Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V: Configure VM Processor Compatibility for Legacy Operating Systems

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Thomas Maurer

Windows Server 2012 Logo

In Windows Server 2008 R2 you had a setting in the Hyper-V Manager GUI to enable Processor Compatibility for legacy operating systems such as Windows NT 4.0 Server or Windows Server 2000. In Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V this setting is gone from the GUI, but you can still change it via Windows PowerShell.

By using the Get-VMProcessor cmdlet you can list the virtual CPU information of your Hyper-V virtual machines.

As you can see you can find a property called CompatibilityForOlderOperatingSystemsEnabled which is set to “False” by default and this is okay in 99% of all cases. But even if Windows NT 4.0 Server or Windows Server 2000 is not officially supported by Microsoft anymore there are some customers which have to run some VMs with legacy operating systems and by changing this setting via Windows PowerShell and the Set-VMProcessor cmdlet you can allow VMs to run old operating systems.


Set-VMProcessor NT4VM -CompatibilityForOlderOperatingSystemsEnabled 1

And of course you can also change it back


Set-VMProcessor NT4VM -CompatibilityForOlderOperatingSystemsEnabled 0

Virtual Machine Backup and Recovery: Five Critical Decisions

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Thomas Maurer

Together with Symantec, Mahmoud Magdy (Microsoft MVP for Exchange Server) and Mikko Nykyri (VMware vExpert) we produced a whitepaper called “Virtual Machine Backup and Recovery: Five Critical Decisions”. This whitepaper covers an overview about virtualization and the challenges which come with the new workloads in terms of backup and recovery.

Because of the outstanding economy, flexibility, and service levels it offers, virtualization is transforming data centers at breakneck speed: by 2016, an estimated 80 percent of the world’s x86 servers will be virtual machines (VMs).1 But the speed of this transformation, along with the high resource utilization, ease of cloning, moving workloads, and other ways virtualization works its magic, raise challenges for “traditional” IT services and the teams that deliver them. Nowhere is the complexity that virtualization creates for traditional IT services more apparent than in backup and recovery, which participants in a recent Symantec survey ranked among their least-successful IT initiatives. This paper addresses five critical decisions organizations must make when building a backup and recovery plan to:

Maintain protection, visibility, and control of applications and data.

Maximize utilization of established infrastructure, processes, staff, and budget.

Use virtualization to improve backup and recovery processes.

Create an efficient, scalable, future-prepared backup and recovery environment.

Each issue is presented first in general terms that apply across IT environments, and then add comments for specific platforms, applications, or industries based on our individual experience as VMware® vExperts and Microsoft® MVPs.

You can download the whitepaper here: Symantec Virtual Machine Backup and Recovery: Five Critical Decisions

Make also sure you checkout the Google Hangout event on Fri, May 10, 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM.

Join a panel of virtualization experts including Microsoft MVPs Mahmoud Magdy & Thomas Mauer and VMware vExpert Mikko Nykyri as they discuss the white paper they co-authored and offer their thoughts on the most important things to consider for a virtualized server environment.

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V: Configure VM Processor Compatibility via PowerShell

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Thomas Maurer

Windows Server 2012 Logo

If you have a mixed Hyper-V environment with Hyper-V hosts which have different CPU generations you may cannot live migration Virtual Machines from one Hyper-V host to another without setting the VM CPU Compatibility setting.

Note: I saw a lot of different environments where different generation of Intel CPUs were used, and most of the time Live Migration did still work. I would recommend to set this setting only if you really need it.

If you need to do this for multiple Virtual Machines you may better use Windows PowerShell to do this.

To do this you can use the new Hyper-V PowerShell module and the Get-VMProcessor and Set-VMProcessor cmdlet. With the Get-VMProcessor cmdlet you can get information about the virtual CPU of VMs. You can list this for all virtual machines running on one host by using the following command


Get-VMProcessor *

To change this setting for all virtual machines running on the Hyper-V host you can use the following PowerShell command. This does only working with virtual machines which are not running.


Get-VMProcessor * | Set-VMProcessor -CompatibilityForMigrationEnabled 1

If you want to shut down all the VMs first you can use the following command.


Get-VM | Stop-VM

If you just want to do this for a single VM you can use the following commands.


Get-VM TMG | Stop-VM

Get-VM TMG | Set-VMProcessor -CompatibilityForMigrationEnabled 1

To do a full automation you could do it the following way:


Get-VM * | Stop-VM

Get-VM * | Set-VMProcessor -CompatibilityForMigrationEnabled 1

Get-VM * | Start-VM

As you can see you can also find the “CompatibilityForOlderOperatingSystemsEnabled” property to enable Processor Compatibility for legacy Operating Systems in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V for example Windows NT 4.0 Server or Windows 2000.

Windows Azure: General Availability of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Posted on April 16, 2013 by Thomas Maurer

Today Microsoft announced the General Availability of the Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service offering. This includes the new Virtual Machine and Virtual Network capabilities. This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production apps.

Today’s IaaS release also includes new enhancements:

VM Image Templates (including SQL Server, BizTalk Server, and SharePoint images)
VM Sizes (including Larger Memory Machines)
VM Prices (reduced prices 21%-33% for IaaS and PaaS VMs)

Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service allows you to create Virtual Machine and Virtual Networks hosted by the Microsoft Windows Azure Cloud. I already created a blog post how you can create new Virtual Machines in Windows Azure and how you can connect System Center App Controller to manage your Private Cloud as well as your Public Cloud hosted in Windows Azure.

