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Jaap Wesselius
I am working as a senior systems architect at Amsio, a managed service provider in The Netherlands where I'm responsible for the entire Microsoft hosted offerings, including Exchange, Lync, Sharepoint, CRM and Hyper-V. Recently we've added Azure for Hosters to our offering as well. I am working with Exchange server since 1997 and for my community work I was awarded with the MVP award in 2007, an award that was reawarded every year since 2007. I started the Hyper-V.nu community site in 2008, just before Hyper-V was released with Windows Server 2008 and it was pretty successfull I must say.
Homepage: http://www.jaapwesselius.com
Posts by Jaap Wesselius
A New Year’s Gift from Veeam!
Dec 18th
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Free Altaro licenses
Nov 30th
Altaro, developers of Altaro Hyper-V Backup, are giving something back this holiday season and are giving every Microsoft Hyper-V admin 50 licenses of their desktop backup software, that’s up to $2,000 worth of software.
There’s no catch! All you need to do is send them a screenshot of Hyper-V that proves that you use Hyper-V and they will send you the licenses which you can use on your own machines or give out to friends, family or colleagues, to use at work or home. The giveaway ends on Dec 24th 2012.
To claim your 50 licenses check out http://www.altaro.com/hyper-v/50-free-pc-backup-licenses-for-all-hyper-v-admins
To check out their Hyper-V portal check out http://www.altaro.com/hyper-v/
For more info about Altaro Hyper-V Backup check out http://www.altaro.com/hyper-v-backup/?LP=Xmas
FreeBSD now supported on Hyper-V
Aug 13th
Last week (August 9th) Microsoft officially announced the availability of FreeBSD 8.2 Support for Hyper-V. Microsoft has been partnering with both NetApp and Citrix to get this up-and-running and performing well. This release of FreeBSD contains 8,500 lines of code submitted under the BSD Lincense. Microsoft is currenlty analysing customer demand to extend this to FreeBSD 9.0.
The source code can be found on Github as well as instructions for building from this source and running the drivers, which can be found here. If you have any feedback do not hesitate to give it through the mailing list.
The FreeBSD integration components provide support for:
- Network controller
- IDE/SCSI storage controller
- Timesync
- Integrated shutdown
- Heartbeat
This is not the first Linux support on Hyper-V. In May 2011 Microsoft already started to support CentOS running on Hyper-V: http://virtualization.info/en/news/2011/05/microsoft-announces-support-for-centos-in-hyper-v.html
Dual boot Windows 7 / Windows 8
Mar 22nd
Hans Vredevoort already blogged about how to boot from VHD with Windows 8 Developer Preview. While this is certainly worth a try I installed Windows 8 (Consumer Edition) on another partition.
This is relatively simple. Suppose your Windows 7 is running from partition1 and you want Windows 8 to be installed on partition2. Boot the computer from the DVD and install Windows 8 on partition 2. When done you’ll notice that it only boots into Windows 7 and there’s no option to select another Operating System.
In Windows 8, request the properties of the computer object, select Advanced System Settings, select Settings under Startup and Recovery and select the default Operating System (Windows 7 or Windows 8 Consumer Preview)
Please note that the OS selection will be shown during the boot process, so don’t panic if you miss the text screen.
Windows Server “8” Beta Hyper-V Component Architecture Poster
Mar 16th
This poster provides a visual reference for understanding key Hyper-V technologies in Windows Server “8” Beta and focuses on Hyper-V Replica, networking, virtual machine mobility (live migration), storage, failover clustering, and scalability.
You can download the poster from the Microsoft download site.
Hyper-V.nu Maintenance
Jul 11th
On Sunday July 10th we updated the Hyper-V.nu server. Quite a lot of Windows hotfixes, a new version of WordPress and some plug-ins were upgraded. If you experienced any issues during the weekend we apologize for this.
We also suffered from thousands and thousands of fake subscriptions to the site. If you have a genuine account on Hyper-V.nu it might well be deleted due to this. If so please recreate your account. Fill in as much data as possible to prevent your account being deleted by our anti-spam scripts.
