Computer Techno

Getting a Better Understanding of Windows 7 Libraries

2009-11-12T03:22:00.000+08:00

When you work with libraries, it is important to remember that they are only representations of collected data. Windows 7 creates merged views of files and folders that you add to libraries. As the libraries themselves do not contain any actual data, any action you take on a file or folder within a library is performed on the source file or folder. You can create new libraries to act as views to various collections of data as needed by right-clicking the Libraries node in Windows Explorer, pointing to New and then selecting Library.

If you’re ever curious about how libraries really work, access the %HomeDrive%\
%HomePath%\AppData\Roaming\Micrdosoft\Windows\Libraries folder. In this folder, you’ll find the library definition files for your user profile. Each library definition file ends with the .library-ms extension and is formatted as an XML file that follows Microsoft’s Library naming schema. If you view a library definition file, you’ll find that it uses simple locations to define where contents in the library originate from. Folder and files are referenced by globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) and the serialized contents of a particular location are encrypted. Some properties of libraries are tracked in the registry, but these are primarily used only when you want to restore the original libraries, which you can do in Windows Explorer by right-clicking the Libraries node and selecting Restore Default Libraries.

Note also that the %Public%\Libraries folder also may have library definition files. For example, Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center both make use of the Recorded-TV library. As this library isn’t a standard library in your user profile, it is represented in the %Public%\Libraries folder by the Recorded-TV.library-ms file.

Source of Information : OReilly Windows 7 The Definitive Guide

About Windows CardSpace

2009-11-11T03:31:00.000+08:00

Windows CardSpace lets you store user account information for online services that support the CardSpace feature. It’s a means of creating a digital identity that can be used instead of a username and password to log in to online accounts that support the CardSpace feature. CardSpace adds security to Web relationships by encrypting data in your card before sending the information to a Web site. You can also review cards from Web sites that use them to get more information about a site before signing up for an account.

CardSpace is still relatively new, with a limited number of Web sites supporting it. The idea of CardSpace is fairly simple, however. You can create one or more digital cards, each with whatever information you want to provide to Web sites with which you do business. For example, you might want cards that include only your name and no further identifying information. Other cards might include your street address and phone number.

When you set up an account with an online site that supports CardSpace, you can send your card rather than fill in blanks on that site’s user form. After you’ve established an account, you can submit your card whenever you need to log in to the site.

You can choose from two kinds of cards to use:

• Personal cards: These you create yourself and provide to online Web services as you see fit.

• Managed cards: These are like membership cards provided to you by organizations and businesses that support the CardSpace identity system.

Use one of the following methods to access Windows CardSpace:
• Click the Start button and choose Control Panel -> User Accounts and Family Safety Windows CardSpace.
• Tap [windows], type card and click Windows CardSpace.

If you’re taken to a welcome page, click OK to proceed. To create a personal card, click Add a Card in the right column. Click Personal Card and fill in whatever blanks you’re comfortable with. You might want to start by creating a basic card that contains your name, e-mail address, and perhaps a picture or logo. You can create other cards with more information, if necessary, for sites that you trust with that information.

You don’t create managed cards yourself. Instead, you set up an account with a service that uses managed cards. When you receive such a card, you’ll likely get instructions on its use. But the basic procedure is to go into CardSpace, click Add a Card, click Install a Managed Card, and then import the card that the online service has sent you.

If the CardSpace technology catches on, you’ll be able to access your cards right from your Web browser. When you go to log in to a site, you’ll see an option to log in the traditional way through a user account and password, or by using CardSpace (or an InfoCard). Click the option to use CardSpace, click the card you want to use, and you’re logged in.

Source of Information : Windows 7 Bible (2009)

Stop Entering Password on Lockout

2009-11-11T03:24:00.000+08:00

If you leave the computer for a few minutes without logging out, you’re taken to a lockout screen that shows your user account information. If your user account is password-protected, you need to enter your password to get back to the desktop. This is to prevent other people from using your computer while you’re away. But it makes sense only in a work environment. In a home environment, it may be overkill. You can reconfigure 7 so that you don’t have to reenter your password to get back to your desktop. Here are the steps:

1. Click the Start button, type pow, and click Power Options.

2. In the left column, click Require a Password on Wakeup.

3. If the options under Password Protection on Wakeup are disabled, click Change Settings that Are Currently Unavailable. Then elevate your privileges by clicking Continue or by entering the password for an administrative account.

4. Choose Don’t Require a Password.

5. Click Save Changes.

Source of Information : Windows 7 Bible (2009)

Customizing Windows 7’s Desktop - Navigating common folders and customizing the listed features

2009-11-11T03:19:00.000+08:00

The Start menu’s right pane provides access to commonly used folders and features. Though at first glance it may seem that this part of the Start menu is similar to the Start menu in Windows XP, this is deceiving, because there are major changes in the locations accessed by these buttons.

In Windows XP, your documents are stored by default in personal folders under %SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\%UserName%. Your personal folder contains a My Documents folder, which in turn contains other folders, such as My Pictures and My Music. Windows XP also has additional folders, such as Cookies, Local Settings, NetHood, and Printhood.

In Windows 7, some of these familiar folders don’t exist. They are implemented as symbolic links that act as reparse points to another directory on the computer. Essentially, these symbolic links redirect programs from locations where these folders were stored in Windows XP and earlier versions of Windows to where the folders are stored currently. If you’re ever curious about exactly how they work, open a command prompt and type dir /al. As the default directory for the command prompt is your user profile directory, you’ll then see a list of the hidden symbolic links in your user profile directory. With the dir command, the /A option displays files and folders with specified attributes and the l specifies that you want to display symbolic links. Other names for symbolic links are reparse points and junctions.

Windows 7 has many environment variables, which are used to refer to user-specific and system-specific values. %SystemDrive% and %User-Name% refer to the SystemDrive and UserName environment variables, respectively. Often, I’ll refer to environment variables using this syntax: %VariableName%. If you’d like to view the current value of any of these variables, click the Start menu, choose All Programs -> Accessories -> Command Prompt. Then type echo %VariableName%, such as echo %SystemDrive%, and then press Enter to see the value.

In Windows 7, your documents are stored by default in personal folders under %HomeDrive%\%HomePath%. Your personal folder contains the following folders:
AppData
A hidden system folder for storing your application data

Contacts
Contains your contacts for use in your mail programs

Desktop
Contains your desktop configuration settings

Downloads
Contains programs and data you’ve downloaded from the Internet

Favorites
Contains your Internet favorites

Links
Contains your Internet links

My Documents
Contains your word processing documents

My Music
Contains your music files

My Pictures
Contains your pictures and digital images

My Videos
Contains your video files

Saved Games
Contains saved game data

Searches
Contains your saved searches

If you examine some of these folders from the Command Prompt, you’ll see that they appear without the “My” prefix. For example, you’re my Documents folder is %HomeDrive%\%HomePath%\Documents.

In Windows 7, shared public documents are stored by default in public folders under %Public%. The public folder contains the following folders:

Desktop
Contains the shared desktop configuration. Any public desktop items show up on all user desktops.

Downloads
Contains shared, public programs and data downloaded from the Internet

Favorites
Contains shared, public Internet favorites

Libraries
Contains shared, public libraries

Public Documents
Contains shared, public word processing documents

Public Music
Contains shared, public music files

Public Pictures
Contains shared, public pictures

Public Recorded TV
Contains shared, public recorded television files

Public Videos
Contains shared, public video files

In addition to personal and public folders, Windows 7 uses libraries. A library is a combination of personal and public data grouped together and presented through a common view. The standard libraries include:

Documents
Collects a user’s My Documents data as well as Public Documents data

Music
Collects a user’s My Music data as well as Public Music data

Pictures
Collects a user’s My Pictures data as well as Public Pictures data

Videos
Collects a user’s My Videos data as well as Public Videos data

Knowing this, you can put the Start menu’s common folder options into perspective. From top to bottom, the option buttons are as follows:

Current User
Displayed as your logon name. Clicking this option opens your personal folder.

Documents
Opens the Documents library, which contains the My Documents folder from your personal folder and the Public Documents folder.

Pictures
Opens the Pictures library, which contains the My Pictures folder from your personal folder and the Public Pictures folder.

Music
Opens the Music library, which contains the My Music folder from your personal folder and the Public Music folder.

Games
Opens the Microsoft Games folder in Windows Explorer.

Computer
Opens the Computer view in Windows Explorer. This allows you to access hard disk drives and devices with removable storage.

Control Panel
Opens the Control Panel, which provides access to system configuration and management tools.

Devices and Printers
Opens the Devices and Printers page in Control Panel, which provides access to devices, printers, and faxes you’ve configured for use.

Default Programs
Displays the Default Programs page in the Control Panel. This lets you choose the programs that Windows 7 uses by default for documents, pictures, and more.

Help and Support
Displays the Help and Support console. This lets you browse or search help topics.

You can add features to the Start menu’s right pane using the Customize Start Menu dialog box. Right-click the Start button and then select Properties. In the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog box, click the Customize button on the Start Menu tab. In the Customize Start Menu dialog box, select or clear options as appropriate and then click OK twice.

Features you can add include:
Administrative Tools
Displays the Administrative Tools menu or window. This lets you access your
computer’s administrative tools.

Connect To
Opens the Network and Sharing Center notification window. You also can open
this window by clicking one of your network icons in the notification area.

Downloads
Opens the Downloads folder in Windows Explorer.

Favorites
Displays your favorite links as a menu. This lets you quickly access favorite
locations.

Homegroup
Opens the Homegroup folder in Windows Explorer so you can view files from other
people on the network (as long as they’ve joined the homegroup).

Network
Opens the Network Explorer. This allows you to browse the computers and devices
on your network.

Recent Items
Provides a menu view that lists recently opened files.

Run
Displays the Run dialog box. This lets you run commands.

Although you may have used the Run options previously, you’ll find the Search box to be much easier to work with. Not only can you use the Search box to open and run commands quicker, but you can also run commands with fewer clicks.