New Windows Azure Virtual Machine Compute Pricing

Below are the new hourly on-demand rates for Windows Azure Virtual Machines:

Size Name	# of CPU Cores	Memory	Windows VM Pricing	Linux VM Pricing
ExtraSmall	Shared	768 MB	$0.02 per hour	$0.02 per hour
Small	1	1.75 GB	$0.09 per hour	$0.06 per hour
Medium	2	3.5 GB	$0.18 per hour	$0.12 per hour
Large	4	7 GB	$0.36 per hour	$0.24 per hour
ExtraLarge	8	14 GB	$0.72 per hour	$0.48 per hour
A6	4	28 GB	$1.02 per hour	$0.82 per hour
A7	8	56 GB	$2.04 per hour	$1.64 per hour

Note that the above prices are for hourly on-demand usage (meaning there is no commitment to use them for more than an hour and you pay only for what you consume). Complete pricing details for Windows Azure Virtual Machines can be found here.

Commitment Pricing Discounts

You can also optionally take advantage of our 6 Month and 12 Month commitment plans to obtain significant discounts on the standard pay as you go rates. With a commitment plan you commit to spend a certain amount of money each month and in return we give you a discount on any Windows Azure resource you use that money on (and the more money you commit to use the bigger the discount we give).

You can get more information on the blog post from Scott Guthrie or the Windows Azure homepage.

Iron Networks Announces Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Network Virtualization Gateway Appliance

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Thomas Maurer

Windows Server 2012 Logo

Finally some months after the launch of Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1, Iron Networks announces Windows Server 2012 Network Virtualization (NVGRE) Gateway Appliance for System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual machine Manager at the Microsoft Management Summit 2013. The Network Virtualization Gateway Appliance allows you to connect your Software Defended Networks (SDN) which you have created with Windows Server 2012 Network Virtualization to physical hardware or other networks.

Windows Server2012 Hyper-V Network Virtualization provides virtual networks to virtual machines, similarly to how server virtualization (hypervisor) provides virtual machines to the operating system. Network virtualization decouples and isolates virtual networks from the physical network infrastructure and removes the constraints of VLAN and hierarchical IP address assignment from virtual machine provisioning. This flexibility makes it easy for customers to move workloads to IaaS clouds and adds efficiency for hosters and datacenter administrators to manage their infrastructure, while maintaining the necessary multi-tenant isolation, security requirements, and supporting overlapping virtual machine IP addresses.

“Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Network Virtualization provides greater freedom for workload placements,” said Brian Hillger, director, Server and Tools Marketing, Microsoft. “Virtual machine workload placement is no longer limited by the IP address assignment or VLAN isolation requirements of the physical network because it is enforced within Hyper-V hosts, based on software-defined, multitenant virtualization policies.”

You can get more information about the Iron Networks Announcement here: Iron Networks Announces Windows Server 2012 Network Virtualization Gateway Appliance

Windows Azure Recovery Services: Backup & Hyper-V Recovery Manager (Preview)

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Thomas Maurer

Microsoft just released Windows Azure Recovery Services (Preview) for the features like Backup and Hyper-V Recovery Manager.

Windows Azure Backup (Preview) – This is your offsite backup to cloud solutions, which integrates in Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 Essentials, or System Center 2012 Data Protection Manager. These tools provide similar experiences configuring, monitoring, and recovering backups whether to local disk or Windows Azure storage. After data is backed up to the cloud, authorized users can easily recover backups to any server.

Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager (Preview) – This allows you to easily failover private clouds to a secondary datacenter- This feature integrates in System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager and uses the Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Replica technology to replicate your private cloud. It helps you to orchestrate datacenter failovers or recovery of virtual machines. The solution offers also the same features as Hyper-V replica but in a much bigger scale.

You can get more information here: Windows Azure Recovery Services

Cisco announced Nexus 1000V for Hyper-V with Microsoft SCVMM integration

Posted on March 2, 2013 by Thomas Maurer

Cisco Nexus 1000v

It’s now early Saturday morning in Switzerland and I’m up because I had to go to university this morning and in the break I was checking my RSS feeds and saw two blog post from my Irish Microsoft MVP fellows Aidan Finn (MVP Virtual Machine) and Damian Flynn (MVP System Center Cloud & Datacenter Management) about the new Cisco Nexus 1000v for Hyper-V with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager integration.

What is the Cisco Nexus 1000v

Cisco Nexus 1000V Series Switches provide a comprehensive and extensible architectural platform for virtual machine (VM) and cloud networking. The switches are designed to accelerate server virtualization and multitenant cloud deployments in a secure and operationally transparent manner. Integrated into the Windows Server 2012 Extensible Switch, and fully compatible with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1, the Cisco Nexus 1000V Series provides:

Advanced virtual machine networking based on Cisco NX-OS operating system and IEEE 802.1Q switching technology
Cisco vPath technology for efficient and optimized integration of virtual network services
Tight integration with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1
Layer 2 Switching with Transmit side Rate Limiting
Security Policy Mobility, inbuilt support for Private VLANs with local PVLAN Enforcement
Provisioning Port Profiles with deep Integration with SCVMM
Traffic Visibility, including VM Migration Tracking, NetFlow v.9 with NDE, Cisco Discovery Protocol v.2
And more…

You can get more information in a Cisco WebEx Webcast about the Nexus 1000v.