Kind regards
The Hyper-V.nu team.
Dynamic Memory in Windows 2008 R2 SP1
Apr 13th
In Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 assigning memory to virtual machines is a static process. When you assign 4 GB to a virtual machine it uses these 4 GB, no more, no less. When not all of this memory is used than it’s bad luck. Once assigned it cannot be used for other purposes. So, when you have a Hyper-V host with 32GB of memory, you can create 15 virtual machines each configured with 2 GB of memory. The last 2 GB will be used by the parent partition itself.
New in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 is a feature called “Dynamic Memory”. This feature can assign more memory to a virtual machine (while running) when the virtual machine needs more memory. It can also remove memory from the virtual machine when this memory can be used for other virtual machines.
Some people think VMware’s and Microsoft’s approaches to dynamic memory is exactly the same. In this article I explain both the similarities and the differences. Read More….
TechEd Europe 2011, 2012 and TechEd US 2011
Apr 6th
As you might have heard there will be no TechEd EMEA this year, it is now official. The next version of TechEd EMEA will be in 2012, and in the Summer timeframe. TechEd EMEA 2012 will be held in Amsterdam from June 25-29.
For all of you that are disappointed in not having an EMEA version this year, you can attend the TechEd 2011 in Atlanta, GA (USA) with a US$200,- discount. TechEd North America 2011 will be held from May 16-19.
More info on http://www.microsoft.com/europe/teched/
And… quite a lot of info on the Microsoft cloud initiatives… Windows Azure, Private Cloud with Hyper-V and Office365: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud/default.aspx?fbid=4Bn2rLKT0mf
iSCSI Target in Windows Server 2008 R2
Apr 4th
A couple of years ago Microsoft acquired a company called “String Bean Software” which was IMHO a simple but great iSCSI Target solution, and it it was incorporated into the StorageServer product.
Today Microsoft launched the iSCSI Software target 3.3 for public download. This is absolutely great, now we have the possibility to create (Hyper-V) clusters on shared storage!
More info on the Jose Barrato’s Blog and it can be downloaded from the Microsoft download site: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=45105d7f-8c6c-4666-a305-c8189062a0d0
Exchange Server 2010 and Dynamic Memory
Apr 2nd
Dynamic memory is a cool feature in Hyper-V R2 SP1 and let’s you increase the density of VM’s on your Hyper-V Server. In short, the Hyper-V Server can assign memory to VM’s that need it, but ‘take’ it from VM’s that do not need it.
It’s all about the workload of course. Exchange Server 2010 is fully supported to run on Hyper-V, except for the Dynamic Memory part. Exchange Server wants only one thing: allocate as much memory as possible for caching mailbox data. When using Dynamic Memory, Exchange will allocate more memory and the Hyper-V server will allow this. But as soon as the Hyper-V server needs to reclaim memory from the Exchange Server and the ‘balloon starts to inflate’ Exchange Server will suffer performance issues. So from an Exchange point of view it’s better to allocate a fixed amount of memory (plenty of memory) to prevent nasty surprises.
For Microsoft official support recommendations on Exchange Server you might want to check this page: Microsoft Support Policies and Recommendations for Exchange Servers in Hardware Virtualization Environments
And for the dynamic memory part scroll down to “Dynamic Memory Allocation Considerations”
Quote from this article:
“Many of the performance improvements in recent versions of Exchange are based on the efficient use of an appropriately-sized RAM allocation. This is particularly true of improvements that are related to reductions in I/O operations. The performance optimizations rely on Exchange caching data in RAM. When RAM is dynamically reduced, the expected performance of the system cannot be achieved. In this scenario, Exchange may exhibit reduced performance, or end-users may experience reduced performance when connecting to Exchange. Therefore, for virtual machines that are running Exchange in a production environment, it is best to turn off memory oversubscription or dynamic memory allocation. Instead, configure a static memory size that is based on the appropriate values for Exchange 2007.”
The same is true for Exchange Server 2010.
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