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Archive for June, 2012
Microsoft Private Cloud Computing Book Release
Jun 15th
Monday June 18 2012 will be the big day for us. Our book Microsoft Private Cloud Computing will be officially available and even a little earlier than expected. Mid-2011 four MVP’s decided to make a joint effort at writing a practical book on deploying a Microsoft Private Cloud. The four authors are:
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Aidan Finn (MVP Virtual Machine @joe_elway)
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Patrick Lownds (MVP Virtual Machine @patricklownds)
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Damian Flynn (MVP System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management @damian_flynn)
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Hans Vredevoort (MVP Virtual Machine @hvredevoort)
Kristian Nese (@kristiannese) who is also MVP System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management kindly accepted the role of technical reviewer. Kristian has also written a book on Cloud Computing in Norwegian.
Learn the foundation of cloud computing and how to build your own Microsoft private cloud
Written by a team of expert authors who are MVPs and leaders in their respective fields, this one-of-a-kind book is an essential resource for IT administrators who are responsible for implementing and managing a cloud infrastructure. You’ll quickly learn how cloud computing offers significant cost savings while also providing new levels of speed and agility.
Serving as a how-to guide, Microsoft Private Cloud Computing walks you through building a secure, internal cloud and delivering it as a service to your company using Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012.
- Walks you through the entire process: understanding cloud computing, understanding the Microsoft concept of a private cloud, deploying a private cloud fabric, deploying services, and building a private cloud, as well as integrating it with Microsoft’s public cloud to create a cross-premises or public cloud
- Discusses fabric management with System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2012
- Examines how to provide network and storage with VMM 2012
- Looks at the VMM library configuration
- Discusses private cloud and cloud service management with Microsoft App Controller
Microsoft Private Cloud Computing is a must-have comprehensive resource that covers all aspects of implementing a private cloud
Aidan wrote the introductory chapters on Private Cloud, Hans dealt with the Fabric Management chapters (Servers, Storage, Network) including Bare Metal Deployment, Patrick wrote the chapters on Service Management (VMM Library, Service Modeling) and Damian contributed chapters on Private Cloud Solutions (VMM Services, Self-Service, App Controller) including the Cloud Services Process Pack.
If you are dealing with the Fabric part you need lots and lots of hardware. Fortunately one of our great customers at INOVATIV as well as my personal friends from XS4ALL (Joey Hofstede, Alexander Rijnbeek) have helped us tremendously. They offered us a remotely accessible lab including HP Blade Servers, HP EVA storage and lots of capacity to test all new VMM 2012 functionality. XS4ALL is a key Dutch Internet Provider, so you can imagine the download speeds if I ever wanted to grab a few ISO’s.
The book can be ordered here and will hopefully soon be found in most large bookstores.
Here are the (earlier) announcement blogs of my fellow authors:
Aidan: http://www.aidanfinn.com/?p=12024
Damian: http://www.damianflynn.com/2012/01/17/microsoft-private-cloud-computing-book/
Selecting Live Migration Networks in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Cluster with PowerShell
Jun 11th
Regarding Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V, we are very clearly in a discovery phase. When fellow Virtual Machine MVP Didier van Hoye aka @WorkingHardInIT asked me if I had already found out how to select the Live Migration networks in a Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Cluster, I simply didn’t have a clue. I saw Aidan Finn’s blog about the new location in the Failover Cluster Manager GUI to select these networks, but he was also asking the same question.
Fortunately my rewritten PowerShell scripts to quickly configure the converged fabric switch and the different management OS virtual networks was working wonders so a new 2-node cluster could be set up in no time.
Now how do we select Live Migration Networks with PowerShell?
As you can see in the GUI, the Live Migration setting is now in the Actions Pane instead of in the properties of a high available virtual machine as with Windows Server 2008 R2. I always needed to point out to customers that this was a global setting for all VMs in the cluster. So the new location seems like a logical one.
Without touching the Live Migration Settings, all networks were enabled for Live Migration in the fresh cluster that I set up. They are in this particular order because of the cluster network metric. You can verify this by this command:
Get-ClusterNetwork | Select name, Metric, AutoMetric, State | Sort Metric | ft –Autosize
To find out about the Live Migration networks, you need this command:
Get-VMMMigrationNetwork
By default all known networks are Enabled and have equal Priority.
If you manually move one network to the top of the list, it gets a Priority 4000. So apparently like the network metric a lower number means higher priority.
VM Migration networks are removed by
Remove-VMMigrationNetwork [Subnet]
VM Migration networks are set by
Set-VMMigrationNetwork [IP Address 1, IP Address 2, IP Address n]
Priority is set by
Set-VMMigrationNework [Subnet] [IP Address] –Priority n
Building A Converged Fabric with Windows Server 2012 PowerShell
Jun 7th
Within the team of Virtual Machine MVP’s and whoever else is aware of the extremely powerful concept of Converged Fabric, there is still a lot of debate on how to get this concept working in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. This blog post will help you succeed at this.
My fellow Hyper-V MVP and good friend Aidan Finn blogged about this exact subject only one week ago. I had been working on a few Windows Server 2012 PowerShell cmdlets for the Hyper-V extensible switch myself and had started to try out a few things with Load Balancing Failover (LBFO) network adapter teams, Hyper-V virtual switches adding a few Management OS Virtual NICs to it.
