Windows 8: Client Hyper-V and boot from VHD

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

Some days before the BUILD conference, Microsoft released a video about Hyper-V in Windows 8. Now after some days of testing I am already a big fan of the client Hyper-V. It lets me create a perfect lab at work or a development VM and Linux VM’s for KTSI.

It’s a great solution for me. Sure there were other solutions like Virtual PC, Virtual Box and VMware Workstation before, but using the built-in Hyper-V has some advantages which make my life a little easier.

PowerShell support – it lets me start up a whole lab environment within seconds. I can really quick import Virtual Machines and start them up. And also do some other cool scripted solutions.
Performance – it offers great performance.
VHD and VHDX – it’s great to work with one virtual disk format and not have to convert virtual disks. It’s also great together with the boot from VHD feature.
Dynamic Memory
Remote Management for Hyper-V Servers (like the RSAT)
Live Storage Migration – Move a running Virtual Machine from local disk to another local disk, USB or network share and back

Microsoft made also the boot from VHD feature a little simpler.

First Mount the VHD you want to boot. (right click on the VHD and “Mount”)
Now check the new drive letter of the VHD in my case this is G:
Open the command prompt and type bcdboot G:\windows
Now your VHD will appear in the boot menu. You can check that by typing bcdedit
and as you can see no sysprep or generalize needed

Here a small list of Hyper-V client features:

32 Virtual CPUs
NUMA in VM
512 GB RAM
Sleep, Hibernate
Management console
Manage Hyper-V Server from this console
Snapshots
Up to 1024 running VM’s
VHD, and VHDX (up to 16TB)
Dynamic disks, Differencing disks, pass through disks, fixedsize disks
4K sector size
DMTF comliant WMI
Networking offloads
Live Storage Migration
Native VHD boot
Dynamic Memory
Remote Management
PowerShell
Export snapshots
Resource Pools
External, Internal and Private Networks
Bi-Direction audio
Enlightened IDE & SCSI controllers
Hyper-V on SMB
up to256 virtual drives
up to 12 virtual NICs
VLAN support
3D Graphics (Software)
Mutli Touch
USB redirection (with RDP)
Wireless NICs
Export & Import VMs
Hyper-V Extensible Switch
VHDX Resiliency

Supported Operating Systems:

Windows XP SP3
Windows Server 2003 SP2
Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2
Windows Vista
Windows Server 2008
Windows 7
Windows Server 2008 R2
Windows Storage Server 2008 R2
Windows Home Server 2011
Windows SBS 2011
Windows 8
Windows Server 8
CentOS 5.2-5.6
CentOS 6.0
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2-5.6, 6.0, 6.1
SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, 11

In my opinion Client Hyper-V is a great solution and lab to go for Developers, IT Pros, Testers, Sales people and a lot more.

Hyper-V: “Version 3 kills them all”

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

Microsoft showed the latest version of Hyper-V at build conference together with Windows 8 and Windows Server 8. Microsoft showed a lot of new Hyper-V features which turn Hyper-V in really powerful hypervisor.

Some days ago I posted a blog post about new features which Microsoft showed before the build conference, now it’s time to extend the list of new features. There are a lot of even more powerful features than the once I posted back then.

Windows Server 8 as Cloud OS

First let’s start with Windows Server 8 as the base of Microsoft Cloud strategy. Microsofts focus in Windows Server 8 was to make it easy for all to build public and private cloud solutions. There are a lot of improvements to manageability, security, scalability, extensibility, predictability and reliability which will also improve the possibilities with Hyper-V. In technical terms Microsoft made a lot of improvements how you can manage a lot of servers and services, Storage, Networking and Powershell. Of course there is a lot more, but this are the parts I think are the most important. And here are some keywords to the improvements in Windows Server 8:

Storage improvements – SMB 2.2, SMB transparent Failover, Data deduplication, Storage Spaces, online filesystem repairs, 64TB NTFS volume etc.
NIC Teaming
Powershell v3 – You can now just do everything in Powershell and even more with 23000 PowerShell cmdlets.
Server Dashboard – The new Dashboard lets you manage all servers, or even better, all Services from one place.
Multi-tenant – everything seems to be made for that
Performance Counters

Hyper-V Host improvements

Hyper-V gets not only a lot of improvements to Virtual Machine, also the Hyper-V Hosts get some new limit improvements.

up to 160 logical CPUs
supports up to 2TB RAM
no more vCPU:pCPU ration limit

Hyper-V Virtual Machine improvements

Microsoft did a lot to extend the existing Virtual Machine hardware to support even high workload Virtual Machines. I will not write a lot about this because the facts here will tell more that a lot of words.

