This whitepaper is neither a tutorial nor step-by-step handbook for common problems. Rather, this whitepaper provides one with the wisdom of the smartest, cutting edge Hyper-V administrators. It’s just a whitepaper with some tips, guidelines and best practices for a Hyper-V environment.

You can download the whitepaper over here: http://www2.savision.com/l/12082/2012-05-08/smvd

When is Application-Consistent Backup Vital? Not all situations require an application-consistent backup. Things such as file and print servers will be fine with crash-consistent and possibly inconsistent backups. If your application doesn’t provide a VSS writer, there might not even be a way to get an application-consistent backup of it while its containing machine is live. The most common need for application-consistent backups is the usage of database-backed applications.

The full blog can be found here:
http://www.altaro.com/blog/vss-crash-consistent-vs-application-consistent-vss-backups-post-2-of-2/

We had a couple of really interesting sessions today, both from marketing and technical folks at HP. One good introductory presentation was by Gary Thorne (VP Strategy Industry Standard Servers and Software). Gary’s presentation was on Transforming the server experience with customer-inspired innovation.  Most of the changes you will see in the Gen8 stem from over 100.000 customer interactions. Whenever there was a server down situation, HP would ask the customer to detail the problems so HP could learn from them. After all, the aim is to get the most amount of uptime with the least amount of effort, speed deployment of systems and deliver the desired performance. This is not something you get after just one round of interviewing customers. It is more like a multi-year project and it takes a large budget for R&D. HP spent $300M on R&D which is at least twice the amount spent on the previous generation.

HP has developed something they call ProActive Insight Architecture which takes much of the hands out of the operation. This required the server to have a lot more intelligence. Right now HP calls the Gen8 the most intelligent server platform on the planet. A sea of sensors collect thousands of system parameters needed to take appropriate action when problems arise. There is no agent involved which means the server starts logging right from the moment is turned on.

Deployment is also much faster and easier because all the firmware and software is already local to the server. It takes only a few minutes to deploy a server and with the right tools many systems can be deployed simultaneously. Another manual and very time consuming task is firmware/driver/software update management. The new HP System Update Manager (SUM) now does everything automatically and in the fraction of the time. It can be done for 1 system, for a full blade enclosure but also for an entire datacenter of around 5,000 servers. HPSUM handles different generations of servers and deals with HP Onboard Administrators, HP Virtual Connect and is able to coordinate reboot behavior. In clusters VM’s are moved off before a server is updated.

One particular problem HP improved on is storage connected directly to the server. CPU and memory speeds have been increasing quite substantially over the previous years. Storage has significantly lagged this trend.  For this reason HP developed a new generation of the Smart Array controller optimized for solid state disks. This accounts for raw performance boosts of 100x in terms of IOPS. The controller caches data in solid state (DRAM) and finds a way to put the hottest data in the fastest place. It is able to run data in and out of cache at very high speeds. HP developed algorithms that see through a virtual machine on hypervisor platforms. Storage subsystems normally work best with sequential IO streams, but with multiple VM’s on one box this IO tends to become randomized streams. The new Smart Array controller attempts to de-randomize on a per VM basis and coordinates the reads and writes in an attempt to avoid latency.

The new Insight Online website helps customers to track their server statistics as well as the server’s warranty information. It maintains a complete snapshot of the server and makes the support effort a lot easier. This service does not come at additional cost. At the same time all this collected information about the server’s health, can be the starting point for Pro-Active Support and to catch problems before they happen. It uses compliance analysis of the system components and makes suggestions for improvement.

Over 150 design improvements in HP ProLiant Gen8 were inspired by customers. One nice example is the Do-Not-Remove LED on the disk drives which are switched on if a logical drive has run into a problem situation. Let’s say a RAID-5 has a drive failure. In that case you want to make sure you do not pull one of the remaining four disks. These four drives will have the Do-Not-Remove light turned on. This greatly reduces the chances that an engineer pulls the wrong disk drive and destroys the entire RAID set.

