Training – 44CO100/5495 Design, Implement, and Migrate a Virtual Environment using Windows Server Hyper-V and System Center – VMware Experts
Instructor – Paul Gregory [paul.gregory@qa-iq.com)
Paul is a seasoned IT practitioner with 20+ years of industry experience going back to DOS, Novell, and most Windows technologies in-between, before becoming a full time instructor he has worked in various architecture roles for large end users and consulting organisations.
Exams & Certification
070-652 – TS: Windows Server Virtualisation, Configuring (Hyper-V, with a bit of VMM)
070-403 – VMM
2nd shot exam promotion – Register 2nd shot before you take the test! (can’t be used after! bugger! Passed two exams in the last two weeks L)
Virtualisation specialisation for Gold partners will be available
Audience
Mostly Solution Architects from major consulting shops such as BT with years of experience going back to DOS, a lot of VMware architects
Virtual Machine Environment
WS2008 EE x64 with Hyper-V as host
Windows Unified Storage Server 2003 Enterprise x64 as iSCSI Target (WUDSS) J
WS2008 SCVMM 2008 as Deployment Server
WS2008 Domain Controller
References & guides
SCVMM Scripting Guide
SCVMM Offline Servicing
DynamicOps
Further training
TechNet Presents: MCS Talks Enterprise Architecture Session 10 – Virtualisation
View the New Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Silverlight Demo
20 November 2008, Virtualisation: Get the Facts – FREE Online Conference
Downloads
Download the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 RTM
Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 3.2 (RTM Version)
Choice facts & quotes
“In April-May 2008, Microsoft migrated the entire TechNet services (web-sites, and back-end!) to Hyper-V”
“John Lewis – consolidated their credit card handling systems to virtualisation (ESX), on to fewer servers and reduced their physical security costs considerably, whilst running their most critical systems in a virtualised environment – Virtualisation is ready for production!”
“Microsoft Virtualisation stack is built around ‘Good enough’ design concepts” (doubt they’ll admit that one though! 
)
Microsoft V-Infrastructure
- WS2008 with Hyper-V
- Hyper-V Server
- Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 …is now on performance par with similarly architected competitive products from VMware
- VirtualPC 2007 SP1 … “”
- Application Virtualisation (App-V formerly SoftGrid)
- Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit with Hyper-V support (should be our default audit tool!)
Performance and Resource Optimisation (PRO) – deep application level performance monitoring using OpsMgr & SCVMM to dynamically change the environment to deal with the issues found, e.g. bringing up a new virtualised machine to handle more workload – impressive stuff when it works!
Licensing
Per WS2008 box you can run 4 more WS2008 VM’s, with Data Center this is unlimited!
Hyper-V Server – free, but you must have licenses for your guest/child OS’s
Planning
Generic performance data to collect & tasks
- CPU, %processor time
- Memory, Committed Bytes
- Disk, Space & Performance
- Network, Bytes/sec, bandwidth
- Backup, required?
- Availability, determine method
- Coexistence and isolation, workload segregation
Differences between Hyper-V vs. VMware (ESX, Vi3)
Architectural
Driver model of Hyper-V allows much more flexibility vs. ESX allowing you to use almost any Windows supported hardware..
With ESX you don’t have that choice, however just because with Hyper-V you can buy a NIC for £5 doesn’t mean you should use it in your production systems!
Performance
Comparisons between Hyper-V & VMware is looking like about at 10% hit compared to ESX.. official numbers early 2009
Storage
Hyper-V supports Multi-Path IO (MPIO) due to the feature support in WS2008, allowing multiple HBA’s or NIC’s in a iSCSI setup
SAN design documents from Microsoft end in “speak to your storage vendor!” but are a good place to start
CPU hardware
Virtualisation optimised processors effectively provide another level of privileged execution for the Hypervisor in Ring -1
Networking
8 x synthetic devices are available and are much more efficient (thin adapters), although require integration services to be installed, so without this 4 x legacy/emulated network cards can also be presented to a VM
Hardware support
VMware supports USB & Parallel, Hyper-V does not although Microsoft encourages USB over IP
Tip – resources needed for the parent partition? – account on 5%, numbers for server-core/Hyper-V server are not published, but obviously should be less!
Interoperability
VHD (Virtual Hard Disk), VHD spec is freely available under the Open Specification Promise (OSP), now used across many products, can also be bootable!
Linux support is very good as considerable code use of from XenSource
Working with Novell – interoperability and joint support for Windows Server & Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10
(ganging up on the market leader!)
Hyper-V Networking
Can run on 1 NIC, recommended 2 or more (1 for management, 1 or more for VM networking)
iSCSI requires a dedicated NIC
To specify the management NIC, simply do not select it when creating the virtual networks as part of setup
..for server core or Hyper-V server the same applies, just don’t select the designated driver…
Tip – VM guest setup, if when moving the mouse from the host into a windowed guest and the mouse cursor turns to a dot then the integration services are not installed.
