We had a problem with our VMware VirtualCenter Server service which did not start automatically after a server reboot. This could be a problem when the VMware VirtualCenter Server service starts before the MSSQL Server.

Now the solution to solve this problem is to add a dependency to the VMware VirtualCenter Server service.

The VirtualCenter Server service is dependent on the following services:

• SQL Services
• ADAM Services (when using linked mode in vCenter Server 4.x)

How to create a service dependency:

1. Open the services.msc
   
2. Check out the name of the service you want to add as dependency
   
3. open the Registry Editor (regedit)
4. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\vpxd
5. Double-click the DependOnService key and add the Service name using the name of the Service in our case MSSQLSERVER
6. In the Services window, open the service properties for the service VMware VirtualCenter Server.
7. In the Dependencies tab, verify the VMware VirtualCenter service is listed as depending on the service.

In Windows Server 2008 or later you could also set VMware VirtualCenter Server service to startup type Automatic (Delay):

1. Click Start > Run, type services.msc, and click OK.
2. Right-click on the VMware VirtualCenter Server service and click Properties.
3. Change the startup type from Automatic to Automatic (Delay).
   

 
More Information on this: VMware KB

Two days ago Microsoft released the Release Candidate of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012. First thing, you can now Upgrade from SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1 to the Release Candidate and you will be able to upgrade to the RTM version from SCVMM 2012 RC or SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1.

Download: EXE
Download: VHD

The Release Candidate brings a lot of changes and new features.

Feature Summary:

• Fabric Management
  • Setup Upgrade
    • *New in RC -Upgrade- Setup will support the following upgrade paths:
      • VMM 2008 R2 SP1 –SC VMM 2012 RC — SC VMM 2012 RTM
      • SC VMM 2012 RC — SC VMM 2012 RTM
  • Hyper-V and Cluster Lifecycle Management – Deploy Hyper-V to bare metal
    server, create Hyper-V clusters, orchestrate patching of a Hyper-V Cluster
    • *New in RC:
      • ISO or CD-based OSD for environments with DHCP without WDS
      • OSD will now convert dynamic to fixed type of VHD destination
      • All network adapters on host can be configured during
        provisioning
    • *New in RC:
      • Ability to bypass cluster validation during cluster creation
      • Run cluster validation reports on-demand
      • New Cluster status tab to view an aggregated status and a cluster validation
        report
      • Ability to see current CSV owner in the properties of the
        cluster
  • Third Party Virtualization Platforms – Add and Manage Citrix XenServer and
    VMware ESX Hosts and Clusters
  • Network Management – Manage IP Address Pools, MAC Address Pools and Load
    Balancers
    • *New in RC:
      • Simplification of the logical networks in the Fabric workspace
      • Ability to see IP addresses that are in use from a IP pool
      • Added support for Microsoft Network Load Balancer
      • Gateway and DNS are no longer mandatory fields for logical networks
      • Load balancer can now support affinity to logical
        networks
  • Storage Management – Classify Storage, Manage Storage Pools and LUNs
    • *New in RC
      • Create persistent sessions to iSCSI array and logon initiator to array
      • Better scalability of storage operations – LUN create, snapshot, clone,
        masking, and unmasking
      • Option to create storage groups per cluster (BETA only supported creation of
        storage group per node in a cluster)
      • Enablement of MPIO feature when provisioning a new Hyper-V server
      • Automatic MPIO device claim
      • Support for arrays that implement OnePortPerView
  • Update Management- Keep your VMM Fabric Servers (VMM roles, hosts, and
    clusters) up-to-date with patches.
    • *New in RC:
      • Share a WSUS root server between System Center Configuration Manager 2007
        R2/ System Center Configuration Manager 2012 Beta
      • Hyper-V Cluster Orchestration- Nodes put into VMM Maintenance Mode can be
        set to trigger Maintenance Mode in Operations Manager.
  • Resource Optimization
    • Dynamic Optimization – proactively balance the load of VMs across a
      cluster
    • Power Optimization – schedule power savings to use the right number of hosts
      to run your workloads – power the rest off until they are needed.
      • *New in RC:
        • Set Operations Manager Mode for powered down hosts
    • PRO – integrate with System Center Operations Manager to respond to
      application-level performance monitors.
      • *New in RC:
        • Support added for System Center Operations Manager 2012 Beta
        • VMM will ship two sample PRO Packs: Cluster scale out and Service scale out
          MPs
• Cloud Management
  • Abstract server, network and storage resources into private clouds
  • Delegate access to private clouds with control of capacity, capabilities and
    user quotas
  • Enable self-service usage for application administrator to author, deploy,
    manage and decommission applications in the private cloud
• Service Lifecycle Management
• Define service templates to create sets of connected virtual machines, OS
  images and application packages
  • *New in RC:
    • Service Designer and Specialization UI enhancements
    • Added ability to use Service Template Patterns
• Compose operating system images and applications during service deployment
  • *New in RC:
    • IP-based provisioning
    • New application instance view
• Scale out the number of virtual machines in a service
• Service performance and health monitoring integrated with System Center
  Operations Manager
• Decouple OS image and application updates through image-based servicing
  • *New in RC:
    • Streamlined ability to enable OS VHD updates to a Service Template
    • Publish updated Service Templates in order to update Service
      Instances
• Leverage powerful application virtualization technologies such as Server
  App-V

Watch what happens when you try to buy a cloud solution from the wrong company.