Source of Information : OReilly Windows 7 The Definitive Guide

Customizing Windows 7’s Desktop - Navigating and customizing the programs list

2009-11-10T03:00:00.000+08:00

The Start menu’s left pane displays recently used programs and programs that have been pinned to the Start menu. You can customize the programs list by pinning items to the Start menu and by changing the number of recently used programs to display. Programs pinned to the Start menu are listed in the uppermost section of the programs list. Pinning programs to the Start menu provides quick access to your favorite programs. You can pin a program to the Start menu by following these steps:

1. Click the Start button.

2. Click All Programs and locate the program’s menu entry.

3. Right-click the program’s menu entry.

4. On the shortcut menu, select Pin to Start Menu.

If you no longer want a program to be pinned to the Start menu, you can unpin it by following these steps:

1. Click the Start button.

2. Right-click the program on the Start menu.

3. Select Unpin from Start Menu.

On the Start menu, recently used programs are listed in the lower portion of the programs list. You can remove a program from the recently used list by right-clicking it and then selecting “Remove from this list.” This won’t, however, prevent the program from being added to the list in the future.

You can customize the programs list by completing the following steps:

1. Right-click the Start button and then select Properties.

2. In the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog box, the Start Menu tab is selected by default. Click Customize. Set the “Number of recent programs to display” option to the desired value.

3. Using small icons instead of large icons, you can display more programs on the list. Scroll down the list of options and clear Use Large Icons.

4. Click OK twice.

Source of Information : OReilly Windows 7 The Definitive Guide

Windows 7 Built-in Applications - Windows PowerShell

2009-11-09T06:27:00.000+08:00

In Windows 7, the Windows PowerShell application is included by default. The Windows PowerShell is an extensible command-line shell application that executes applications written in its associated scripting languages, allowing IT administrators to easily automate and administer their IT infrastructure. Think of Windows PowerShell as the command prompt (with which most Windows users are familiar) on steroids—a very powerful one indeed. Windows PowerShell is available as a separate download for Windows XP and Vista users.

To launch Windows PowerShell, type “Windows PowerShell” in the Start menu text box.

Using the Windows PowerShell, you can issue commands that you normally use with your command prompt window, such as dir:

Windows PowerShell
Copyright (C) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

PS C:\Users\Wei-Meng Lee> dir

Directory: C:\Users\Wei-Meng Lee
Mode LastWriteTime Length Name
---- ------------- ------ ----
d-r-- 5/2/2009 2:49 PM Contacts
d-r-- 6/22/2009 6:48 AM Desktop
d-r-- 6/20/2009 2:28 PM Documents
d-r-- 6/19/2009 12:02 PM Downloads
d-r-- 5/20/2009 9:06 AM Favorites
d-r-- 5/2/2009 2:49 PM Links
d-r-- 5/2/2009 2:49 PM Music
d-r-- 6/14/2009 10:07 PM Pictures
d-r-- 5/2/2009 3:42 PM Saved Games
d-r-- 6/9/2009 2:33 PM Searches
d---- 6/28/2009 9:49 AM Tracing
d-r-- 5/2/2009 2:49 PM Videos
d-r-- 6/20/2009 1:51 PM Virtual Machines

PS C:\Users\Wei-Meng Lee>

When you issue the dir command, PowerShell actually translates it into the name of a cmdlet (Windows 7 has more than 100 cmdlets), which is a programming script. The dir command is an alias of the Get-ChildItem cmdlet.

The following example shows how you can take the directory listing of the Windows directory and then pipe it into another cmdlet named format-list, which displays in detail the information of each directory and file:

PS C:\Windows> dir | format-list

Directory: C:\Windows
Name : addins
CreationTime : 4/22/2009 4:55:52 PM
LastWriteTime : 4/22/2009 4:55:52 PM
LastAccessTime : 4/22/2009 4:55:52 PM
Name : AppCompat
CreationTime : 4/22/2009 2:17:25 PM
LastWriteTime : 5/16/2009 6:47:19 AM
LastAccessTime : 5/16/2009 6:47:19 AM
Name : AppPatch
CreationTime : 4/22/2009 2:17:25 PM
LastWriteTime : 4/22/2009 5:01:13 PM
LastAccessTime : 4/22/2009 5:01:13 PM
Name : assembly
CreationTime : 4/22/2009 2:17:25 PM
LastWriteTime : 5/28/2009 3:25:15 AM
LastAccessTime : 5/28/2009 3:25:15 AM
Name : Boot
CreationTime : 4/22/2009 2:17:26 PM
LastWriteTime : 4/22/2009 4:55:52 PM
LastAccessTime : 4/22/2009 4:55:52 PM
Name : Branding
CreationTime : 4/22/2009 2:17:26 PM
LastWriteTime : 4/22/2009 4:55:52 PM
LastAccessTime : 4/22/2009 4:55:52 PM
...
...
Name : write.exe
Length : 9216
CreationTime : 4/22/2009 11:39:18 AM
LastWriteTime : 4/22/2009 1:19:45 PM
LastAccessTime : 4/22/2009 11:39:18 AM
VersionInfo : File: C:\Windows\write.exe
InternalName: write

OriginalFilename: write
FileVersion: 6.1.7100.0 (winmain_win7rc.090421-1700)
FileDescription: Windows Write
Product: Microsoftr Windowsr Operating System
ProductVersion: 6.1.7100.0
Debug: False
Patched: False
PreRelease: False
PrivateBuild: False
SpecialBuild: False
Language: English (United States)
Name : _default.pif
Length : 707
CreationTime : 4/22/2009 9:29:14 AM
LastWriteTime : 3/20/2009 11:42:51 PM
LastAccessTime : 4/22/2009 9:29:14 AM
VersionInfo : File: C:\Windows\_default.pif
InternalName:
OriginalFilename:
FileVersion:
FileDescription:
Product:
ProductVersion:
Debug: False
Patched: False
PreRelease: False
PrivateBuild: False
SpecialBuild: False
Language:

Source of Information : Oreilly Windows 7 Up and Running

Windows 7 Built-in Applications - Snipping Tool

2009-11-08T06:21:00.000+08:00

Beginning with Windows Vista, Microsoft shipped an application called the Snipping Tool, which is included in Windows 7 as well. The Snipping Tool is a screen-capture tool.

To launch the Snipping Tool, select Start menu->Snipping Tool.

Clicking the arrow next to the New button reveals four options in which you can capture your screenshots:

Free-form Snip
You can capture your screen by simply moving your mouse to designate the area you want to capture; it can be of any shape.

Rectangular Snip
You capture a rectangular portion of your screen.

Windows Snip
You capture any of the opened windows on the screen.

Full-screen Snip
You capture the entire screen. This works for multiple monitor setups, too.

You can save the image to disk or email it. If you want to insert the captured image into another application (say, Word), click the Copy icon (third icon) and paste it into your target application.

Longtime users of Windows know that they can capture screenshots easily using the Print Scrn key (or Alt-Print Scrn for capturing the current active window) on the keyboard. But the Snipping Tool makes it easy for you to capture specific parts of your screen directly without needing to further edit your screenshots. It also allows you to directly save the screenshots to file.

Source of Information : Oreilly Windows 7 Up and Running

Windows Live Essentials

2009-11-07T05:59:00.000+08:00

Windows Live is the brand name for a set of services and applications offered by Microsoft. Broadly speaking, Windows Live is made of two parts: Windows Live Services and Windows Live Essentials. Windows Live Services refers to hosted applications/services that you can use over the Web. A good example of a Windows Live Services application is Hotmail; another example would be MySpace. Windows Live Essentials, on the other hand, refers to a suite of applications that users can download and install on their Windows computers. Examples are Messenger, Mail, and Photo Gallery. This section will focus on Windows Live Essentials.

The Windows Live Essentials suite includes the following key applications (as well as some add-ins to other applications such as the Windows Live Toolbar for Internet Explorer):
• Messenger
• Mail
• Photo Gallery
• Writer
• Family Safety
• Movie Maker

To download Live Essentials, go to http://download.live.com. You can download the main installer application, which will allow you to choose and download your desired applications on demand.

Windows Live Messenger
Windows Live Messenger is an instant messaging application.
Windows Live Messenger offers the following functionalities:
• File transfers
• PC-to-PC and PC-to-phone calls
• Photo sharing
• Sending SMS messages
Using Live Messenger, you can also send messages to other users even when they are offline .

Windows Live Mail
Windows Live Mail is the successor to Outlook Express (shipped with Windows XP) and Windows Mail on Windows Vista. Using Live Mail, you can read and send email from one or more email accounts, including accounts from providers such as Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo!, and more.

Live Mail supports the POP3, IMAP, and HTTP protocols. The last one is particularly important for Hotmail users, because that service requires the HTTP protocol in order to be able to read your email using a mail client (unless you subscribe to the Hotmail Premium service). Also included with Mail are four other subapplications—Calendar, Contacts, Feeds, and Newsgroups (you need to press the Alt key to reveal the menu).

When you click the Sign In button in the upper right, Windows Live Mail will:
• Allow you to use your Windows Live online contact list (via the Windows Live Contacts application) and see when senders are online in Messenger
• Sync with your Windows Live calendars

Windows Live Mail Versus Live Hotmail
The popular, free web-based email service Hotmail was once called Windows Live Mail. It has since been renamed Windows Live Hotmail. The name Windows Live Mail now refers to the desktop version of the email application.

Subscribing to Microsoft Communities
To subscribe to a newsgroup using Windows Live Mail, click the Newsgroup icon in the bottom left of the Windows Live Mail window (or make the menu visible with the Alt key, then select Go->Newsgroups). The first time you go to the Newsgroups section, you will see a message indicating that you are not subscribed to any newsgroup. Click the View Newsgroups button to see a list of available newsgroups from the Microsoft Communities. Select the newsgroups that you are interested in and click Subscribe.

