VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘hyper-v’

I finally took the time to get technical details about how to enable Microsoft Hyper-V Live Migration.  My experience with the product has been limited to stand alone, “Rock Box” instances of Microsoft’s hypervisor only, but I recently attended a Lunch and Learn where I received a good understanding of what steps to take in order to create a Hyper-V Cluster for Live Migration. It’s Tricky if you are used to VMware, but not exactly “Hard Times“.

In light of other bloggers Raising Hell with clustered file system discussions in the V12N blogisphere recently, This post is not attempting to proclaim one solution is the “King of Rock.” I am simply listing the prerequisites as I understand them and providing useful links to configuration details for an administrator charged with evaluating/ building a Microsoft Hyper-V environment including Live Migration.

I do not want anyone to say to me “Rich, You Be Illin’“. I’m just sticking with a “It’s Like That” approach to posting this information. Hopefully, this post will help others plan for a Hyper-V implementation that goes so well they will be Krush Groovin’ like it’s Christmas In Hollis when finished.

I also want to point out I have not actually created a Hyper-V Cluster with Live Migration yet. I’m posting my notes and some links for when I might eventually have to put on My Addidas (without the laces) and Walk This Way. Please let me know in the comments if I have some of these details wrong.

Before you get serious, I suggest you use this YouTube Playlist as the soundtrack for the rest of this post.

I’ll use the overview of steps to implement Live Migration provided in the Microsoft TechNet Guide titled Hyper-V: Using Live Migration with Cluster Shared Volumes in Windows Server 2008 R2 to organize the rest of this post.

Steps for implementing live migration

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If comparing the v12n community to a religion makes sense, then using Sir Issac Newton’s Laws of Motion to explain Veeam Global “Scientist” Doug Hazelman’s guest post on the Windows Virtualization Team Blog shouldn’t be a stretch either. Hazelman, one of the VM /ETC Q2 UGH recipients, announced the following in the post R2 Veeam Too:

“While Veeam has continued to build some of the best software for data protection and management of VMware infrastructures, we realize that customers are now faced with more virtualization choices. By fully supporting Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere, Veeam can help you manage heterogeneous hypervisor deployments and clouds with the innovative solutions you’ve come to expect from Veeam. The management and R&D teams at Veeam have a long history of working with Microsoft going back to the Aelita days, and we’re all excited to be working with Microsoft again.”

Imagine your favorite Physics teacher or professor at the chalkboard in an UGLY GREEN lab coat explaining:

Newton’s Laws of Motion are:

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Edwin Yuen, Microsoft Virtualization Team Senior Technical Product Manager, has introduced Hyper-V’s latest feature closely emulating VMware’s virtual infrastructure enterprise product offerings. Quick Storage Migration (QSM) is being added to System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2. SCVMM 2008 R2 Release Canidate was recently released to the public. Hyper-V’s final release was integrated in Windows Server 2008 SP2.

Quoting Yuen’s post on the Microsoft Virtualization Team Blog titled System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 – Quick Storage Migration, here are some high level notes about QSM:

• QSM enables the migration of a VM not only between storage locations but also from one SAN to another
• QSM relies on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS)
• QSM can move the virtual disks of a running virtual machine independent of storage protocols (iSCSI, FC) or storage type (local, DAS, SAN), with minimal downtime
• QSM will not be available on the free Hyper-V Server 2008 version and requires Microsoft’s Virtual Machine Manager (VMM)
• Quick Storage Migration is included with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 both in the Enterprise Edition and the Workgroup Edition
• A VM can remain running for the almost the entire duration of the transfer of its virtual disks from one storage location to another. The post estimates the VM downtime to be under 1 minute in most cases assuming W2K8 R2.
• The VM is put into save-state (Hyper-V snapshot) for a brief interval to migrate its memory state and associated differencing disks.

