 2012: support for CSV3.0 and scale-out CSV file shares.
New and improved Metro-Style User Interface.

Overall Altaro is an easy, fast and effective Hyper-V Backup solution with a lot of extras. If you want to try the new Altaro Hyper-V Backup checkout the contest page. Altaro are giving away two Nexus 7’s to a couple of lucky testers of their Windows Server 2012 Backup for Hyper-V Beta.

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Converged Fabric

Posted on July 22, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

Windows Server 2012 RC Logo

In Windows Server 2008 R2 we had some really simple configurations and best practices for Hyper-V and network configurations. The problem with this was, that this configurations were not really flexible. This had two main reasons, first NIC teaming wasn’t officially supported by Microsoft and secondly there was no possibility to create virtual network interfaces without third party solution.

Here is a example of a Hyper-V 2008 R2 host design which was used in a cluster setup.

Traditional Design

Each dedicated Hyper-V network such as CSV/Cluster communication or the Live Migration network used a own physical network interface. The different network interfaces could also be teamed with third party software from HP, Broadcom or Intel. This design is still a good design in Windows Server 2012 but there are other configurations which are a lot more flexible.

Microsoft MVP Adian Finn and Hans Vredevoort did a already some early work with Windows Server 2012 Converged Fabric and you should definitely read their blog posts.

In Windows Server 2012 you can get much more out of your network configuration. First of all NIC Teaming is now integrated and supported in Windows Server 2012 and another cool feature is the use of virtual network adapters in the Management OS (Host OS or Parent Partition). This allows you to create for example one of the following designs.

Virtual Switch and Dedicated Management Interfaces

This scenario has two teamed 10GbE adapter for Cluster and VM traffic.

Virtual Switch and Dedicated Teamed Management Interfaces

The same scenario with a teamed management interface.

Dedicated Virtual Switch for Management and VM Traffic

One Virtual Switch for Management and Cluster traffic and a dedicated switch for VM traffic.

One Virtual Switch for everything

This is may favorite design at the moment. Two 10GbE adapter as one team for Virtual Machine, Cluster traffic and management. It is a very flexible design and allows the two 10GbE adapters to be used very dynamic.

This design solutions will also be very interesting if you us SMB 3.0 as a storage for Hyper-V Virtual Machines.

There are at the moment not a lot of official information which designs will be unsupported and which will be supported. You can find some information about supported designs in the TechEd North America session WSV329 Architecting Private Clouds Using Windows Server 2012 by Yigal Edery and Joshua Adams.

Configuration

Now after you have seen these designs you may want to create such a configuration and want to know how you can do this. Not everything can be done via GUI you have to use your Windows PowerShell skills. In this scenario I use the design with four 10GbE network adapters 2 for iSCSI and to for my network connections.

Install the Hyper-V Role
Create NIC Teams
Create a Hyper-V Virtual Switch
Add new Virtual Network Adapters to the Management OS
Set VLANs of the Virtual Network Adapters
Set QoS Policies of the Virtual Network Adapters
Configure IP Addresses of the Virtual Network Adapters

Install Hyper-V Role

Before you can use the features of the Virtual Switch and can start create Virtual Network Adapters on the Management OS (Parent Partition) you have to install the Hyper-V role. You can do this via Server Manager or via Windows PowerShell.

 Add-WindowsFeature Hyper-V -Restart

Create NIC Teams

Now most of the time you will create a NIC Teaming for fault tolerance and load balancing. A team can be created over the Server Manager or PowerShell. Of course I prefer the Windows PowerShell. For a Team which will not only be used for Hyper-V Virtual Machines but also for Management OS traffic I use the TransportPorts as load balancing algorithm. If you use this team only for Virtual Machine traffic there is a algorithm called Hyper-V-Port. The Teaming Mode of course depends on your configuration.

 New-NetLbfoTeam -Name Team01 -TeamMembers NIC1,NIC2 -LoadBalancingAlgorithm HyperVPort -TeamingMode SwitchIndependent

Create the Virtual Switch

After the team is created you have to create a new Virtual Switch. We also define the DefaultFlowMinimumBandwidthWeight to be set to 20.

 New-VMSwitch -Name VMNET -NetAdapterName Team01 -AllowManagementOS $False -MinimumBandwidthMode Weight
Set-VMSwitch "VMNET" -DefaultFlowMinimumBandwidthWeight 3.