Working with the Calendar
To view your calendar in Windows Live Mail, click the Calendar icon in the bottom left of the Windows Live Mail window (or make the menu visible with the Alt key, then select Go->Calendar). The calendar will be displayed.

You can create a new Calendar by clicking the “Add calendar” link. Creating a new calendar allows you to organize the entries according to specific occasions. For example, you might have a calendar for company meetings and another for family matters.

You can also share calendars that you have created with your friends or the public. Before you can share your calendar, you need to sign into Live.com. Click the Sign In button in the upper right of the Windows Live Mail Window (if you see your Windows Live ID listed there instead of a Sign In button, it means that you are already signed in).

By default, three calendars will be created for you: My Calendar (your personal calendar), Birthday calendar (your contacts’ birthdays calendar), and Holidays (the holidays of the country you have selected).

However, to do so, you need to use the web-based version of Calendar. First, log in to http://calendar.live.com. You will be asked to sign in using your Live ID (the one that you signed into from within Windows Live Mail). Once you have signed in, you will be able to specify which calendar you want to share by clicking the Share link. You can then specify whom you want to invite to subscribe to your calendar, and the selected recipients will receive an email invitation.

Another interesting thing you can do with Windows Live Mail is subscribe to an online calendar. Subscribing to online calendars allows you to view the calendar of another party and be updated automatically when the party’s calendar is updated.

To subscribe to a calendar published by other users/organizations, click the Subscribe
link. You will be asked to either subscribe from a public calendar via a URL or import an .ics file. When you subscribe to a calendar via a URL, you will always get the updates performed by the calendar owner. An example of a calendar URL looks like this: http://cid-6d498f3bdb1fa52e.calendar.live.com/calendar/Trainings/index.html. If you choose to import the calendar via an .ics file, then you will only get a static calendar (i.e., you won’t see updates performed by the calendar owner). Calendars created in Live.com will be synchronized automatically with Windows Live Mail when you relaunch Windows Live Mail again (or simply press F5).

Windows Live Photo Gallery
Windows Live Photo Gallery is a photo management and photo sharing application that is tightly integrated with Windows Live Messenger. Using the Live Photo Gallery, you can organize your photos into folders, as well as tag photos and then upload them to Windows Live Photos and Flickr.

Windows Live Photo Gallery is the successor to Vista’s Windows Photo Gallery application. The names of your friends are taken from Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Contacts.

Windows Live Writer
Windows Live Writer is a blog-publishing application that allows you to publish your postings to blog publishing sites such as Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, and Windows Live Spaces.

When you first start Live Writer, you will be asked to create a new blog on Windows Live or use an existing blogging account. Once you have done this, you can use Writer to create a new posting and then publish it to your blogging account.

A nice feature of Windows Live Writer is WYSIWYG editing, and also that it supports rich content like images, maps, videos, and all major text-editing features like tables, alignment, and spellchecking.

Windows Live Family Safety
Windows Live Family Safety is a parental control application that allows parents to monitor their children’s activities on the Web. You can install Live Family Safety on all computers that your children use in your home. To activate Windows Live Family Safety, you will first be asked to log in using your Windows Live ID (such as your Hotmail email account). Once you have logged in, you will see the screen.

Select the account(s) to monitor and click Next. You will be prompted to match the Windows account with the name in Family Safety. Once this is done, click Save. You will now see that the default filter is Basic, which means that only adult websites are blocked. To change the filter, go to http://familysafety.live.com and you will be able to change the filter type to Strict, Basic, or Custom.

In order for the child to visit the page, he will need a parent (the one who signed in to Live Family Safety) to authorize the page using the password supplied during the signing-in process. Alternatively, the child can also email the parent the request.

Windows Live Movie Maker
Windows Live Movie Maker is a video creating and editing application. It is the successor to the Windows Movie Maker included with Windows Vista. The new Windows Live Movie Maker is now much more user-friendly.

Using Live Movie Maker, you can save your movies in Windows Media as DVD quality or Windows Media portable device format. Windows Live Movie Maker requires a video card that is at least as powerful as the ATI Radeon 9500 or nVidia GeForce FX 5900.

Source of Information : Oreilly Windows 7 Up and Running

Windows 7 Encrypting File System (NTFS Encryption)

2009-11-06T06:00:00.000+08:00

As you have seen, BitLocker and BitLocker To Go encrypt the entire drive to protect the integrity of your filesystems. However, sometimes you may need to encrypt just selected files (or folders), not the entire drive. To do this, you can make use of the Encrypting File System, also known as the NTFS Encryption feature of Windows 7.

NTFS Encryption is available only in Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. To encrypt a file (or folder), right-click its icon and select Properties. In the General tab, click the Advanced... button. Check the “Encrypt contents to secure data” checkbox and click OK twice.

You will be asked if you want to encrypt the entire file itself, or encrypt its parent folder as well (recommended). Select the option you want and click OK. The file will now be encrypted. If you click the Details button, you will see that the file has been encrypted using a certificate bearing your name (this is created for you automatically).

To allow other users to access your encrypted file, click the Add... button to add the certificates provided by the users. A user who possesses the certificate contained in the certificates list will be able to access your encrypted file.

When you select the certificate name, you will be able to back up the certificate to disk. Doing so allows you to pass your certificate to other users so that they can also access this encrypted file. However, giving your certificate to other users will allow them to access all your encrypted files and folders (that use the same certificate). So, think carefully before you give away your certificates.

Creating Certificates
When you encrypt a file using NTFS Encryption, Windows 7 automatically creates an encryption certificate for you if you do not already have one. However, you can also manually create your own encryption certificate using the “Manage file encryption certificates” application (just type “Manage file encryption certificates” in the search box of the Start menu).

By creating your own certificates, you can then encrypt different files using different certificates. Doing so allows you to share specific encrypted files with other users without compromising the integrity of other files.

If you already have a certificate created for you, you should see it now. To view other certificates on your computer, click the “Select certificate” button. If you want to create a new certificate, choose the “Create a new certificate” option and click Next. You will now choose the type of certificate you want to create. If you do not have a smartcard, you should select the first option, where you will create a selfsigned certificate stored on your computer. Click Next.

Your certificate will now be created. On the next screen, you have the option to back up your certificate to storage. Supply a path and a password for the backup. Click Next to continue.

Now you have the option to update your encrypted files with the new certificate and key (all your encrypted files will now use this new certificate). Select the drives or folders containing the encrypted files and click Next. That’s it! Your certificate is now created. The certificate is saved as a file with the .pfx extension.

Importing Certificates
When you receive a .pfx certificate from someone else, you can import it into your own certificate store in Windows by double-clicking the .pfx file. When you double-click a .pfx file, the Certificate Import Wizard will appear. Click Next to proceed. You will be asked to specify the location of the .pfx file. When done, click Next. Enter the password that was used to protect the certificate and then click Next twice. Finally, if the importing is successful, click the Finish button.

Source of Information : Oreilly Windows 7 Up and Running

Windows 7 BitLocker Drive Encryption

2009-11-05T05:51:00.000+08:00

In Windows Vista, you had the BitLocker Drive Encryption feature that allowed you to encrypt the content of entire volumes. In Windows 7, Microsoft has extended this feature to include removable hard disks and thumb drives. This new feature is known as BitLocker To Go.

The encryption performed by BitLocker is transparent to the user—you will use the drive normally and Windows 7 will automatically encrypt the data on the fly when you write to the drive. Likewise, Windows will decrypt the data on the fly when you read from the drive.

BitLocker
The BitLocker Drive Encryption feature in Windows 7 (also available in Windows Vista) allows you to encrypt your hard drives so that it is safe from unauthorized access. Using BitLocker, all data written to a hard drive stays encrypted when it is stored on the drive. When the OS reads the data, it is automatically decrypted. However, if a BitLocker-encrypted drive is removed from a computer, its content will not be accessible unless the correct password is provided. This way, BitLocker helps protect the integrity and security of your data.

There are two types of hard drives you can encrypt using BitLocker: Operating system drive This is the drive where Windows 7 is installed in. Data drive(s) This includes internal data drives attached to your computer.

BitLocker is available only in the Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Windows 7. To encrypt the operating system drive using BitLocker, right-click the C: drive and select “Turn on BitLocker...” Alternatively, you can manage BitLocker on all your drives via the BitLocker Drive Encryption application in the Control Panel.

In order to use BitLocker to encrypt your hard drive containing your operating system, your computer needs to have the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip. BitLocker uses the TPM chip to store the keys that are used to decrypt your encrypted drive during bootup time. Alternatively, if your computer does not have the TPM chip, you can store the encryption key on a USB thumb drive. In this case, you need to insert your USB drive into your computer during bootup time.

Using BitLocker to encrypt your operating system drive also requires two partitions on the hard drive—one system partition (hidden boot partition) and one operating system partition. Fortunately, Windows 7 automatically creates these two partitions during the installation process.

For encrypting data drives, BitLocker requires the drive to be formatted using either the exFAT, FAT16, FAT32, or NTFS filesystems.

BitLocker To Go
BitLocker To Go is an extension of the BitLocker application that provides encryption support for removable hard disks and thumb drives.

BitLocker To Go is available only in the Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Windows 7. To turn on BitLocker To Go, simply insert your thumb drive into your computer, rightclick the drive icon in Computer and select “Turn on BitLocker...”.

Now you need to choose a way for the drive to be unlocked when it has been encrypted—using a password or a smartcard. The easiest way would be to choose a password; if you choose this option, supply a password. Click Next to proceed. In the next step, you have a choice to store your recovery key to a file or print it out. The recovery key is used to temporarily unlock a BitLocker-encrypted drive in the event that you forgot the password. Choose the desired option and click Next. You are now ready to encrypt your drive. Click the Start Encrypting button to begin the encryption.

Windows will now start to encrypt your drive. It will take some time, especially if you have a large-capacity thumb drive. When the encryption is done, a lock will appear on the drive icon. From now on, whenever you insert your thumb drive into your computer, you will be prompted to enter the password to unlock the drive. Enter the password and click the Unlock button to unlock the drive.