Yuen’s post provides a feature comparison table of QSM versus VMware’s Storage Vmotion. The following is a screen shot of the table. Read the rest of this entry »

Some of the new automation and life cycle management technology for both XenServer and Hyper-V announced today by Citrix will be provided by an integration of VMLogix LabManager and StageManager products with Citrix Essentials. This partner feature integration follows a similar strategy used by Citrix in the past with Marathon Technologies to provide High Availability for guests on XenServer hosts. VMLogix LabManager and StageManager are very similar in name to VMware VI 3.5 Enterprise products that provide basically the same automation and management features.

In the official announcement today, VMLogix explains: Read the rest of this entry »

Along with the news of a free XenServer, Citrix has officially announced Citrix Essentials – a new product line that will provide lifecycle management, storage integration, and automated provisioning features for both Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors. In the press release Citrix states, “The new solution helps customers transform virtualized datacenters into more dynamic “delivery centers” with capabilities like lab automation, dynamic provisioning, workflow orchestration and seamless integration with leading storage systems.” Citrix Essentials appears to help close the current feature gap between Citrix and the virtualization market leader VMware by providing much of the automation already available for the VMware VI 3.5 Enterprise products.

The announcement provides the following outline of Citrix Essentials features:

“While some features vary based on the underlying virtualization environment, the Citrix Essentials product line consists of five broad categories of capabilities:

• Automated Lab Management streamlines the process of building, testing, sharing and delivering applications on-demand throughout the full application lifecycle, from development labs to production servers.  Because this functionality supports all of the leading virtualization platforms, customers can even run development and testing environments on one virtualization platform, and seamlessly move those applications into production on another platform.
• Advanced Storage Integration featuring Citrix® StorageLink™ technology fully leverages all the native power of third-party array-based storage systems making it easy for customers to manage advanced storage features directly from their virtualization management environments.
• Dynamic Provisioning Services reduce costs and optimize datacenter infrastructure by letting customers manage common sets of master workload images centrally and stream them on-demand to both virtual machines or physical servers.
• Workflow Orchestration enables users to automate key management processes across their virtual infrastructure using common task libraries and a graphical workflow canvas.
• High Availability delivers a broad range of powerful high availability options from automatic restart as the result of host or virtual machine failure to intelligent placement of virtual machines across resource pools based on resource availability.”

Citrix has released a separate announcement for Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V that explains the extended partnership between Citrix and Microsoft now known as “Project Encore”. This press release also describes Read the rest of this entry »

SB said BS so I had to show that installing Hyper-V Server 2008 in a VM is possible! Hopefully he/she will allow a VM hosted  on the free VMware Server 2.0  as acceptable proof. My virtualization host is a 64 bit Ubuntu 8.10 desktop running VMware 2.0. I created the VM from my Vista notebook using the VMware Server web interface. Once again, it’s a very simple, straightforward process.

I’m not claiming to be able to run virtual machines on the Hyper-V VM. Fact is I have not tried. My intent is testing and learning the remote administration for now. I am planning on joining this VM to an Active Directory Domain along with my Windows 7 Beta install. Hopefully joining the server and client to a domain won’t be as frustrating as trying to figure out the configuration for a workgroup! I’ll probably post that process too when I get around to it.

So, the rest of this post shows the build in a table formatted steps with images. SB, this one’s for you! Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft has updated it’s licensing policies regarding virtual machines hosted on all versions of Hyper-V again. Available for download via the Licensing: Virtual Environments and Technologies web page, 2 key Microsoft virtualization policy documents now have Jan ’09 revisions. A description of these documents is provided in the page’s Overview section:

Licensing Microsoft Server Products in Virtual Environments (Word file, 2.25 MB) is an overview of Microsoft licensing models for the server operating system and server applications under virtual environments. Licensing Microsoft Windows Server 2008 to Run with Virtualization Technologies (Word file, 1.39 MB) describes how Windows Server 2008 and other Microsoft server products are licensed when they are used with other virtualization technologies.

Here are some quick notes on the changes from these documents that caught my attention. Read the rest of this entry »