After you have created the Hyper-V Virtual Switch or VM Switch you will find this switch also in the Hyper-V Manager.

Create Virtual Network Adapters for the Management OS

After you have created your Hyper-V Virtual Switch you can now start adding VM Network Adapters to this Virtual Switch. We also configure the VLAN ID and the QoS policy settings.

 Add-VMNetworkAdapter -ManagementOS -Name "Management" -SwitchName "VMNET"
Add-VMNetworkAdapter -ManagementOS -Name "LiveMigration" -SwitchName "VMNET"
Add-VMNetworkAdapter -ManagementOS -Name "CSV" -SwitchName "VMNET"

 

Set-VMNetworkAdapterVlan -ManagementOS -VMNetworkAdapterName "Management" -Access -VlanId 185
Set-VMNetworkAdapterVlan -ManagementOS -VMNetworkAdapterName "CSV" -Access -VlanId 195
Set-VMNetworkAdapterVlan -ManagementOS -VMNetworkAdapterName "LiveMigration" -Access -VlanId 196

 

Set-VMNetworkAdapter -ManagementOS -Name "LiveMigration" -MinimumBandwidthWeight 20
Set-VMNetworkAdapter -ManagementOS -Name "CSV" -MinimumBandwidthWeight 10
Set-VMNetworkAdapter -ManagementOS -Name "Management" -MinimumBandwidthWeight 10

Your new configuration will now look like this:

As you can see the name of the new Hyper-V Virtual Ethernet Adapter is vEthernet (NetworkAdapaterName). This will be important for automation tasks or configuring IP addresses via Windows PowerShell.

Set IP Addresses

Some months ago I wrote two blog posts, the first was how to configure you Hyper-V host network adapters like a boss and the second one was how to replace the netsh command with Windows PowerShell. Now using Windows PowerShell to configure IP addresses will save you a lot of time.


# Set IP Address Management
New-NetIPAddress -InterfaceAlias "vEthernet (Management)" -IPAddress 192.168.25.11 -PrefixLength "24" -DefaultGateway 192.168.25.1
Set-DnsClientServerAddress -InterfaceAlias "vEthernet (Management)" -ServerAddresses 192.168.25.51, 192.168.25.52

# Set LM and CSV
New-NetIPAddress -InterfaceAlias "vEthernet (LiveMigration)" -IPAddress 192.168.31.11 -PrefixLength "24"
New-NetIPAddress -InterfaceAlias "vEthernet (CSV)" -IPAddress 192.168.32.11 -PrefixLength "24"

# iSCSI
New-NetIPAddress -InterfaceAlias "iSCSI01" -IPAddress 192.168.71.11 -PrefixLength "24"
New-NetIPAddress -InterfaceAlias "iSCSI02" -IPAddress 192.168.72.11 -PrefixLength "24"

There is still a lot more about Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Converged Fabric in the future, but I hope this post will give you a quick insight into some new features of Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V.

Windows Server 2012: CSV Cache Benchmark

Posted on April 12, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

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:

With 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.

Windows Server 2012: Enable CSV Cache

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

Windows Server 8

In Windows Server 8 beta (Windows Server 2012 beta), Microsoft released a lot of new features for Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV). One of them is CSV Cache. CSV Cache gives you the possibility to allocate system memory (RAM) of the cluster nodes as cache. This can improve the performance of read requests in workloads like Hyper-V.

Now to enable the CSV Cache on a cluster you have to do this with Windows PowerShell.

First open the PowerShell prompt
Set the size of the CSV Cache. The default it 512MB. With this command you will reserve the Memory on all Cluster nodes for caching.
```
(Get-Cluster). SharedVolumeBlockCacheSizeInMB = 512
```

Now you have to enable the Cache on on the Cluster Shared Volumes you want to use.

Get-ClusterSharedVolume “Cluster Disk 1” | Set-ClusterParameter  CsvEnableBlockCache 1

Here you can find a Windows Server 2012: CSV Cache Benchmark

If you want to know more about CSV Cache, you can read this blog post from Elden Christensen on the Failover Clustering and Network Load Balancing Team Blog.

Automated Active Directory Deployment with PowerShell

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

For a small presentation at KTSI I created a PowerShell script will automatically will deploys Active Directory Servers, adds other member servers, creates Organization Units and adds users via Powershell Remoting. As source there is a XML configuration file and CSV files for User Data.