VHDX Format – supports up to 16TB Virtual Disks
32 CPUs per VM
512GB RAM per VM
Support for Fibre Channel Adapters
Supporting Virtual Active Directory Servers

Hyper-V Networking improvements

Hyper-V got a lot of improvements in terms of networking. Microsoft realized that networking features are really important if you start to create private and public cloud scenarios and now even create a mix of public and private cloud scenarios without creating a lot of work for the IT teams to reconfigure Virtual Machines.

QoS and flexible bandwidth allocation
Support for SR-IOV (Direct Access to the physical Network adapter)
Network Virtualization
PVLAN support
Dynamic Virtual Machine Queue (D-VMQ)
Receive Side Coalescing (RSC)
DHCP Guard
Extensible virtual switch
IPsec Task offload

Hyper-V Clustering improvements

Hyper-V gets also a lot of Cluster improvements. But you have to be aware that Clusters are for really high availability and this adds a lot of costs to projects and solutions. Microsoft is working on Cloud solutions which will give great availability to low cost. For example Hyper-V Replica or Live Migration to another host over the Ethernet without the need for a shared storage. But if you need real HA you will need the Failover Cluster.

supporting up to 4000 VMs per cluster
supporting up to 63 Cluster nodes
improved Cluster Manager Console
VM Monitoring – Application health detection inside the virtual machine
New Placement policies – Virtual Machine Priority and enhanced placement
Storage Live Migration
Hyper-V Replica supporting clustering
No need for Block Storage – you can use SMB Shares
Support for Storage Spaces
Automated Node Draining – like Maintenance mode in SCVMM
Cluster Aware Updating
Cluster Shared Volume Improvements – BitLocker support, a lot of performance improvements, Self-Healing
Live Migration Queing
Migrate multiple Virtual Machine at the same time

Hyper-V Storage improvements

A I mentioned earlier Microsoft made a lot of improvements in terms of storage in Windows Server 8 and Hyper-V can take advantage of those which are quiet impressive. For example with the new features in SMB 2.2 you can now use SMB file shares to store your Virtual Machines.

VHDX
ODX
RDMA
SMB 2.2 – Transparent Failover
4K native disk support
Data Deduplication
Virtual Fiber Channel
VM boot from SAN

Hyper-V Management Improvements

As everywhere in Windows Server 8 PowerShell is the key. And the new Server Manager Dashboard Microsoft enable to create Server Groups to manage multiple servers from a single console.

Powershell for Hyper-V
Powershell Workflows – Commands and Tasks across servers
Hyper-V Extensible Switch – lets vendors to create “plugins”. Could be very interesting for Cisco UCS installations.
Server Manager Dashboard – lets you manage multiple Hyper-V host from a single console.
SCVMM 2012 – not a part of Windows Server 8 but will add great management solutions

Hyper-V HA and Data Protection

Now I think this is maybe the greatest new feature. You can now live migrate a Virtual Machine from one Hyper-V Host to another without Shared Storage or Cluster configuration. And with this option Microsoft also included a new feature called Hyper-V Replica which includes the option to replicate Virtual Machine to another host which can be hosted in the same network or even in the cloud.

Live Migration
Live Storage Migration
Live Migration to another Hosts (Not clustered) over the Ethernet
Hyper-V Replica – Replicated Virtual Machines to another Hyper-V host on-premise or public cloud
BitLocker support for CSV

This are not all of the new features Windows Server 8 Hyper-V has to offer but I tried to list the important ones. And if Microsoft sticks with their licensing model, it will be a really strong competitor to the VMWare vShpere 5.

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.

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

Thomas Maurer ™

Just another private cloud weblog

Tag Archives: Microsoft Hyper-v