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Archive for October, 2011
Monitoring a Hyper-V environment – Part 1
Oct 26th
When you’re using Hyper-V as a virtualization platform this Hyper-V environment will be a very critical component for your IT infrastructure. I don’t need to tell anyone that you need to watch these critical components very closely. In this multipart blog I will show you how you can watch your Hyper-V environment using several different products. In this part we will take a look at HyperV_Mon and the PAL tool.
HyperV_Mon
Let’s start with a basic tool. HyperV_Mon is a freeware tool for viewing CPU performance of a Hyper-V server, it’s not a regular monitoring tool. The tool can help you to understand true CPU usage of a virtual machine. This tool can be downloaded from here. Just unpack the ZIP file and double click HyperV_Mon.exe (you don’t need to install any software). This tool only requires that you have the .NET 3.5 Framework installed on the machine where you run the tool. You also need WMI access to the Root Partition of the host which you want to monitor. You can run to tool from a remote machine so it’s not necessary to run the tool on the Hyper-V host itself. This makes it possible to monitor a Hyper-V core edition host.
The tool is very easy to configure:
Hyper-V community event in Amsterdam on 19th of January
Oct 24th
UPDATE: ALL PRESENTATIONS WILL BE IN ENGLISH!
On January the 19th, 2012 the Hyper-V.nu crew will organise a very cool event again! Both the speakers and the subjects are valid reasons to visit this event and you may not miss it!
Admission is free!
This event will be organized at Microsoft’s headquarter in Amsterdam (Evert van de Beekstraat 354, Schiphol).
The schedule of the day is final:
| 9:30 – 10:00 | Welcome |
| 10:00 – 11:00 | Keynote by Jaap Wesselius and Peter Noorderijk |
| 11:00 – 12:00 | Hyper-V networking in Windows Server 8 by Aidan Finn |
| 12:00 – 12:45 | Lunch |
| 12:45 – 13:45 | Hyper-V storage in Windows Server 8 by Hans Vredevoort |
| 14:00 – 15:00 | Windows 8 DDDD – Disk Deduplication Deep Dive by Ronald Beekelaar |
| 15:00 – 16:00 | SCVMM 2012 by Maarten Wijsman |
| 16:00 – 16:15 | Closing keynote by Robert Bakker |
| 16:15 – 17:00 | Drinks |
You need to register for this event at the following link:
Our guest speakers Aidan Finn and Ronald Beekelaar are both Virtual Machine MVP and they rock in the Hyper-V community. Both of these guests are international speakers on events like TechEd and so on. Hyper-V.nu is very proud that these guys will speak on the Hyper-V.nu event!
Be quick with registering because seats are limited!
See you on the January the 19th 2012 @Microsoft Amsterdam!
Collecting Data from Hyper-V hosts and VM’s
Oct 20th
There haven’t been any new blogs on Hyper-V.nu in the past weeks because of …. you know … an absolute dearth of time. It so happened that my other Hyper-V.nu colleagues had the same luxury problem in these economical challenging times.
So while I was doing a lot of other things which I will soon be able to talk about, I asked my colleague Sander Klaassen to fill in the gap and write a guest blog. Sander is also a Microsoft virtualization enthusiast and combines this with his broad other expertise.
Please welcome our guest blogger Sander Klaassen!
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Over de last years I developed a script to quickly scan a customer’s IT environment. Recently I added a Hyper-V module which collects data from Hyper-V hosts and VM’s. I showed Hans Vredevoort the output and he asked me to write a blog about it. I was not sure to share the code, because it isn’t very clean, since I only occasionally work on it.
I created a VBScript and not a PowerShell script because I wanted to be able to run it without installing anything, and VBScript is part of windows since Windows 2000 so it’s always available.
This is also the reason why I made this script besides the regular Microsoft scan tools like ACT and MAP. They all need installation of components or even agents.
I modified the script for this blog, I changed the script by requesting input in a text file instead of Active Directory. This text file is a simple list of machine names:
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HyperV01
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HyperV02
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HyperV03
Save it in the same directory as the VBScript with the name “machinelist.txt”
The script queries WMI name spaces of each machine and when it finds the Hyper-V role, it collects the following information:
The Experts Conference 2011
Oct 20th
In the past week I attended TEC Europe 2011 in Frankfurt and presented a Hyper-V Storage Deep Dive session for a small but highly specialized audience. TEC2011 is certainly not known for its sheer size but because of its small size it is very easy to get into touch with both other speakers and visitors. My Hyper-V.nu and inovativ colleague Jaap Wesselius was also present and he presented for the third consecutive year. So that must mean something. Jaap presented a number of topics around Exchange, Hyper-V and instructed an Exchange 2010 Availability workshop.
My presentation was part of the Cloud and Virtualization track. This track was a mixture of private cloud management, server virtualization, application virtualization, desktop virtualization, identity, software as a service, infrastructure as a service, PowerShell, etc. I really enjoyed the depth of most presentations and talking to a good number of friends I normally only meet on the social media platforms.
My presentation dived into 10 storage topics related to Hyper-V which were analyzed on both their strengths and weaknesses and compared to what will be available in Hyper-V version 3 in Windows Server 8.
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Hyper-V Virtual Disks
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Hyper-V Shared Disks
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Hyper-V Snapshots
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Cluster Shared Volumes
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Live Migration
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Storage Migration
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Hyper-V Data Protection
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Cluster Storage Validation
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SCSI-3 Reservation/Registration
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Storage Configuration with PowerShell
You can download the PowerPoint including some of the PowerShell 3 scripts I used for configuring in a Windows
Server 8 Hyper-V and File Server Cluster: http://bit.ly/qeO2Z3
My next presentations will be at Experts Live – Cloud Edition on November 22nd, 2011 and our own big Hyper-V.nu event on January 19th 2012
Left to right: @hvredevoort @jaapwess @workinghardinit @hypervserver @rickslager
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