If you insert a thumb drive encrypted with BitLocker To Go into a Windows XP computer, you will be prompted to enter the key to unlock the drive. If you forgot your password, click the “I forgot my password” link. You will be prompted to enter the recovery key that you saved/printed earlier. Enter the recovery key and you will be granted temporary access to the drive before you change its password.

You also have the option to automatically unlock the drive on the current computer. If you choose this option, you will not be prompted to unlock the drive every time you insert the thumb drive into the current computer. You should choose this option only if you are sure that your computer is secure and that it is not easily accessible to other people. You can change the BitLocker feature of a drive by right-clicking the drive icon in Computer and selecting Manage BitLocker.

Source of Information : Oreilly Windows 7 Up and Running

Windows 7 - The Credential Manager

2009-11-04T06:42:00.000+08:00

Windows 7 includes a feature known as the Credential Manager to help users save their credentials to a vault. Although this is not a new feature, in this version it has the ability to back up and restore the vault. In the Credential Manager, all the credentials are stored in a secure location known as the Windows Vault.

To use the Credential Manager, go to Control Panel->User Accounts and Family Safety->Credential Manager. There are three types of credentials you can store using Credential Manager:

Windows credentials
Stores the credentials of resources such as servers, printers, and the like.

Certificate-based credentials
Stores certificate-based credentials, such as those from a smartcard.

Generic credentials
Stores generic credentials, such as online IDs.

Using the Credential Manager
Note that the Credential Manager is designed to work with resources (such as servers and websites) that make use of the Credential Manager API to retrieve the username and password from the Credential Manager. A good example is Windows Live Hotmail.

When you first log in to Windows Live Hotmail, you have an option to save the password to your computer. When you check the “Remember my password” link, the credential (Windows Live ID and password, in this case) is automatically saved into the Credential Manager.

If you log out from Hotmail now and try to log in again, you will see that your Windows Live ID is now displayed on the login page and that you can log in automatically (without needing to enter the password) by clicking the “Sign in” button. For websites that do not use Windows Live Login, Internet Explorer will store the ID and password pair in the Registry.

Linking Online IDs
In the previous section, you saw how Hotmail automatically signs you in using the credentials saved in the Credential Manager. The Credential Manager also allows you to link your login user account with an online ID explicitly (such as those given by your email service provider) so that you can sign in to these services automatically. This is done via online ID providers. An online ID provider associates your Windows login with an online ID so that when you access your online service you do not need to supply your username and password again.

To manually link your user account with an online ID, click the “Link online IDs” link at the bottom of the Credential Manager window. Click the “Add an online ID provider” link to locate an online ID provider.

You will be brought to a web page where you can locate an online ID provider. At this moment, only one online ID provider is available—Windows Live. Click the Windows Live icon.

You will be brought to a page where you can download the necessary program. In this case, you need to download the Windows Live ID Sign-in Assistant. Once the download is complete, proceed with the installation.

Click the “Link online ID” link to add an online ID. Enter your Live ID. You should now see the credentials you entered. Now when you use any of the Windows Live services (such as Hotmail and Messenger), you will see that your credentials are automatically filled in for you.

Backing Up the Credentials
A new feature of the Credential Manager in Windows 7 is its ability to back up your credentials to the filesystem. To back up the vault, click the “Back up vault” link. You will be asked to select a path to back up the vault. Click the Browse... button and specify the path and name of the backup vault. Click Next.

To continue, press Ctrl-Alt-Delete. You will now be asked to protect the file with a password. Enter the password twice and the vault will be backed up. To restore the vault, click the “Restore vault” link and supply the password used to protect the file.

Source of Information : Oreilly Windows 7 Up and Running

Windows 7 User Account Control

2009-11-03T06:32:00.000+08:00

One of the most fiercely criticized features of Windows Vista is the User Account Control (UAC). Whenever a system-level change is made, Vista’s UAC displays a dialog box prompting the user to continue or stop. This happens regardless of whether it is a program that is making the changes or the user herself (even though she might be logged in as an administrator). And with the frequency that the UAC displays prompts, most users find it a nuisance rather than a useful security alert feature. Moreover, when the user ends up with too many UAC prompts, it actually defeats the purpose, as users simply give their permission without reading the prompts.

In Windows Vista, Microsoft only provided two options to control UAC—turn it on or turn it off. In Windows 7, Microsoft has fine-tuned the UAC so that you can choose when to be notified if changes happen.

To configure UAC, go to Control Panel and select User Accounts and Family Safety, and then select User Accounts. Click the Change User Account Control settings link.

Notice that you now have four levels to specify how you are notified when changes are made to your computer.

The four levels are:
• Always notify when programs install software or users make changes to the computer. This is the most naggy option, as all changes require the permission of the user (this is the option used by Vista).

• Notify only when programs make changes to the system. When the user makes changes to the Windows settings, there will be no prompting. This is the default level selected by Windows.

• Notify only when programs make changes to the system without desktop dimming. When the user makes changes to the Windows settings, there will be no prompting.

• The user is never notified. This option is not recommended.

When you select a particular notification level and click OK, you will be prompted to confirm the selection.

Source of Information : Oreilly Windows 7 Up and Running

Windows 7 File Sharing

2009-11-02T06:21:00.000+08:00

File Sharing with Windows XP
Though the new HomeGroup feature in Windows 7 makes file sharing very simple, it is incompatible with previous versions of Windows. If you need to share files with Windows XP or Windows Vista computers, you have to rely on the old trusty filesharing mechanism:

1. To share files with other users and computers on the network, turn off passwordprotected sharing so that users can access the files without authentication.

2. Go to Control Panel->Network and Internet->Network and Sharing Center. Click the “Change advanced sharing settings” link.

3. Scroll to the bottom of the page and locate the “Password protected sharing” section. Turn off the password-protected sharing, as this will allow other users to access your shared file without needing an account on your computer. Click the “Save changes” button when done.

4. Create a folder that you want to share. For example, create a folder on the desktop and name it Common Files.

5. Right-click the folder and select Properties.

6. Click the Sharing tab and click the Share... button. You will see the File Sharing window.

7. Click the drop-down arrow to select from a list of users who can access the shared folder. Once selected, click Add to add the user to the shared list. You can also configure the read/write permission for each user. Here, I am sharing the files with everyone on the network.

8. Click Share.

On the Windows XP computer, open the My Network Places window, and you should be able to see the various shared folders on the network. Double-click the one that contains your shared folder.

You will now be able to access the content in the shared folder.

Viewing Shared Folders from Within Windows 7
In Windows 7, to view shared folders from other computers, launch Windows Explorer and expand the Network item on the bottom-left corner of the window. All shared folders on the network will be listed here.

File Sharing with Mac OS X
If you want to share your Windows 7 files with Mac OS X users, use the SMB (Server
Message Block) protocol in Mac OS X.

The following steps outline how you can view shared folders in Mac OS X:
1. In Finder, select Go->Connect to Server....

2. Specify the “smb://” prefix, followed by the IP address (or computer name) of the Windows 7 computer and the “:139” port number. Click Connect.

3. If the connection is successful, you will be asked to log in to the Windows 7 computer. For sharing with everyone, select the Guest account and click Connect.

4. You will be asked to select the folder to mount in Mac OS X. Select the folder and click OK.

5. Finally, the shared folder is now available in Mac OS X.

Source of Information : Oreilly Windows 7 Up and Running

Virtualization Best Practices - Storage: How Many Drives Do I Need?

2009-11-01T06:38:00.000+08:00

Storage can be one of the most complicated areas to plan for virtualization deployments. It’s rare that you’ll know exactly how large your VMs will grow, which may lead to either too much or not enough storage being allocated to a particular virtualization host. You can avoid both situations with some planning and monitoring.

When you’re planning a virtualization deployment, knowing the basics of the workload and expected growth is critical to ensuring that enough storage is provisioned to the host. However, the way that storage is provisioned is as critical as the amount. Allocating 2TB of storage to a host for VM usage may sound great; but if it’s two 1TB drives connected to a Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) controller on the motherboard, it’s highly unlikely that it will perform under load.

Storage planning involves two main areas of concern: storage controllers and the number of drives connected to those controllers. The type of storage on the back end also matters:

Storage controllers. The number of storage controllers installed in the system is a common bottleneck. A VM will do as much I/O as a physical system. If a VM is doing significant amounts of I/O, it can and will saturate the storage controller. Performance will suffer for any other VMs that are using virtual hard disks (VHDs) available from that storage controller. That’s why it’s absolutely critical to have multiple paths available to the storage pool, for both performance reasons and failover in case of a loss of connection. Having multiple controllers available eliminates the single point of failure that can cripple a large-scale virtualization deployment.

Number of drives. As we mentioned earlier, provisioning storage for virtualization doesn’t always mean getting the largest drive available. In many cases, just as with many highperformance workloads, it’s preferable to have multiple smaller disks as opposed to fewer larger disks. Having multiple disks available lets you spread the work across multiple physical disks that are part of a Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID).

Storage type. The type of storage connected to the host is of slightly less importance. As long as the storage is on the Windows Server 2008 hardware compatibility list, it will work with Hyper-V. This includes small computer system interface (SCSI), serial-attached SCSI (SAS), Internet SCSI (iSCSI), fibre channel, and even Intelligent Drive Electronics (IDE) and SATA. You’ll see the difference in the rotational speed of the disk, as well as the amount of cache available on the disk. The performance gains from moving from a 7,200 RPM disk to a 10,000 RPM or even 15,000 RPM disk are significant and can increase even more past that level. Similarly, moving from 4 or 8MB of cache to 16 or 32MB will increase performance.

Volume management. When you pair storage with highly available VMs, the best practices get a bit more complicated. VMs that are made highly available as part of failover clustering have a limitation of one VM per logical unit number (LUN) if individual failover per VM is desired. This means you must carefully plan the provisioning of LUNs.

