Tag Archives: Storage

Hyper-V: “Version 3 kills them all”

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Windows Server 8 Server Manager Dashboard

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

Windows Server 8 Hyper-V Manager

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

Windows Server 8 Hyper-V VM Move

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

Windows Server 8 Hyper-V Powershell

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

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Hyper-V

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.

Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Part1

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CISCO UCSThis is my first post on a Microsoft Hyper-V Cluster with a Cisco UCS. In the next parts I will write about how to setup a Hyper-V Cluster on a UCS.

After testing and evaluation Bladecenters for our Datacenter, we decided that the Cisco UCS is the best solution for us. There are a lot of reasons why the UCS (Cisco Unified Computing System) is one of the best systems for a datacenter. Some of them are:

  • Easy cabling
  • Single Management Console for Switches, Chassies and Blades (UCS Manager)
  • Hardware Virtualization
  • Made for Datacenters

About the Cisco UCS (Wikipedia):

The Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) is a data center computing solution composed of computing hardware, virtualization software, switching fabric, and management software. The idea behind the system is to reduce total cost of ownership and improve scalability by integrating the different components into a cohesive platform that can be managed as a single unit. Just-In-Time deployment of resources and 1:N redundancy are also possible with a system of this type.

But lets start with our project. First of all what have we got in our starting configuration.

Cisco UCS Hardware

  • Two chassies with 6 Blade Servers each
  • 12 Blade Servers (2x Intel Xeon 6-cores and 72GB RAM)
  • 6 Nodes for VMware and 6 Nodes for Hyper-V
  • EMC Storage

Cisco UCS Hyper-V TaskmanagerIn the next part I will write about how to Setup the Blade Servers with Microsoft Hyper-V Server (Core).

Howto: Update SCVMM 2008 to SCVMM 2008 R2

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Update from Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to Micorsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 is pretty simple. Yesterday I updated the SCVMM on our environment.

  1. Copy the SCVMM 2008 R2 on the Server
  2. Start the Setup.exe
  3. Install VMM Server, the installer check that this is an update of an existing installation
  4. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Update After updating the VMM Server you have to install the new VMM Administrator Console and the new Self-Service Portal if needed.
  5. The installer of the VMM Administrator Console and the VMM Self-Service Portal will first uninstall the old version and then install the new version.
  6. After installing the SCVMM 2008 R2 you have to check for Windows Updates
  7. After a rebooting the SCVMM Server you have to push the new Agent Update to the Virtual Host Servers
  8. Now you are done

Whats new in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2:

  • Support for Live Migration
  • Hot addition/removal of Storage
  • New optimized networking technologies
  • Cluster Shared Volumes
  • SAN migration
  • Expanded Support for iSCSI SANs
  • Storage Migration
  • Rapid Provisioning
  • Support for third party CFS
  • Support for Veritas Volume Manager
  • Added Maintenance Mode
  • Support of disjoint domains
  • Use of defined port groups with VMware Virtual Center
  • Queuing of Live migrations
  • Host Compatibility checks

Drobo Pro

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Drobo Pro

Drobo Pro

Last year I found a really cool product called drobo. Drobo was a “BeyondRAID storage device” which had four slots for harddrives, a Firewire 800 and an USB 2.0 port. Its was basically a pretty cool desktop storage device. You also could add a Network Interface called DroboShare.

A week ago Data Robotics released the new Drobo Pro, basiclly the same functions like Drobo, plus they added an onboard network interface and 8 slots for harddrives. So Drobo Pro supports up to 16TB of storage.