I have quite a history with HP servers, dating all the way back to the first true PC based server, the Compaq SystemPro back in 1989. The first HP ProLiant generation I remember is the ProLiant 1000  ranging to the ProLiant 5000 which supported nothing less than 4GB of memory. Without going into too much of history, many readers are more likely to remember the DL/ML/BL series which up-to-now has known seven generations. I recall the HP ProLiant G5 series was the first server to support Hyper-V as it required hardware virtualization support. The G6 introduced SLAT capable processors which made virtualized memory management a lot more efficient. The G7 arrived relatively quickly after the G6 for a reason I can’t recall.

HP has already formally announced its new HP ProLiant Gen8 server series. Hey … that sounds different! Why didn’t they call it G8? Well I might be able to find out on May 7th during the Tech Tour in Houston. If you have any questions you want me to ask, just leave a comment at the bottom of this blog.

Assuming the HP ProLiant Gen8 series will play an important part in the building of many new private and public clouds, and also the upcoming release of Microsoft Windows Server 2012, makes this a really interesting topic. I will be writing a few blogs and might publish a video or two depending on what crosses my path. I’ll keep you posted.

Related
Blog Hans de Leenheer:
Technical Deep Dive – http://hansdeleenheer.blogspot.com/2012/03/hp-proliant-gen8-technical-deepdive.html
Tech Q&A – http://hansdeleenheer.blogspot.com/2012/02/hp-proliant-gen8-tech-q.html

When designing any IT solution, many administrators often consider “Backup” to be little more than another box on a long list of items to check off. They verify that the software and hardware they’re using will handle the load, configure it to back up on a reasonable schedule, and forget about it. Some will take the extra step of restoring some data to an alternate location as a test. Hardly any go through the full exercise of simulating an actual catastrophe. Most of the time, this practice is completely harmless. Unfortunately, if disaster does strike, there are often more questions than answers. Planning ahead is critical, and that involves knowing what sort of backup you need and if your backup application can provide it.

You can continue the article here:
http://www.altaro.com/blog/vss-crash-consistent-vs-application-consistent-vss-backups-post-1-of-2/

Look out for the second part of this blog!

This specification is released under the Microsoft Open Source Promise (OSP) initiative to help guide development of VHDX virtual hard disk format implementations that are compatible with those provided by Microsoft.

Join us for The Experts Conference for Virtualization 2012, April 29-May 2 in San Diego! TEC is the leading advanced training conference for Microsoft technologies, and this year brings even more sessions on Windows Server 2012 / Hyper-V 3.0, including Hot Storage Tricks, Capacity Management and Performance Analytics, SCVMM 2012 and Best Practices for Virtualizing Mission Critical Applications, and many more key topics.

Some of the internationally known speakers at TEC 2012 include:

• Brian Madden, Virtualization Expert at Tech Target as keynote presenter
• Mattias Sundling, Virtualization Track Facilitator/vExpert/Evangelist at Quest
• Stephen Baron, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft
• Christopher Kusek, vExpert/Technology Evangelist at EMC
• Dung K. Hoang, Principal Engineer at HP
• Hans Vredevoort, MVP/Consultant at Inovativ
• Rob Nottoli, System Architect at Microsoft.
• Greg Shields, MVP/vExpert/Senior Partner at Concentrated Technology

Check out the TEC website to see the full lineup.

TEC is for the experts by the experts and, as such, the sessions are highly technical (300-400 level) and include both presentations and demonstrations led by some of the world’s top technologists. Don’t miss your chance to learn from the best. TEC also provides really good networking opportunities! Meet the speakers, experts, product managers from Quest and Microsoft.

For more information about TEC and to signup, visit TEC website. We offer special discount for user groups and bloggers. Please contact stella.lowe@quest.com for further inquiries.

Please note that this is a different tool from the Microsoft Solution Accelerator called Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter.