After your Hyper-V host is up and running, you should watch a few performance counters related to storage:
• Physical Disk, % Disk Read Time
• Physical Disk, % Disk Write Time
• Physical Disk, % Idle Time

These three counters provide a good high-level view of disk activity. If the read and write times are high (consistently greater than 75%), then disk performance is likely to be affected.
Additional counters to monitor include these:
• Physical Disk, Avg. Disk Read Queue Length
• Physical Disk, Avg. Disk Write Queue Length
High levels for these counters (greater than 2) may indicate a disk bottleneck.

Source of Information : Sybex Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Insiders Guide to Microsofts Hypervisor

Virtualization Best Practices - How Much Memory Is Enough?

2009-10-31T06:01:00.000+08:00

Memory is another key area to consider when you set up virtualization. After all, you can have all the processing power in the world, but unless you have enough memory to run those VMs at the same time, you’ll be stuck with extra processing power.

Hyper-V doesn’t support the concept of allocating more memory than is available in the host system. This prevents you from affecting the performance of the host. (If you started a VM using 4GB on a system with 2GB of RAM, the system would need to use virtual memory to provide the extra memory beyond what was available on the host.) How much memory is necessary for the host? The usual answer applies here: It depends on a number of factors.

Number of VMs running, and their allocated memory. How many VMs will be running on the host, and how much memory will be allocated to each one? The amount of memory each VMs needs is entirely dependent on the workload running within the VM. A SQL Server running in a VM will require much more memory than a departmental file server.

Other workloads running on the host. Although it’s recommended that Hyper-V be the only role running on the host, it’s possible that this won’t be the case. If so, it’s critical that enough memory be available to service all the other workloads running on the system. Refer to the memory requirements of the other workload(s) that will be running on the host, and add that amount to the total amount of memory required for the VM.

Host reserves. It’s recommended that you set aside 512MB of RAM for the host. That memory is used by Hyper-V’s virtualization stack that runs in the parent partition, as well as by any services running in the parent partition. Hyper-V won’t allow a VM to launch unless at least 32MB of RAM is available.

Other VMs (for quick-migration scenarios only). If the host is part of a Windows Server
2008 cluster for quick migration, ensure that there are sufficient resources across all nodes of the cluster in case one node goes down. If a node hosting VMs goes offline for any reason, those VMs will attempt to restart across all other nodes in the cluster. However, if there’s not enough memory on the cluster’s remaining active nodes, the VMs may not be able to start.

Luckily, monitoring the amount of available memory on a Hyper-V host is significantly easier than monitoring processor utilization, because memory utilization appears in Task Manager. You can also monitor the host’s memory utilization using the Memory Available Mbytes counter.

In some rare cases, a VM may not be able to start even when plenty Note of memory is available. This is most commonly seen when large file copies are performed in the parent partition. Microsoft has released a hotfix for this as KB953585.

Source of Information : Sybex Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Insiders Guide to Microsofts Hypervisor

Virtualization Best Practices - Faster Processors and Performance

2009-10-30T06:55:00.000+08:00

In some cases, the speed of the processors leads to better performance. However, this isn’t always the case. For example, let’s consider a VM created by using a physical-to-virtual conversion. This workload was previously running on an older Pentium 3 Xeon processor at 700MHz and is running a custom line-of-business (LOB) application.
Now that it’s in a VM, will the workload run more quickly? Depending on the type of application, it may not. That doesn’t mean the extra processing power from faster processors goes to waste, because it provides extra headroom for workloads to grow and a resource for other VMs. But you do need to take this fact into account.

CPU-Bound or I/O-Bound Workloads
Not all workloads are capped by the processing power available to the VM. Some workloads, such as a SQL Server, are generally bound to a greater extent by the limits of memory and the disk subsystem than by the processor. In this case, buying a faster processor won’t necessarily provide faster performance to the VMs—use the money you save to invest in memory or a faster storage subsystem. Once the host has been deployed, administrators often use management tools to determine how the host is performing. But because of the virtual nature of the processors, monitoring a virtual system isn’t as simple as looking at the Task Manager.

Perfmon
Traditionally, administrators used Windows Task Manager to get a quick glance at what was happening on the system. However, because of the architecture of Hyper-V, Task
Manager doesn’t show the CPU usage of VMs. Task Manager running in the parent partition has no way of displaying that information; instead, you need to use Perfmon.

Perfmon, short for Performance Monitor, is Microsoft’s tool to examine performance data. This data can be as simple as CPU utilization or as complex as context switches between Ring 0 and Ring 3.

By looking at the Hyper-V performance counters through Perfmon, you can determine if the system has room for more VMs or, conversely, if the system is oversubscribed (too many VMs running on the host).

Using Perfmon to monitor the host is easy. From the Start menu, select Administrative Tools, and then select Reliability And Performance Monitor. Click Performance Monitor in the list on the left.

By default, only one item is tracked in Perfmon: % Processor Time. Unless you’re interested in the processor utilization of the parent partition only, you’ll need to add some counters.

The processor-performance counters refer to the number of logical processors (LPs) in the system. A logical processor is a unit of processing power—for example, if you have a system with a single CPU socket and a single-core, non-hyperthreaded processor, you have one LP. Change that processor to a dual-core processor, and you have two LPs. Adding Hyper-Threading? Make it four logical processors.

To add a performance counter, you click the green + sign or press Ctrl-I. A large number of Hyper-V–related performance counters are available, but we’re interested in a couple in particular:

Hyper-V Hypervisor Virtual Processor, % Total Run Time. Under Instances Of Selected
Object, you’ll see a few options. _Total provides a sum of all the VPs allocated to all running VMs. You can also add individual VPs allocated to a VM.

Hyper-V Hypervisor Root Virtual Processor, % Total Run Time. This is the percentage of the time that the logical processors selected are executing instructions in non Hypervisor–based code in the root/parent partition.

Adding these two values gives you the total CPU utilization of the host executing virtualizationrelated code. The closer the value gets to 100%, the more heavily loaded the system is.

Source of Information : Sybex Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Insiders Guide to Microsofts Hypervisor

Virtualization Best Practices - Choosing a Processor

2009-10-29T06:47:00.000+08:00

As of this writing, Hyper-V provides support for up to 24 cores in the parent partition. A core is a unit of processing power. Both Intel and AMD have released processors that consist of multiple processor cores on a single processor. These processors plug into sockets on the computer’s motherboard. Having multiple processor cores on a single die allows even a single-socket system to execute multiple threads of execution at the same time. Although 24 cores sounds like a lot of processing power (and in most cases, it certainly is!), virtualization can easily use all of it.

You must consider three key factors about processors as you work through the planning stages:
• Number of processors in the system
• Number of cores on the processors in the system
• Speed of the processors in the system

Because one of the key features of virtualization is the ability to achieve higher density (running multiple VMs on a single physical host), administrators naturally gravitate toward the processor as a key bottleneck. After all, if a host runs out of processing power, those virtualized workloads may not be able to keep up with the demand being placed on them.

You need to answer a couple of key questions for the host:
• How many processors are necessary for this virtualization host?
• Do the processors need to provide t wo, four, or even six cores per processor?

The answer to these two questions is usually, “It depends.” Two schools of thought apply here, which bring up two more questions: Do you want to use more dual-socket systems, which usually have a lower price point? Or do you want to achieve maximum consolidation by going with quad-socket systems?

The price advantage of dual-socket systems is significant. At the time of writing, you can deploy three physical dual-socket systems for the price of one quad-socket system. You can then cluster those three dual-socket systems together in a high-availability configuration to ensure continuous uptime for the workloads running in the VMs. With the three-system configuration, however, you need to consider some other costs. Having three systems means further expenses for operating system licenses, management software licenses, and the administration of three servers. You also need to factor in the power costs of the three servers.

The other option, which uses only one quad-socket virtualization host, doesn’t provide any sort of backup or high availability—meaning that if the single host goes down, all the virtualized workloads will go down with it. But quad-socket servers generally provide a bit more in terms of expansion and I/O scalability, which could result in additional VMs being deployed on a single host.

Some enterprises are also considering the use of blade servers. Although the up-front cost of the enclosure is higher, the ability to use 14 systems in 7 units of rack space (for example) could be a better fit for some companies. As you can see, there’s no simple answer when you’re deciding on the best configuration for your host.

Source of Information : Sybex Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Insiders Guide to Microsofts Hypervisor

Virtual Machine Settings

2009-10-28T06:37:00.001+08:00

Now that you’ve created a new VM using the wizard, let’s look at the VM’s setting. To do so, select the newly created VM in the Hyper-V Manager, and click Settings. The Settings dialog is broken into two sections: Hardware and Management. The hardware options control the hardware that’s available to the VM, and the management options control the VM’s administrative tasks. We’ll look at all the options available.

Hardware
Just like a physical system, a VM consists of a variety of (virtual) hardware devices. In the settings for a VM, you can modify that hardware—including adding processors, network adapters, and hard disks.

Add Hardware
You can modify the configuration of the VM by adding hardware, such as a small computer system interface (SCSI) controller or additional network interface, to the VM. The VM must be powered off to add hardware to the VM. After you add the virtual hardware to the VM and power on the VM, the OS will recognize the new hardware.

BIOS
Hyper-V doesn’t allow direct access to the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS), so the only BIOS settings you can modify are exposed here:

• Num Lock. Selecting this check box triggers Num Lock in the VM to be active on boot.

• Startup Order. This option controls the order in which devices will be queried for boot. The top-most option will be tried first, and if it fails, then the next option will be tried. By default, the boot order is CD, IDE, legacy network adapter, and then floppy.

Memory
You can adjust the amount of memory allocated to the VM. This can range from 8MB to the maximum amount of RAM in the system. There are some caveats:

• Once the VM is powered on, the memory is allocated to the VM and can’t be reclaimed until the VM is saved or turned off.

• Memory allocated to a VM can’t be shared. If multiple VMs are running the same OS,
Hyper-V doesn’t provide the capability to share common pages of memory between the VMs.
• Hyper-V doesn’t provide support for allocating more memory than is available on the host. This limits the amount of memory available to allocate to VMs to about 1GB less than the maximum amount of RAM in the host.

