Today is my first day at itnetx gmbh, a consulting and engineering company located in Bern/Switzerland. itnetx is focussed on Microsoft Technologies, especially Microsoft Private Cloud Solutions, Microsoft System Center and Microsoft Virtualization. In 2011 itnetx has been awarded by Microsoft Switzerland as “Microsoft Partner of the year – Datacenter”
Since this are my preferred Microsoft technologies, it seems like a perfect match.
Aidan Finn (Virtual Machine MVP) just made a blog post about Hyper-V & PowerShell in Windows Server 8 and how you can enable Hyper-V via PowerShell in Windows Server 8. So this gave me the idea about doing a little more with PowerShell and Hyper-V 3.
I already did a blog post about how you can attach multiple VHDs to a SCSI Controller with PowerShell in Windows Server 8. In this post I will show how easy you can export and import a lot of Virtual Machines.
First you can run a Get-VM Test*, to check which VMs you will export.
Get-VM Test*
Now you can export the Virtual Machines
Get-VM Test* | Export-VM -Path "C:\VMs"
Now I removed the Virtual Machines in Hyper-V with Powershell (You could also add the -confirm parameter so you don’t have to press “y” for each VM.
Get-VM Test* | Remove-VM
And now you can import the Virtual Machines again
Get-Childitem "C:\VMs" -Recurse *.xml | Import-VM
I will post more about PowerShell in Windows 8 and Windows Server 8 (Hyper-V 3) in the next upcommig weeks. If you want know more about what new Hyper-V features and improvments are coming in Windows Server 8, you can read the following blog post: “Hyper-V: Version 3 kills them all”
The first things I tried with the new Cisco UCS C200 M2 servers was the CIMC (Cisco Integrated Management Controller). CIMC is the remote out-of-band management solution (IPMI) provided with Cisco servers, it’s basically the same like HP iLO or Dell DRAC.
One of the biggest advantages is that CIMC is included for free, so there is no extra license you need for extra features like KVM or stuff like that.
After working some hours with the CIMC I was really happy, no problems at all everything worked as expected. From the design it’s like the Cisco UCS Manager but better 
. I think it is much easier to use and much faster (it’s not Java).
Keyfeatures
Today my two new virtualization nodes from Cisco arrived. For my Microsoft Hyper-V lab I needed two new nodes and I got a really good offering for two Cisco UCS C200 M2 High-Density Rack-Mount Servers.
The whole Cisco server series is optimized for virtualization and offers very cool features like a buildiin Cisco Integrated Management Controller (without extra charge) and Ciscos Extended Memory Technology which allows to use up to 192GB RAM.
Technical Specs
The Cisco UCS C200 M2 server is a high-density, 2-socket, 1 rack unit (RU) rack-mount server built for production-level network infrastructure, web services, and mainstream data center, branch, and remote-office applications.
Hardware
The Hardware makes a really good first impression.
One of my next posts will be about the CIMC (Cisco Integrated Management Controller) which I really started to like.
In this clip from episode 100,Jimmy Ray and guest Jeff Silberman address the myths being portrayed by Cisco’s competitors, and demonstrates why it just doesn’t hold water. A must-see segment for you competitive types!
I could test some features in the new version of Hyper-V which comes with the Windows Server 8 Developer Preview. I did a little overview about the a lot of new features in the new Hyper-V Version: Hyper-V: “Version 3 kills them all”. In this post I will write something about some new things in Hyper-V Dynamic Memory.