Tip – Hyper-V only supports a single session for guest control, if more are needed then use remote desktop
Tip – turn time synchronisation off in an Active Directory environment, the only one synchronising time should be the DC running the PDC emulator role.
Snapshots
Snapshots simply work by marking the running VHD read only, then creating a AVHD to write changes to, this is why it is so quick in Hyper-V compared to VMware. Snapshots honour the original VHD sizing so a fixed virtual disk will not end up being bigger than it should do, and compromising the physical disk.
Tip – snapshots to maintain multiple build threads, e.g. developer may have
RTM
|
— SP1 (snapshot)
|
— SP2 (snapshot)
|
— SP3 (snapshot)
Saving
Fast state-save and shutdown, akin to Hibernation, but not!
Microsoft advise is bad practise to save the state of DC’s, although no real technical reason other than the older than 60-days tomb-stoning issue (same as restoring a tape over 60-days old from tape… don’t!)
3. SCVMM 2008 Architecture, Implementation, Library, and VMware Vi3 Management
Tip – whilst VMM can managed Hyper-V & Virtual Server hosts that are not in a domain, or in a DMZ, VMM must be installed in a working AD (if virtualising can put on a DC)
Tip – USB storage devices and the VMM service do not get on, will result in unexpected behaviours and errors! (wtf!?!?!)
Tip – VMM Library refresh is once an hr by default, you can change this but not reduce – use refresh instead
PowerShell treats all data stores as drives, including enviornment variables, and the registry!.
4. SCVMM 2008 VI3 Template, and Windows Powershell
Template configuration, settings & profiles, is stored in the SQL 2005 dB, VHD’s stored in the library.
Windows PowerShell is the engine to allow automated, scripted (repeatable and consistent), management using VMM – obviously the GUI is the front-end! Anything that can be done through the GUI can also be scripted with PowerShell!
PowerShell is formatted in a verb, noun structure – what you are going to do, and what you want to manipulate e.g. to start a service is:
start-service nnnnnn
get-help will return all PowerShell commands with product specific extensions (if installed, e.g. Exchange, VMM, etc.).
get-help start-service will return the help for the start-service command.
to view the drives use:
get-psdrive
Tip – by default PS does not allow you to run scripts, this is controlled through an execution policy, use get-help set-executionpolicy to see the options
Tip – you cannot use PS on Server Core or Hyper-V server as it requires .Net to run, however you can use PS on another system to remotely manage a system inc. Server Core
5. Access Control, Self Service Portal, and Performance Resource Optimisation
Hyper-V Access
by default Hyper-V only allows members of the Administrators group to create and control virtual machines.
However, you can use Authorization Manager (azman.msc) to manipulate the InitialStore.xml to delegate Administrative Responsibilities (to non admins). You can, of course, use VMM to do this too!
Self-Service Portal
Allows self-service provisioning of machines through a Web-UI, can create groups of users with defined quotas to manage resource allocation, plus lots more!
Tip – the owner of a VM is very important, it defines who can see what machines through the Self-Service Portal – full AD integration, e.g. groups are supported.
Tip – For self created machines you are the owner, however if you specify the group name in user role properties then this will be the group.
Tip – if using VMM, just because you are an Administrator does not give you access to the Self-Serice portal web UI, you need to specifically add accounts to the Self-Service role
Performance Resource Optimisation (PRO)
PRO provides workload and application aware resource optimisation, it can be used to manually or automatically implement corrective actions such as the deployment of a new VM when existing loading suggests is advisable.
6. Failover Cluster, Quick Migration, Backup, and Recovery with Hyper-V and SCVMM
Uses the in-built clustering capability within WS2008, e.g. Enterprise or Data Center editions only -
Windows Cluster environment uses a shared storage model, e.g. use of iSCSI or FC SAN LUNs, however there is a 1 to 1 relationship between VM’s and LUNs – if you have multiple VM’s on 1 LUN, you have to migrate all VM’s if migrating a LUN.
3rd party tools existing such as SANBolic KAYO FS (c.$299), and MELIO FS to enable shared application access to the same data if supported (e.g. not Exchange with local storage) and mitigate this limitation.
Tip – iSCSI Initiator is supported in Server Core, use the iSCSICLI tool to configure.
Tip – if using HBA’s then all adaptors have to be identical down to firmware level (to be supported by Microsoft Clustering)
Tip – In production use a minimum of dual NICs for Clustering, but ideally 3 NICs (1 for public/user access, 1 for private/intra-server, 1 for storage)
Tip – when setting up Virtual Network switches, ensure identical naming, down to case level – failover is case-sensitive!
Tip – you don’t need to use the HCL to build clusters anymore, if it passes the Cluster Validation Wizard then it is supported, if it doesn’t it isn’t, simple!
7. V2V and P2V Troubleshooting
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