Processor
The Processor Settings dialog has a number of options. Hyper-V supports up to four virtual processors in the VM. Those virtual processors are scheduled as threads on the physical processors. A VM can’t have more virtual processors allocated than are present in the host. That means that in order to create a four-core VM, the host system must have at least four cores.

The upper limit of total virtual processors you can allocate on a host is eight times the number of logical processors. A single dual-socket, dual-core server (exposing 4 processors to the host) can support a total of 32 virtual processors. You should keep a very close eye on performance to ensure that the system can handle all the running VMs as well as the host.

Additionally, the Processor Settings dialog is where you set the resource-control options for the VM. This dialog includes the following options:

• Virtual Machine Reserve. This reserves a set amount of processor power for the VM. You can think of this reserve as a guaranteed amount of processor resources.

• Virtual Machine Limit. This is a hard cap on the amount of processor power that the VM can take from the host.

• Relative Weight. The relative weight is another method of assigning a value of importance between multiple VMs. You can set this option to any value from 1 to 10,000. If two VMs have the same VM reserves and limits, the VM with a higher relative weight will receive more processing power.

• Processor Functionality. The last check box in the processor settings controls the processor functionality. By selecting this option, you’ll let older OSs, such as Windows NT or earlier, work with Hyper-V.

It’s important to know the differences between a logical processor and a virtual processor. Logical processors are the foundation of today’s multicore processors. A system with a single core and without Hyper-Threading has a single logical processor. Adding additional cores increases the logical processor count. For example, a system with two physical processors, each processor having two cores, has a total logical-processor count of four. A virtual processor is seen on the host as a single thread of execution, which can then be scheduled on any of the logical processors in the system.

IDE Controller
Hyper-V includes a dual-channel IDE controller much like many standard hardware PCs. By default, a single VHD is connected to the primary IDE controller in the primary connection, with a CD/DVD drive connected to the primary connection of the secondary controller.

The VM can boot only from a VHD connected to the IDE controller. Although this does seem strange and counterintuitive for performance reasons, this arrangement is necessary because of the architecture of Hyper-V. The synthetic devices in Hyper-V aren’t seen in the OS without the integration components being installed.

By clicking the IDE controller, you can add a new hard disk or DVD drive to the specific IDE controller. (DVD drives can be connected only to the IDE controllers.) If you select a hard disk, you have a number of options to choose from. At the top, you can select the specific location where the VHD file will be connected the top. If no SCSI controllers have been added to the VM, then you can add the new VHD to one of the pre-existing IDE controllers only. However, if you added a SCSI controller to the VM’s configuration, then the SCSI controller and all available locations will be listed as well.

After you’ve assigned the new VHD to a specific location, you can set up the specifics of the disk. A number of Hard Drive settings are available, including creating a new VHD, using an existing disk, or editing or inspecting an existing disk. The New, Edit, and Inspect buttons all map back to the New Virtual Hard Disk Wizard. This wizard provides a one-stop interface for all tasks having to do with VHD files.

The bottom option, Physical Hard Disk, lets you directly connect a physical logical unit number (LUN) to a VM. This allows the VM to use directly storage volumes that are connected to controllers on the host—including fibre channel, Internet SCSI (iSCSI), or direct-attached SCSI storage. The use of physical hard disks lets you treat your VMs the same way as physical machines, and you get an increase in performance compared to the default dynamically expanding VHD. In order to connect a physical hard disk to a VM, you must mark the physical disk Offline on the host. You can do this by opening the Disk Management MMC snap-in, selecting the disk, and then right-clicking it and selecting Offline. Take care that you don’t bring the same volume online while the VM has it mounted, or you may lose data.

Network Adap ter
You have several items to choose in the Network Adapter Settings window, and you can change the same settings regardless of the type of network adapter—normal or legacy.

• Network. Each network adapter defined in the Settings dialog can be connected to a single virtual network.

• MAC Address. The Media Access Control (MAC) address of a network adapter is what makes each network adapter unique.

Hyper-V gives you the ability to assign a static MAC address to each network adapter in the VM or to use a dynamically generated MAC address. Some applications use the MAC address of a system for a number of purposes. To set a static MAC address, click the Static radio button and enter the value.

Dynamic MAC addresses under Hyper-V always start with 00:15:5D, with the last three octets randomly chosen based on the MAC address of the host’s physical adapter.

• Enable Virtual LAN Identification. If the VM needs to communicate over a specific virtual local area network (VLAN) using the 802.1q protocol, enter the VLAN ID here. Multiple virtual network adapters can be connected to different VLANs.

COM Port
The COM ports in the VM can either be left unconnected (the default selection) or be connected to a named pipe. Named pipes are a special way of communicating between two different systems.

To connect a virtual COM port to a named pipe on the local system, enter the name of the pipe in the Pipe Name text box. There’s no need to format it in the traditional \\.\pipe\pipe syntax; the dialog box takes care of that. To connect to a remote pipe on another system, select the Remote Computer check box and enter the name of the computer.

Floppy
A VM has a single virtual floppy disk drive. The virtual floppy drive has no access to the physical floppy disk drive—rather, it uses virtual floppy disks (VFD files). You can create VFD files by using the Virtual Disk Wizard (New -> Floppy Disk).

Source of Information : Sybex Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Insiders Guide to Microsofts Hypervisor

Managing Windows Server Core

2009-10-27T06:13:00.000+08:00

Windows Server Core can be managed a number of different ways:

Local command prompt. Many of the command-line utilities present in a full installation of Windows Server 2008 also exist in a Core installation. This allows administrators to perform the same tasks using a common toolset.

Terminal Server. Windows Server Core supports Terminal Services Remote Administration mode. Administrators can connect to the Server Core system from another Windows system for administrative purposes. The user experience is identical—the user logging in from the remote system will only get a command prompt in their Remote Desktop session.

Terminal Services Remote Administration is disabled by default, just as it is on a full installation of Windows Server 2008.

WS-Management. Web Services for Management (WS-Management) is a relatively newly defined standard in the IT world. It provides a common method for systems to access and exchange management information across the entire IT infrastructure. Many management tools, including System Center Virtual Machine Manager, use WS-Management to communicate between the client and the server.

Windows Remote Shell. By adding this feature, administrators can execute commands on a Server Core system from another system via the command line. Windows Remote Shell uses WS-Management to pass the commands from one system to another.

From the Windows Server Core system, run the following command:

WinRM quickconfig

Now, from a separate Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista system, you can execute commands against the Windows Server Core system like this:

Winrs -r: dir

This generates a directory listing of the remote Windows Server Core system.

Windows Script Host. Windows Server Core includes the cscript.exe application, allowing you to run scripts for administrative purposes. You can write scripts in a variety of different languages—Jscript, VBScript, and so on (providing the scripting engine for that language is installed).

Source of Information : Sybex Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Insiders Guide to Microsofts Hypervisor

Windows Server Core Architecture

2009-10-26T06:08:00.000+08:00

The architecture of Windows Server Core is extremely similar to a full installation of Windows Server 2008. Windows Server Core uses the same device drivers, has the same kernel installed on disk, and behaves the same as a full installation of Windows Server. The main difference is that the graphical subsystem of Windows, as well as the .NET Framework and other products nd services, are absent from a Core installation. This means that any application that relies on any of those pieces of functionality won’t run, such as websites that rely on the ASP.NET framework. Some applications, such as SQL Server 2008, also won’t work on a Windows Server 2008 Core installation. Additionally, items such as Internet Explorer and Windows Mail have been removed.

Benefits
Windows Server Core offers a number of benefits, regardless of its intended use:

Reduced maintenance. By default, a Windows Server Core system has very few binaries installed. When a role is added, only the components that are necessary for the role are installed. The binaries are still present on the system, which allows for those components to be updated during normal patch cycles. No longer will your Windows Servers need updates for little-used components. Systems running Windows Server Core can see up to 40 percent fewer patches compared to systems running Windows Server 2003.

Reduced attack surface. Because fewer applications and services are running on the server, there are fewer avenues to exploit. Exploits aimed at components that don’t exist on the server don’t get a chance to work.

Reduced management. Because fewer components are installed on the system, there’s less administrative overhead.

Less disk space required. Fewer binaries being installed on disk mean that less disk space is required. Windows Server Core requires only 10GB of disk space, as opposed to 20GB for a full installation of Windows Server 2008.

Disadvantages
Although the Server Core installation option sounds great in theory, administrators need to be aware of the following concerns:

Remote management. Because Windows Server Core provides no local GUI-based administration tools, you perform the bulk of administration for the system from another system with a full installation of Windows Server 2008 or enterprise-management tools. Many of the Windows administration tools that are accessed through the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) can be configured to administer other computers in either a workgroup or a domain setting.

Command line. The only interface presented at a console or remote logon at a Windows Server Core system is the command line. For some administrators, that’s preferred—and those administrators probably use batch files (.BAT) and command scripts (.CMD) to perform mundane administration tasks. Not all administrators prefer that approach, however.

No PowerShell. Because Windows Server Core doesn’t include the .NET Framework, the PowerShell feature isn’t available. You can still use PowerShell from another system to perform administrative tasks against the Windows Server Core system via Windows Management Interface (WMI).

Inability to transition from Core to full. A Windows Server Core installation can’t be “upgraded” to a full installation of Windows Server. To move to a full installation of Windows Server 2008, you must reinstall the system.

Source of Information : Sybex Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Insiders Guide to Microsofts Hypervisor

Hyper-V Software Requirements

2009-10-25T06:17:00.000+08:00

Hyper-V is a feature of Windows Server 2008 x64 Edition only. There’s no support for Hyper-V in the x86 (aka 32-bit) Edition or the Itanium versions of Windows Server 2008. The x64 Edition is required for a couple of reasons:

Kernel address space The 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008 provides a much larger kernel address space as compared to the 32-bit edition. This directly translates into the support of larger processes, which is crucial for virtualization.

