Powered by System Center
Peter Noorderijk
My name is Peter Noorderijk. I work since 2001 in the ICT sector. Started as an all-round system administrator and grown to a senior consultant. Since april 2008 I’m working for PQR. Focusing on Server & Storage, Virtualization and Application Delivery solutions, PQR implements and migrates advanced ICT-infrastructures and has achieved the highest certifications of its most important partners: HP Preferred Partner Gold, Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Citrix Platinum Solution Advisor, VMware Premier and Consultancy Partner. I’ve a strong focus on Backend Virtualization soluitons and especially Microsoft Hyper-V. Off course I’m also focused on the Microsoft System Center solutions because of the tight integration with Hyper-V. Last but not least I’m focused on Microsoft Exchange solutions. I’m blogging and publishing about these focus area’s at different places but I’m very pleased to blog about Hyper-V only here at HYPER-V.NU! You can follow me on twitter: @pnoorderijk
Homepage: http://www.hyper-v.nu
Posts by Peter Noorderijk
Hyper-V.nu event videos
Jan 30th
Carsten Rachfahl en Jan Kappen were two of the many visitors of the Hyper-V.nu event on the 19th of January. But these guys have done a very good job during the event and especially afterwards. They’ve recorded all sessions and have done some nice video editing. You can view the results over here:
Keynote – by Jaap Wesselius and Peter Noorderijk
Windows Server 8 Hyper-V networking – by Aidan Finn
Windows Server 8 Hyper-V storage – by Hans Vredevoort
Windows Server 8 DDDD – by Ronald Beekelaar
SCVMM 2012 – by Maarten Wijsman
These videos are uploaded to the youtube Hypervcommunity channel from our German friends:
http://www.youtube.com/user/hypervcommunity
Again thanks for the really nice job!
Hyper-V.nu event – review
Jan 24th
On the 19th of January we organised our first Hyper-V.nu event for the year 2012. After the registration opened we were over booked within two days and had to disappoint a lot of people, sorry for that!
But…. This meeting was really, really great! With a fully loaded room (people were even sitting on the stairs), great speakers with great sessions and a very satisfied crowd we must be very happy and satisfied, and we are!
Specials thanks to our sponsors: Altaro, VEEAM, Inovativ, PQR, Wortell and Microsoft! Without their support it was not possible to organise this event. Also a special thank to our German friends Carsten Rachfall en Jan Kappen who have recorded all sessions. These video’s will be published very soon, so keep an eye on www.hyper-v.nu for links to these recordings.
We will also thank our guest speakers Aidan Finn and Ronald Beekelaar. Both of them were from overseas! They both have given a great session with a lot of immersion into Windows 8!
Last but not least we will thank the visitors for attending this event. We hope that you all come again to our next event!
Here are the presentations of this great event:
Keynote – Jaap Wesselius and Peter Noorderijk
Windows Server 8 Hyper-V Networking – Aidan Finn
Windows Server 8 Hyper-V Storage – Hans Vredevoort
Windows 8 DDDD – Ronald Beekelaar
Cheers, Peter
The private cloud explained
Nov 28th
Everybody is talking about the cloud these days. However the term Cloud is completely over-hyped! Suppliers rebrand their products into cloud products even when it has not only one Cloud property. People say that they are using Cloud computing, but they mean virtualization… and so on.
In this article I’ll try to explain the Internal Cloud and what you need for the Internal Cloud. We also will take a look if we can build an Internal Cloud with Hyper-V and System Center.
Let’s first take a look at the Wikipedia definition of Cloud computing:
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet).
When you look at this definition I can imagine that you say: Hey we’re already doing this for a couple of years and that can be true. Cloud is just a marketing term!
Ok now we’ve clarified the term Cloud let’s take a look at the difference between an internal cloud and a public (external) cloud. The main difference is that an internal cloud is only dedicated to your company and a public cloud is shared with many. An example of a public cloud service is Office 365. Many companies share this platform with other companies and it’s not possible to get a dedicated Exchange server or Sharepoint server within this service. The opposite is true for a private cloud service. Within a private cloud you can get dedicated servers or dedicated hardware.
However, the question is: when are we talking about a private cloud? Well Gartner made a nice model with required en preferred components for a private cloud:
When any of the required components is missing we’re not talking about a private cloud.
Hyper-V interview video’s in cooperation with NGN
Nov 23rd
A couple of weeks ago the Hyper-V.nu team visited the Netwerk Gebruikersgroep Nederland (NGN) to record some interviews about Hyper-V. The NGN record and edit the video’s. Jaap Wesselius interviewed Hans Vredevoort, Maarten Wijsman and me. The first of the three video’s is just published online at the site of NGN.
You can watch the video here
Hyper-V community event – Sold out!!
Nov 10th
Let’s start with the good news: The Hyper-V.nu event is completely sold out! The bad news is that you cannot register anymore. For this event we’ve decided not to watch for another location then the planned location @ Microsoft. For the next event we will look for a place with more capacity so that we’ve more seats available.
We are very proud that the event was sold out within one week! Thanks to everyone who has registered….We’re looking forward to see you at the event!
All sessions for this event will be in English.