Microsoft pokes fun at VMware with “VMlimited man“.

In the first post I wrote how you can enable SSH on the ESXi 5.0 host. In this post I show you how you can enable or activate SSH on the ESXi 5.0 hosts via the vSphere Client.

1. First start the vSphere Client
2. Select the ESXi host in the configurations tab
3. Select Security Profile
   
4. Click on Properties in the upper right corner and you will get the a popup with all the services on this ESXi 5.0 hosts. Select the SSH service and press the Options button.
   
5. Now you can start the services and set the startup options
   
6. press okay and you are done..

As in VMware ESXi 4.1 you can enable or activate SSH on VMware ESXi 5.0 very simple. VMware ESXi 5.0 is also known as VMware vSphere Hypervisor.

1. On the start screen press F2 for “Customize System”
   
2. Login with the local password
   
3. Select and enter Troubleshooting Options
   
4. Click on Enable SSH to activate SSH on your VMware ESXi 5.0 host
   
5. After you have pressed the ENTER key you will now see that SSH is enabled
   

If you need to run multiple instances of Windows on your computer, you have different options. First you could use software like Microsoft Virtual PC or VMware Workstation to run a virtual instance. But if you need more performance, or you have to run for example Microsoft Hyper-V you need a native installed Operating System. Until Microsoft added the feature “boot from VHD”, you had to create different partitions for each installation. Since Microsoft allowed you to use VHD to boot you won a lot of flexibility.

This guide should show you how you can install a new operation system in a VHD, which you can boot from.

1. First boot from a Windows Setup DVD or USB Stick
2. On the screen where you could click “Install now” you have also a “Repair your computer” option in the bottom left corner. Click on this option or use the short cut “Shift + F10” to boot in to the command line mode.
3. Enter diskpart
   
4. Create a new VHD file
   create vdisk file=”filepathandfilename” type=”expandable” maximum=maxsiize
   
5. Now you have to attach this VHD
   select vidsk file=”filepathandfilename”
   attach vdisk
   
6. Now you can switch back to the “Install now” screenby pressing “ALT+TAB” and now do the setup on the new create vdisk.
7. If you start Windows the next time you will see the new and the old Windows in the boot menu.

If you want to add a already existing VHD to the boot menu you can use bdcedit to edit the boot menu.

bcdedit /copy {originalguid} /d "New Windows 7 Installation"
bcdedit /set {newguid} device vhd=[D:]\Image.vhd
bcdedit /set {newguid} osdevice vhd=[D:]\Image.vhd
bcdedit /set {newguid} detecthal on

You can get more information here.

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.

• 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:

• Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Part1
• Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Create Hyper-V Image for Blade Servers – Part 2
• Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Install Blade Servers – Part 3
• Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Configure Blade Servers – Part 4
• Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Configure Hyper-V Networks – Part 5
• Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Create Hyper-V Cluster – Part 6
• Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Add Nodes to Hyper-V Cluster – Part 7
• Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Add Hyper-V Cluster to SCVMM – Part 8
• Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Important Updates for the Hyper-V Cluster – Part 9

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.

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.

This How-To shows you how you configure the (Virtual) Network Adapters of the Hyper-V Servers. This is not really heavy, but to complete the UCS Hyper-V Guide I post this. If you use Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 you will find later a post about doing this in SCVMM 2008 R2.

1. Connect to the Hyper-V Server with the Hyper-V Manager Console
   
2. Now you can configure the Networks under Virtual Network Manager on each Hyper-V Host.
   What we did is, we added 7 (Virtual) Network adapters to the UCS Bladenodes in the UCS Manager. We added the same on Configuration on the Blades which are using VMware ESXi and on the Blades with Microsoft Hyper-V and thats why we have a Network called vMotion on the Hyper-V Servers. We use the vMotion network adpater for the private Failover Cluster Heartbeat.

Basically we have the following Networks:

• 1. Network adapter is the Hyper-V Management Network dedicated to the Hyper-V Node
• 2. Network adpater for Hyper-V Cluster Live Migration
• 3. Network adapter for private Failover Cluster Heartbeat
• 4. Network adapter External Network, is used for our main external Network
• 5. Network adapter Internal Network, is used for our internal Management Network for Servers
• 6. and 7. Network adapters are used for VLAN Trunks

To get the best performance we don’t share any Network Adapter with the Hyper-V Host and a Virtual Network.

This 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.

• 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

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