If you are only converting a dozen or so VM’s it is not worth your while. However if you have 100+ Windows and Linux VM’s in your environment this tool is for you. The target customer has multiple hypervisors, wants to move to Hyper-V and has primarily a Windows workload.

VMMT as it is called uses a combination of existing products and custom scripts:

• vCenter & vSphere
• Veeam Backup and Reporter
• Orchestrator 2012
• PowerShell
• Virtual Machine Manager 2012

Microsoft and Veeam worked closely together on this project. Veeam have been a VMware Platinum partner for years but when they saw that adoption of Hyper-V was beginning to pick up, they now broadly support Hyper-V.

The contribution of Microsoft consists of:

• Virtual Machine Manager
• Orchestrator
• Web UI
• Runbooks

Veeam contributed:

• 6 months Reporter license
• 6 months Backup license
• 90 day eval of nWorks
• Script used by Runbooks

Currently the following operating systems are supported:

• Windows 2008
• Windows Server 2008 R2
• Windows 2003 SP1+
• SUSE
• CentOS
• RedHat

Sources:

• vSphere 4.1
• vSphere 5.0

Other operating systems may work but were not in scope at the start of this project.

There are also a number of limitations:

• VMs in VMware with IDE Virtual Hard Disks
• VMs in VMware using RDMs
• Static IP is not automatically configured in target
• Limited to four virtual disks on IDE bus (V2V limitation)

There are both online and offline conversion options.

The VMM Migration Toolkit starts with a running machine and uses Veeam to create a copy of the VM without interrupting the production VM. VMMT then does a number of preparations, performs the conversion, creates a copy of the VM to the VMM Library (using NFS to mount the copy), deletes the conversion files, detects the operating system, run the V2V, remove the VMware tools from the VM and finally collects networking info.

The virtual machine that is being converted has to stay offline until the process is completed. A very interesting aspect of this toolkit is that it extensively uses Orchestrator runbooks.

It is important to note that currently support is limited to USA & Canada, Germany, UK and Australia and you need to contact your Microsoft Sales Rep. Involvement of a partner or MCS is required.

The new “cloud-optimized OS” is due out later this year.

Read more in Mary Jo Foley’s blog:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/windows-server-8-officially-dubbed-windows-server-2012/12475

Back in August 2011:
http://www.hyper-v.nu/archives/hvredevoort/2011/08/the-teams-that-contribute-to-hyper-v-version-3/

Today was my first day at MMS2012 in Las Vegas. It is the event for Microsoft System Center and the new 2012 version of the product is inseparable from Hyper-V and Private Cloud. Despite the hard economic times we live in, the event is sold out of all 5500 seats and is clearly sizzling with expectations. Just after I walked out of the two beta Private Cloud exams this afternoon, the expo floor opened. The very first thing I noticed was a mini theatre in the back of the hall. The introductory slide that was held up before the presentation started looked very promising to me. In fact it was the ideal follow up for my previous blog that dealt with Offload Data Transfer or ODX in Windows Server 8 that would rock your socks off. The primary focus is on file based storage and Hyper-V VM’s on network shares using the immensely improved SMB 3.0 protocol.

I recorded an ultra cool presentation by Alex Jauch who is a Microsoft Technical Architect working for NetApp. It lasted only 12 minutes or so but it exactly defined what makes file based storage so appealing in Windows Server 8 and how Hyper-V will hugely benefit from this. You will see SMB 3.0 and ODX in action using Hyper-V VM’s on Network Attached Strorage.

After the presentation I stood in line waiting to chat with the presenter. Before me stood Eric Gray who is a VMware employee. Eric has a blog called VCritical and as the name implies he has been fairly critical of Hyper-V. As a result he has been in some fierce debates. Nevertheless our chat was professional and friendly. He now seems to recognize the huge improvements in storage, networking and Hyper-V appearing in the upcoming version of Windows Server 8.

Thanks to Alex Jauch who kindly allowed me to publish the video.

The video can be found here: https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=96ba3346350a5309&resid=96BA3346350A5309!878&id=96BA3346350A5309%21878&sff=1