Since I didn’t have any real servers at hand, I was using my two SiteCom USG Gigabit Network Adapters which I fitted in my laptop. The worked wonders for creating a LBFO adapter team while keeping my other adapter for other tasks.
If you are entirely new to the subject, please read Aidan Finn’s blogs on Converged Fabric first. They give you a very good introduction what Converged Fabric means in het Microsoft Private Cloud arena. Just think of your current Hyper-V host network setup with 6 to 8 NICs and made ‘fault tolerant’ with often badly behaving teaming software from HP, Dell, Broadcom, Intel and the likes. I wrote at least a dozen blogs on this topic in the past few years. Microsoft was very right not to support teaming in R2. Although things got better in the end, I am so happy network adapter teaming is now an integral part of Windows Server 2012. Of course LBFO adapter teams can be created by a PowerShell one-liner.
I saw a comment from Aidan that his published PowerShell script for creating the Converged Fabric was broken after moving from Windows Server 8 beta to Windows Server 2012 RC.
This blog will describe how I created the LBFO team, virtual (extensible) switch, Management OS vEthernet networks. The script closely resembles what Aidan has described in his PowerShell Script To Create A Converged Fabric For Clustered Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Host blog, but all commands now also work in Windows Server 2012.
What has changed:
- Adapter names are now automatically named with syntax “vEthernet (Name Adapter)” so be careful when you use the –InterfaceAlias parameter
- The parameter –IPv4Address has been changed to –IPAddress
This is how my network looks like when the PowerShell commands have been run
My LBFO team has only one adapter called Internal LAN, but you can test with it without a problem, except that it does not offer any Fail Over capability. It’s just a lab.
All-In with System Center 2012: 8 minute video [Dutch]
Jun 7th
The company I work for is All In with Microsoft System Center 2012 and it is no surprise that we spend a lot of effort getting across the message that this Microsoft Management suite is what you really need if you build a Microsoft Private Cloud with a heterogeneous landscape of hypervisors, operations systems and applications.
In my book Microsoft Private Cloud Computing several of the important pieces are covered such as System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 and App Controller 2012.
This 8-minute video explains why System Center 2012 is such an interesting management suite and ought to be considered by every IT manager or CIO looking to efficiently manage a small, medium or large datacenter.
Dutch version: http://www.systemcenter2012.nl/
Please take a look at the list of System Center 2012 References at the bottom of this blog.
System Center References:
System Center User Group [Dutch]: http://www.scug.nl/
System Center Blog: http://www.systemcenterblog.nl/
System Center Central: http://www.systemcentercentral.com/
System Center Microsoft site: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/system-center/default.aspx
System Center 2012 Books: http://www.systemcenterblog.nl/tag/system-center-2012/
System Center Technical Resources: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/systemcenter/
System Center Solution Center: http://support.microsoft.com/ph/16340
Microsoft Private Cloud Computing Book: http://www.aidanfinn.com/?p=12024
How to Participate in the System Center Community:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/11504.how-to-participate-in-the-system-center-community.aspx
System Center twitter hashtags;
http://www.systemcentercentral.com/BlogDetails/tabid/143/IndexID/92725/Default.aspx
System Center Virtual Machine Manager Blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/scvmm/
System Center Operations Manager Blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/
System Center Data Protection Manager Blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/dpm/
System Center Service Manager Blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/servicemanager/
System Center Orchestrator Blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/orchestrator/
System Center Configuration Manager Blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/configmgrteam/
System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management (CDM) MVP’s:
https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/communities/mvp.aspx?product=1&competency=System+Center+Cloud+and+Datacenter+Management
Mike Kolitz’s SuperDuper Windows 8/Server 2012 Deployment cmdlet
Jun 1st
Updated June 7, 2012
I have already blogged several times about how to create a Boot from VHD installation for the Developer and Beta versions of Windows 8 and Windows Server 8 Beta.
Now that the Release Preview version of Windows 8 and the Release Candidate version of Windows Server 2012 have been released, it is a good occasion to revisit this very flexible boot method.
My first assumption this time is that you already have a system running PowerShell 3.0 which is the case if your machine runs an earlier version of Windows (Server) 8. This blog you will learn how to configure Native VHD without touching diskpart for preparing the VHD file. In fact we are going to create a VHDX file which is recognized by Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 machines.
A second assumption is that you have the Hyper-V role installed. This is required because we need the Hyper-V PowerShell module which comes with the Hyper-V role.
To fully understand what is going on, I suggest you first run the classical route and then be surprised by the simplest of deployment methods which has much less requirements [See update and comments Mike Kolitz below) compared to the Classical Route. More on this later on in the blog!
The Classical Route
Let’s start creating a 60GB dynamic VHDX file named ws2012rc.vhdx in a directory we shall name D:\VHDX. A downloaded ISO image file of Windows Server 2012 should be copied to D:\Download.
New-VHD -Path d:\vhdx\ws2012rc.vhdx -Dynamic -SizeBytes 60GB
Once the VHDX file is created, it can be mounted as follows:
Mount-VHD -Path D:\vhdx\ws2012rc.vhdx –verbose
As you can see in the next screen, the newly mounted VHDX has a RAW partition style, so we need to find a way to only initialize the mounted virtual hard disk.
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