This script is just for Lab deployments not for production, and it is not perfect, but I think maybe some people will enhance this script with their own code.

I do not support this script. it is just something I need to deploy my test environments and nothing more. More it shows diffrent

You can find more information about it works in this document.

XML Config file:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<lab>
<config>
<servers>
<server name="ADS01" ip="192.168.100.11" id="1" adminpw="passw0rd"/>
<server name="ADS02" ip="192.168.100.12" id="2" adminpw="passw0rd"/>
</servers>
<ad>
<domain name="ktsi.local" netbiosname="ktsi" forestlevel="4" domainlevel="4" safemodepw="passw0rd" />
</ad>
<ous>
<ou name="UserAccounts" path="DC=KTSI,DC=LOCAL" />
<ou name="BASEL" path="OU=USERACCOUNTS,DC=KTSI,DC=LOCAL" />
<ou name="CHICAGO" path="OU=USERACCOUNTS,DC=KTSI,DC=LOCAL" />
<ou name="NEWYORK" path="OU=USERACCOUNTS,DC=KTSI,DC=LOCAL" />
<ou name="SALES" path="OU=BASEL,OU=USERACCOUNTS,DC=KTSI,DC=LOCAL" />
<ou name="IT" path="OU=BASEL,OU=USERACCOUNTS,DC=KTSI,DC=LOCAL" />
<ou name="ADMINISTRATION" path="OU=BASEL,OU=USERACCOUNTS,DC=KTSI,DC=LOCAL" />
<ou name="PRODUCTION" path="OU=BASEL,OU=USERACCOUNTS,DC=KTSI,DC=LOCAL" />
<ou name="SALES" path="OU=CHICAGO,OU=USERACCOUNTS,DC=KTSI,DC=LOCAL" />
<ou name="IT" path="OU=CHICAGO,OU=USERACCOUNTS,DC=KTSI,DC=LOCAL" />
<ou name="ADMINISTRATION" path="OU=CHICAGO,OU=USERACCOUNTS,DC=KTSI,DC=LOCAL" />
<ou name="PRODUCTION" path="OU=CHICAGO,OU=USERACCOUNTS,DC=KTSI,DC=LOCAL" />
<ou name="SALES" path="OU=NEWYORK,OU=USERACCOUNTS,DC=KTSI,DC=LOCAL" />
<ou name="IT" path="OU=NEWYORK,OU=USERACCOUNTS,DC=KTSI,DC=LOCAL" />
<ou name="ADMINISTRATION" path="OU=NEWYORK,OU=USERACCOUNTS,DC=KTSI,DC=LOCAL" />
<ou name="PRODUCTION" path="OU=NEWYORK,OU=USERACCOUNTS,DC=KTSI,DC=LOCAL" />
</ous>
<users>
<file name="users.csv" path="OU=ADMINISTRATION,OU=BASEL,OU=USERACCOUNTS,DC=KTSI,DC=LOCAL" />
</users>
<members>
<member name="PC101" ip="192.168.100.21" />
<member name="PC101" ip="192.168.100.22" />
<member name="PC101" ip="192.168.100.23" />
</members>
</config>
</lab>

The PowerShell Script:

Continue reading →

Extending a Microsoft Hyper-V R2 Cluster Shared Volume

Posted on August 25, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

This quick blog post shows you how you can simply extend a Hyper-V R2 or Windows Server 2008 R2 Cluster Shared Volume without any downtime. First you expand your LUN in your OEM SAN management software. This is mostly of the time nothing special. But after that you have to expand the Cluster Shared Volume.

In your OEM SAN Management Software expand the size of the LUN or disk
Open the Microsoft Failover Cluster Manager and check the CSV coordinator for the disk or LUN you have expanded. The CSV coordinator is the disk owner in the cluster
Login to the CSV coordinator machine
If you are using the GUI version you can use the Disk Management under Storage in the Server Manager. You can now rescan for disks and then expand the Disk or LUN.
If you are using Hyper-V or Windows Server Core you can use diskpart
First start the cmd and open diskpart
type rescan
now type list volume, to list all volumes
Use select volume IDNumber, the IDNumber is the number you could see with list volume in the previous step.
now you can type extend
with list volume you can see the results

In some environments sometimes if you need to expand a Cluster Shared volume it makes more sense to create a new one and move the Virtual Machines with Storage Migration but this cannot be done without downtime.