Large amount of host memory Hyper-V supports up to 1 TB of RAM on the host. x86 versions of Windows Server 2008 support only up to 64 GB of RAM on the host, which would severely limit the number of VMs you could run.

We’re frequently asked to explain the differences with Hyper-V between versions of Windows Server 2008. There’s no difference—the features of Hyper-V are the same, regardless of whether you’re running the Standard, Enterprise, or Datacenter product. However, differences in the versions of Windows Server 2008 affect key virtualization scenarios:

Processor sockets Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition is limited to four sockets, whereas Enterprise Edition supports eight sockets.

Memory Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition supports up to 32 GB of RAM, and
Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition supports up to 2 TB of RAM. Failover clustering Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition doesn’t include the failover clustering functionality required for quick migration.

Windows Server 2008 includes the rights to run virtual images of the installed operating system. The number of those virtual images is tied to the edition.

Source of Information : Sybex Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Insiders Guide to Microsofts Hypervisor

Hyper-V Requirements

2009-10-24T06:39:00.000+08:00

Because Hyper-V is included as a role of Windows Server 2008 x64 Edition, it inherits the same hardware requirements. However, a few areas require special attention for Hyper-V.

Hardware Requirements
Some of the requirements for Hyper-V are hard requirements, such as the type of processor, whereas others are best practices to ensure that Hyper-V performs optimally.

Processor
Hyper-V requires a 64-bit capable processor with two separate extensions: hardware-assisted virtualization and data-execution prevention. Hardware-assisted virtualization is given a different name by each vendor—Intel calls it Virtualization Technology (VT), and AMD calls it AMD Virtualization (AMD-V). Almost all processors now ship with those features present, but check with your processor manufacturer to make sure. Although the functionality is required in the processor, it’s also required to be enabled in the BIOS. Each system manufacturer has a different way of exposing the functionality, as well as a different name for it. However, most, if not all, manufacturers provide a way to enable or disable it in the BIOS. You can enable it in the BIOS, but some systems don’t enable the feature unless there’s a hard-power cycle—shutting off the system completely, for example. We recommend that the system be completely powered off.

Data-execution prevention (DEP) goes by different names depending on the processor manufacturer—on the Intel platform, it’s called eXecute Disable (XD); and AMD refers to it as No eXecute (NX). DEP helps protect your system against malware and improperly written programs by monitoring memory reads and writes to ensure that memory pages marked as Data aren’t executed. Because you’ll be running multiple VMs on a single system, ensuring stability of the hosting system is crucial.

Storage
As we talked about earlier, Hyper-V’s architecture lets you use standard Windows device drivers in conjunction with the VSP/VSC architecture. As such, any of the storage devices listed in the Windows Server Catalog will work with Hyper-V. These include SCSI, SAS, fibre channel, and iSCSI—if there’s a driver for it, Hyper-V can use it. Of course, you’ll want to take some considerations into account when planning the ideal Hyper-V host.

Here are some of the areas where extra attention is necessary:

Multiple spindles and I/O paths. Most disk-intensive workloads, such as database servers, need multiple spindles to achieve high performance. Hyper-V’s storage architecture enables those workloads to be virtualized without the traditional performance penalty. When multiple disk-intensive workloads share the same disk infrastructure, they can quickly slow to a crawl. Having multiple disks (as well as multiple I/O paths) is highly recommended for disk-intensive workloads. Even two workloads sharing a host bus adapter with a single fibre channel can saturate the controller, leading to decreased performance. Having multiple controllers also can provide redundancy for critical workloads.

Disk configurations for optimal performance Hyper-V has a number of different ways to store the VM’s data, each with its own pros and cons:

Pass-through disks:
• Pros: Pass-through disks generally provide the highest performance. The VM writes directly to the disk volume without any intermediate layer, so you can see near-native levels of performance.
• Cons: Maintaining the storage volumes for each VM can be extremely challenging, especially for large enterprise deployments.

virtual hard disks:
• Pros: These are the best choice for production environments using VHD files. Because you allocate all the disk space when you create the VHD file, you don’t see the expansion penalty that occurs with the dynamically expanding VHD.
• Cons: Because all the space for the VHD is allocated at creation, the VHD file can be large.

Dynamic virtual hard disks:
• Pros: A dynamically expanding VHD expands on demand, saving space on the system until it’s needed. Disks can remain small.
• Cons: There is a small performance penalty when a disk is expanded. If large amounts of data are being written, the disk will need to be expanded multiple times.

Snapshots. Snapshots are extremely useful in the test and development environment. However, what can be helpful in one environment can be harmful in another. You shouldn’t use snapshots in a production environment because rolling back to a previous state without taking the proper precautions can mean data loss!

Networking
Much like storage, networking with Hyper-V inherits the rich driver support of Windows Server 2008. Many of the caveats for storage apply to networking as well—ensure that multiple NICs are present so a single interface doesn’t become the bottleneck.

The following list identifies areas where you should pay special attention with networking:
• Hyper-V supports Ethernet network adapters, including 10, 100, 1000, and even 10GbE network adapters. Hyper-V can’t use ATM or Token Ring adapters, nor can it use wireless (802.11) adapters to provide network access to the VMs.

• During the Hyper-V role installation you can create a virtual network for each network adapter in your system.

• We recommend that you set aside a single NIC to manage the host. That NIC shouldn’t be used for any VMs (no virtual switch should be associated with it). Alternatively, you can use out-of-band management tools to manage the host. Such tools typically use an onboard management port to provide an interface to the system.

Software Requirements
Hyper-V is a feature of Windows Server 2008 x64 Edition only. There’s no support for Hyper-V in the x86 (aka 32-bit) Edition or the Itanium versions of Windows Server 2008. The x64 Edition is required for a couple of reasons:

Kernel address space The 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008 provides a much larger kernel address space as compared to the 32-bit edition. This directly translates into the support of larger processes, which is crucial for virtualization.

Large amount of host memory Hyper-V supports up to 1 TB of RAM on the host. x86 versions of Windows Server 2008 support only up to 64 GB of RAM on the host, which would severely limit the number of VMs you could run.

We’re frequently asked to explain the differences with Hyper-V between versions of Windows Server 2008. There’s no difference—the features of Hyper-V are the same, regardless of whether you’re running the Standard, Enterprise, or Datacenter product. However, differences in the versions of Windows Server 2008 affect key virtualization scenarios:

Processor sockets. Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition is limited to four sockets, whereas Enterprise Edition supports eight sockets.

Memory. Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition supports up to 32 GB of RAM, and Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition supports up to 2 TB of RAM.

Failover clustering. Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition doesn’t include the failoverclustering functionality required for quick migration.

Virtual image use rights. Windows Server 2008 includes the rights to run virtual images of the installed operating system. The number of those virtual images is tied to the edition.

Source of Information : Sybex Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Insiders Guide to Microsofts Hypervisor

Hyper-V Features

2009-10-23T06:01:00.000+08:00

Now that we’ve gone over both the scenarios and architecture of Hyper-V, let’s dive into some of the features of Microsoft’s virtualization platform:

32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) VMs Hyper-V provides support for both 32-bit as well as 64-bit VMs. This lets users provision both architectures on the same platform, easing the transition to 64-bit and providing legacy 32-bit operating systems.

Large memory support (64 GB) within VMs With support for up to 64 GB of RAM, Hyper-V scales out to run the vast majority of enterprise-class workloads. Hyper-V can also use up to a total of 1 terabyte (TB) of RAM on the host.

SMP virtual machines Symmetric Multi Processor (SMP) support allows VMs to recognize and utilize four virtual processors. As a result, server applications running in a Hyper-V VM take full advantage of the host system’s processing power.

Integrated cluster support for quick migration and high availability (HA) Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and HA go hand in hand. It’s easy to create a failover cluster of VM hosts that your VMs can live on. After you set up the failover cluster, you can quickly and easily move a VM from one host to the other from the Failover Cluster Manager or from other management tools (such as System Center Virtual Machine Manager).

Volume Shadow Service integration for data protection Hyper-V includes a Volume Shadow Services (VSS) provider. As we discussed earlier, in the list of scenarios, VSS lets backup applications prepare the system for a backup without requiring the applications (or VMs) to be shut down.

Pass-through high-performance disk access for VMs When a physical volume is connected directly to the VM, disk I/O–intensive workloads can perform at their peak. If the Windows Server 2008 system can see the volume in the Disk Management control panel, the volume can be passed through to the VM. Although you’ll see faster performance with pass-through disk access, certain features (such as snapshots, differencing disks, and host-side backup) that you get from using a VHD file aren’t available with pass-through disks.

VM snapshots Snapshots let administrators capture a point in time for the VM (including state, data, and configuration). You can then roll back to that snapshot at a later point in time or split from that snapshot to go down a different path. The snapshot is a key feature for the test and development scenario, because it lets users easily maintain separate points in time. For example, a user may install an operating system inside a VM and take a snapshot. The user can perform a number of tasks and then take a second snapshot. Then, the user can return to either of those snapshots later, saving configuration time and effort.

New hardware-sharing architecture (VSP/VSC/VMBus) By using the new VMBus communication protocol for all virtual devices, Hyper-V can provide higher levels of performance than were previously seen with Microsoft virtualization products.

Robust networking: VLANs and NLB Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) tagging—also referred to as the IEEE standard 802.1q—provides a secure method for multiple networks to use the same physical media. Hyper-V supports VLAN tagging (802.1q) on the virtual network interfaces and specifies a VLAN tag for the network interface. Network Load Balancing (NLB) support in Hyper-V allows VMs to participate in an NLB cluster. An NLB cluster is different from a failover cluster, such as those used for VM quick migration. NLB clusters are configured with front-end nodes that handle all incoming traffic and route it to multiple servers on the back-end.

DMTF standard for WMI management interface The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) is a standards body that provides a uniform set of standards for the management of IT environments. Microsoft has worked closely with the DMTF to ensure that all the management interfaces for Hyper-V adhere to the standards, allowing management tools from multiple vendors to manage the system.