I’ve you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact me: peter@hyper-v.nu
Regards, Peter
Monitoring a Hyper-V environment – Part 2
Nov 2nd
In my previous article about ‘Monitoring a Hyper-V environment we’ve looked at two tools: HyperV_Mon and the Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) Tool. Both tools can be used to monitor the performance of a Hyper-V environment. But as I said earlier a monitoring tool needs to do more than that. I think a monitoring tool needs to do end-to-end monitoring of the whole chain of components which are needed to deliver a service to an end user. Performance statistics are not competent in this situation, configuration errors, product updates/ patches and best practices must also be verified by the monitoring tool. System Center Operations Manager is such a tool.
In this blog we will take a look at the Microsoft Windows Hyper-V management pack and some additional tooling for System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr). We will not take a look at the PRO management pack for System Center Virtual Machine Manager.
The Microsoft Hyper-V Management Pack
Management packs can be directly downloaded from the OpsMgr console. OpsMgr will connect to the Management Pack Catalog website and from here you can search for the management pack that you would like to install. So let’s search for ‘Hyper-V’…. and the result is:
Hyper-V community event–Update
Nov 2nd
As we announced in this blog the seats at our Hyper-V community event on the 19th of January are limited.
Today we received the message that all seats are assigned! This means that you get an error/ message when you try to register for this event.
The Hyper-V.nu team is considering what to do with this situation.
Sorry for the inconvenience. We will give you an update as soon as we’ve any information about the subscriptions.
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!
Windows Server 8 will bring us this!
Sep 14th
Well as I said in my previous blog I expect a lot of new details around Windows Server 8. The wave of new Windows 8 features that Microsoft announced yesterday is impressive and while watching the keynote I almost get a buffer overflow 
. Today It’s time for Windows Server 8 news, are you ready for some really cool stuff?
Windows Server Core
Microsoft introduced Windows Server Core in Windows Server 2008 and this continues in Windows Server 2008 R2. During the setup of your server you had to choose between the GUI or the Core version. Personally I like the Core version because it’s faster, more secure, needs less patching and so on. However sometimes it was a challenge to configure things within the OS like NIC bindings e.g. Over the time there appeared tools for managing Server Core (see also this and this blog). The command line scares many admins because of the unknown territory of CLI. Windows Server 8 will change this: In Windows Server 8 you can turn the GUI on and off whenever you want. So there is no reason anymore to choose the GUI version for a Hyper-V host. You can run Server Core and when you need to configure something you can turn on the GUI configure your stuff and turn the GUI off again!
Virtual Machines on a File Server
Yes you read that correctly. With Windows Server 8 it’s possible to store virtual machines on a Windows file server! This is made possible through the updated file server protocol SMB 2.2. This means that it is not a requirement anymore to make use of a SAN system when you build a Hyper-V cluster. You can simply point your nodes in the cluster to the file share where the VM is placed. I really wonder how this performs and how reliable it is. However this will give the small sized business the opportunity to easily build a high available Hyper-V environment.
Hyper-V Replication
This feature is already announced in the early summer of this year. Because it’s a very interesting feature I will mention it again. Hyper-V Replication makes it possible to replicate a virtual machine to another Hyper-V host without the need for expensive storage hardware and replication software. This even can be a virtual machine that is stored on local storage. The network connection between the host could be a one gigabit Ethernet link. If you have a large virtual machine that would take hours or days to replicate over your network it is also possible to do the first replication to a portable drive. Transfer this drive to the other host, copy the replica to the host and from then only replicate the changes. So this will give you the possibility to implement a disaster recovery site without the need to spend a lot of money.
NIC Teaming
In Windows Server 2008 (R2) Microsoft does not support NIC teaming but instead directs you to the OEM hardware vendor. This was a great disadvantage and a lot of people has complained about this. Well Microsoft has heard all these complaints. In Windows Server 8 we don’t need NIC teaming software anymore! The Operating System will do the job!!! Great isn’t it? It doesn’t matter if you use two or more different NICs for different vendors. These can all be teamed by the OS. The OS will do bandwidth management, failover management and will also improve throughput.
Domain controllers that are virtualization-aware
Snapshotting a virtual machine with the domain controller role is absolutely unsupported. The restore snapshot method will likely cause a rollback in the update sequence number (USN) used to track changes in Active Directory. When a USN rollback occurs, the contents of the Active Directory databases on the improperly restored domain controller and its replication partners may be permanently inconsistent… But thins will change with Windows Server 8!!!!!
On top of Windows Server 8 you can install a virtual machine with the Domain Controller role and AD will be virtualization aware. It even understand what needs to be done when a DC goes back in time (revert a snapshot). There is even an option DC cloning. When you setup a virtual DC you can make this DC clone-able.
Hyper-V scalability
Hyper-V in Windows Server 8 is more scalable then it was ever before:
- In the beta a Hyper-V host support up to 160 CPU cores;
- 2 TB of RAM
- 4000 virtual machines per cluster
- 63 nodes per cluster
Virtual machines will support up to 32 virtual CPU’s and 512 GB of RAM. There also will be a new virtual harddisk format VHDX. VHDX should be faster and can exceed the 2 TB size limit of a VHD file.
De-Duping on storage and network
Windows Server 8 can dedup files within a VHD file. So If you have some VHD files with all a Windows Server 8 installation on it identical files will be deduped to save storage! This will also happen when you copy a number of files between two Windows Server 8 host the network stack will do dedupping as well.
That’s it for now… Windows Server 8 add some very nice features which are not available in other hypervisors. Until today Hyper-V was always a step behind the other hypervisor but Windows Server 8 will change this and take a leap ahead of its competitors!
Twitter
RSS