Support for full or Server Core installations Hyper-V can run on a full installation of Windows Server 2008 as well as the Server Core option. We’ll discuss Server Core in more depth later.

Advantages over Virtual Server
Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V has a number of advantages over Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1:

• Support for SMP and 64-bit VMs. Virtual Server was limited to 32-bit uni-processor virtual machines.
• Support for more than 3.6 GB of RAM per VM.
• Support for mapping a logical unit number (LUN) directly to a VM.
• Increased performance from VSP/VSC architecture.
• Hyper-V management via a MMC-based interface instead of the web-based console.

However, it’s impossible for users who have only 32-bit hardware in their environment to move to Hyper-V (because it’s a feature of the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008).

Source of Information : Sybex Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Insiders Guide to Microsofts Hypervisor

Hyper-V Architecture - Virtual Machine

2009-10-22T06:11:00.000+08:00

A VM can have two different types of devices: emulated and synthetic. Although synthetic devices are encouraged due to their superior performance, they aren’t available for all operating systems. Emulated devices are present in Hyper-V mainly for backward compatibility with nonsupported operating systems. VMs running certain distributions of Linux have synthetic device support as well. Let’s examine each type of device.

Emulated Devices
Emulated devices in Hyper-V exist primarily for backward compatibility with older operating systems. In an ideal world, all applications would run on the latest version of the operating system they were designed for, but that’s far from reality. Many companies have systems in production that run on older copies of operating systems because one of their applications doesn’t run on anything newer. An older operating system may not be supported under Hyper-V, which means it can’t take advantage of the high-performance I/O. That’s not a total loss, however: If you consolidate those older systems onto a newer Hyper-V host, the advantages of moving to a more up-to-date hardware platform can provide a performance boost.

Emulated devices have another key role. During the installation of the VM, operating systems don’t have support for the synthetic devices that may be installed in the VM. For that reason, you must use emulated devices—otherwise, the operating-system installation can’t function. For Hyper-V, it’s easy to move from emulated to synthetic devices.

The emulated devices presented to a VM are chosen for their high degree of compatibility
across a wide range of operating systems and in-box driver support. The video card is based on an S3 video card, and the network card is an Intel 21140-based Ethernet adapter.

Emulated devices under Hyper-V don’t perform as well as the new synthetic devices. Thanks to part of the work that was done to harden the entire virtualization stack, emulated devices execute in the worker process—specifically, in user mode in the parent partition.

How does I/O happen with emulated devices?

The below are about how emulated storage requests are handled. Emulated networking is handled in a similar fashion. I want to point out a few specific items:

• Context switches are used. A context switch is a switch from executing a particular processor instruction in kernel mode to user mode. When paired with virtualization, a context switch is an “expensive” operation. There’s no money involved, but the CPU cost for such an operation is very high. That time could be spent doing other tasks.

• The path that the data packet traverses is long, especially compared to the synthetic case (which we’ll review next).

• The path illustrated in the figure is repeated hundreds of times for a 10 kilobyte write to disk. Imagine if you’re doing a large SQL transaction that involved writing hundreds of megabytes to disk, or running a popular website being served up from IIS running in the VM. You can see that it won’t scale well.

Synthetic Device Drivers
Synthetic devices provide much higher performance than their emulated counterparts. By taking advantage of VMBus, synthetic devices can execute I/O transactions at a much faster rate. Synthetic devices, such as the Microsoft Virtual Machine Bus Network Adapter, don’t have real-world counterparts. They are purely virtual devices that function only with Hyper-V—loading the drivers on a physical system does nothing. These new synthetic devices rely on VMBus.

Synthetic device drivers are available only for operating systems that are supported by Microsoft. (For reference, a list of supported operating systems for Hyper-V is available at www.microsoft.com/virtualization.) If you’re running an operating system in the VM that isn’t supported by Microsoft, you’ll need to use the emulated devices in the VM. Much like the emulated storage request chart presents a lot of data. Here are a few key differences:

• In the beginning, the data path is similar to the emulated data path. •u However, the synthetic storage device in Hyper-V is a SCSI-based device—so the last driver it hits before getting put on VMBus is the StorPort driver.

• When a packet makes it to the miniport driver, it’s put on VMBus for transport to the Storage VSP in the parent partition. Because VMBus is a kernel-mode driver, no context switches are necessary.

• After the data packet crosses over to the parent partition, the correct destination is determined by the VSP, which routes the packet to the correct device. The destination is a virtual hard disk (VHD) file.

Installing Synthetic Device Drivers
It’s easy to install synthetic device drivers in the VM. After you’ve installed the operating system, select Action -> Insert Integration Services Setup Disk. An installer launches and automatically installs the drivers for you. When you reboot, the VM can take advantage of the new architecture.

A special synthetic driver deals with the boot process: Optimized Note Boot Performance.
Because the synthetic drivers rely on VMBus, you can’t boot off hard drives that are connected to the SCSI controller. All isn’t lost—during the boot process, after the VMBus driver is loaded, all the IDE boot traffic is automatically routed through the same infrastructure that is used for SCSI traffic. This means the boot process and all disk traffic (reads and writes) perform at the same accelerated speed.

Linux Device Drivers
No, that’s not a typo—certain distributions of Linux are supported under Hyper-V. Not only is the operating system supported, but a full set of device drivers also enable synthetic device support under Linux. The drivers include the Hypercall adapter—a thin piece of software that runs in the Linux VM and increases performance by translating certain instructions to a format that Hyper-V can understand.

Source of Information : Sybex Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Insiders Guide to Microsofts Hypervisor

Hyper-V Architecture - Parent Partition

2009-10-21T06:11:00.000+08:00

The installation of Windows is now running on top of the Windows hypervisor. One of the side effects of running on top of the hypervisor is that the installation is technically a VM. We’ll refer to this as the parent partition. The parent partition has two special features:

• It contains all the hardware device drivers, as well as supporting files, for the other VMs.

• It has direct access to all the hardware in the system. In conjunction with the virtualization service providers, the parent partition executes I/O requests on behalf of the VM—sending disk traffic out over a fibre channel controller, for example.

The following best practices provide a secure and stable parent partition, which is critical to the VMs running on the host:

• Don’t run any other applications or services in the parent partition. This may seem like basic knowledge for system administrators, but it’s especially crucial when you’re running multiple VMs. In addition to possibly decreasing stability, running multiple roles, features, or applications in the parent partition limits the amount of resources that can otherwise be allocated to VMs.

• Use Windows Server 2008 in the Core role as the parent partition.

Windows Hypervisor
The Windows hypervisor is the basis for Hyper-V. At its heart, the hypervisor has only a few simple tasks: creating and tearing down partitions. (A partition is also known as the basis for a VM) and ensuring strong separation between the partitions. It doesn’t sound like much, but the hypervisor is one of the most critical portions of Hyper-V. That’s why development of the hypervisor followed the Microsoft Security Design Lifecycle process so closely—if the hypervisor is compromised, the entire system can be taken over, because the hypervisor runs in the most privileged mode offered by the x86 architecture. One of Microsoft’s design goals was to make the Microsoft hypervisor as small as possible. Doing so offered two advantages:

• The Trusted Computing Base (TCB) is smaller. The TCB is the sum of all the parts of the system that are critical to security. Ensuring that the hypervisor is small reduces its potential attack vectors.

• The hypervisor imparts less overhead on the system. Because all VMs (as well as the parent partition) are running on top of the hypervisor, performance becomes a concern. The goal is to minimize the hypervisor’s overhead.

Kernel-Mode Drivers
A Windows kernel-mode driver is one of two types of drivers in Windows. Kernel-mode drivers execute in Ring 0. Because this type of driver is executing in kernel mode, it’s crucial that these drivers be as secure as possible: An insecure driver, or a crash in the driver, can compromise the entire system.
Hyper-V adds two kernel-mode drivers:

VMBus. VMBus is a high-speed in-memory bus that was developed for Hyper-V. VMBus acts as the bus for all I/O traffic that takes place between the VMs and the parent partition. VMBus works closely with the virtualization service provider and virtualization service client.

Virtualization Service Provider (VSP). The Virtualization Service Provider (VSP) enables VMs to securely share the underlying physical hardware by initiating I/O on behalf of all VMs running on the system. It works in conjunction with the hardware vendor drivers in the parent partition—which means that no special “virtualization” drivers are necessary. If a driver is certified for Windows Server 2008, it should work as expected with Hyper-V. Each class of device has a VSP present—for example, a default installation of Hyper-V has a networking VSP as well as a storage VSP. The VSPs communicate with the matching Virtualization Service Client (VSC) that runs in the VM over VMBus. We’ll cover the VSC when we look at the different types of VMs.

User-Mode Applications
User-mode applications are, strangely enough, applications that run in user mode. They execute in Ring 3, which is where all unprivileged instructions are run. Many of the applications that run in Windows are user-mode applications—for example, the copy of Notepad that you use to look at a text file is executing in user mode.
Hyper-V has a number of different user-mode applications:

Virtual Machine Management Service (VMMS). The VMMS acts as the single point of
interaction for all incoming management requests. It interacts with a number of processes,
two of which we’ll refer to here.

WMI providers. Hyper-V has a rich set of WMI interfaces. They provide a way to manage the state and health of the VMs as well as get settings information and some performance information. All the WMI interfaces are fully documented on http://msdn.microsoft.com.

Worker processes. When a VM is started up, a worker process is created. The worker process represents the actions that are taking place in the virtual processor, as well as all emulated devices and the virtual motherboard. Each VM that is running on a host has a worker process.

Now that we’ve shown you what’s happening in the parent partition, let’s look at the VMs. After you create a VM and power it on, you can install a wide variety of x86/x64-based operating systems. Even though these are VMs, they can run the same operating systems without modification as a physical computer. But operating systems that are supported by Microsoft include new synthetic drivers, which work in conjunction with the matching VSP running in the parent partition.

Source of Information : Sybex Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Insiders Guide to Microsofts Hypervisor