Hans Vredevoort

Best Practices to Implement Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V R2 on HP ProLiant Servers (Part 2)

Nov 15th

Posted by Hans Vredevoort in Hans Vredevoort

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On the first day of TechEd Europe 2009, Doug Dewerd presented a session on best practices to implement Windows Server 2008 R2 on HP ProLiant Servers. This is in fact the combination of hardware and software I have preferred ever since Windows and ProLiant were joined, exactly 20 years ago last week. The ProLiant server was produced by Compaq and replaced the first PC based server, the Compaq SystemPro which was released in 1989. A nice best practice not many customers are aware of is that ever since the first ProLiant model, the Smart Array Controllers have shared a common driver family. Standardization even on the driver level has worked well for many of our clients. You probably have seen several vendors who introduced new technology, but have switched the configuration software and driver installation methodology quite a bit.

On the agenda were four topics:

  • HP Servers and Windows Server 2008 R2
  • HP and Hyper-V R2
  • HP Management Tools
  • HP Storage Support

HP Servers and Windows Server 2008 R2

HP ProLiant Servers combined with R2 mean a considerable reduction in power consumption and improved consolidation ratio’s. The HP ProLiant G6 servers use half the power of previous generations of servers, support more processors and are certified with R2 advanced power management. Especially combined with HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 technology virtualization ratio’s can be improved significantly at a lower price level than traditional switches in a blade enclosure. Furthermore a deep integration with Microsoft System Center improves availability and simplifies management.

There are three interesting things that help efficiency in the datacenter:

  1. HP LeftHand SAN products which provide high availability without the requirement to buy additional synchronous replication software. This iSCSI based storage is fully transparent to Hyper-V R2 and Cluster Shared Volumes and Live Migration. LeftHand superbly mirrors data blocks (Network RAID) across storage nodes and by simply spreading the nodes of the storage cluster across sites, a fully automated and disaster tolerant solution can be built. Of course the network interconnects have to be superb as well for synchronous replication to be efficient, although asynchronous replication is also supported out of the box.
  2. EVA CLX (Cluster Extensions) now supports Live Migration and disaster recovery. This software, not being the cheapest around, is able to eliminate service disruption and automatically fails over or back with Microsoft failover cluster services when disaster strikes.
  3. An integration is made available between the HP Configuration & Sizing Tool for Hyper-V and MAP (Microsoft Assessment & Planning) tool. It can build detailed HP configurations for R2, Hyper-V and applications.

If you want to find out which HP ProLiant Servers are supported for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V R2, just go to:
http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/us/en/servers/ws-servers-2008-r2.html

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HP fully supports Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V R2 for both it’s fifth and sixth generation of tower, rack and blade servers with one or two exceptions. Just check the support matrix.

Power Control with Windows Server 2008 R2

Windows Server 2008 R2 has done great things for intelligent support for power control. R2 supports the new processor performance state interface which enables OS and platform coordination of processor power management:

  • Platform is in direct control of t- and p-states
  • OS specifies processor performance requirements
  • Platform is responsible for delivering requested performance
  • Interface is described via ACPI which is jointly developed by HP and Microsoft

The collaborative power controls are available in ProLiant G6 servers and blade and combine the OS independent HP Power Regulator and Windows Server 2008 R2’s Power Metering & Budgeting infrastructure. PMB manages power based on its knowledge of incoming work queues and task scheduling, whilst HP Power Regulator manages power based on the state of the hardware and the reaction speed necessary to protect hardware.

The process is like this:

  • Windows asks for what it thinks is best
  • The hardware grants that request unless it can’t because of hardware constraints
  • Then the hardware tells the OS what it actually got

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This joint effort at improving Green IT can reduce energy cost by as much as 70%.

Scalability and Performance

Windows Server 2008 R2 improves on physical processor and memory resources, running exclusively on 64-bit processors, it supports up to a maximum of 256 processors. R2 also improves on virtual processor resources. Hyper-V R2 now supports up to 64 logical processors (cores or hyper-threaded CPU’s). Accepting processor overcommit, Hyper-V R2 allows for 512 virtual CPU’s per physical host. The current limit of vCPU’s per virtual machine is 4.

An extremely important improvement is the support for SLAT (Second Level Address Translation) which reduces hypervisor processor time and saves about 1MB of memory per virtual machine by using processor functionality to carry out virtual machine memory management functions. In short, memory management is delegated to the processor with better scalability and performance as the result.

Doug showed an example of near linear scalability in throughput with no virtual CPU overcommit (n
o more vCPU’s are used than the amount of physical CPU’s available).

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These are the graphs you want to see that could make you wonder why you wouldn’t virtualize even your heavier database servers. In fact we only need to get more experience and faith in hypervisors like Hyper-V R2.

A helpful site with technical guidance, reference configurations, performance characterization and test results, white papers, tools, system configurators, capacity planners and sizers can be found on HP ActiveAnswers.

Hyper-V Support

Most ProLiant servers support Hyper-V R2. At a minimum HP ProLiant Support Pack (PSP) 8.30 must be used. Be careful to install PSP before enabling the Hyper-V role and don’t install PSP on the guests. Furthermore, check the HP whitepapers on Hyper-V R2 integration for the minimum ROM version, supported options and NIC Teaming information.

Hyper-V R2 Installation Tips

  • Check HP R2 white paper to ensure servers, options and storage are supported
  • Update server BIOS if needed
  • Enable support for No-Execute and hardware-assisted virtualization in RBSU (Rom Based Server Utility)
  • Install OS, then ProLiant Support Pack without Network Configuration Utility (NCU), then enable Hyper-V
      • If installing HP Systems Insight Manager or HP Insight Control for System Center, make sure that SNMP is configured and started
  • NIC Teaming is supported provided that
      • The latest version of Hyper-V is installed and enabled
      • HP ProLiant Network Teaming Software is installed and enabled after having enabled Hyper-V

Hyper-V Server R2 or Server Core with Hyper-V R2 Installation

  • Copy PSP executables to subdirectory and extract
  • If installing HP SIM or HP Insight Control for System Center, make sure SNMP service has started
      • Run oclist.exe to list the services that have started
      • If SNMP has not started, execute the command start /w ocsetup SNMP-SC to start the SNMP service
  • Run setup.exe from folder
  • Select Bundle Filter and options
  • Select items to be installed
  • View Installation Results upon completion

NIC Teaming Notes

Known Hyper-V R2 Issues

  • Stop 0x0000007E blue screen displays after initial reboot when Hyper-V is installed on Windows Server 2008 R2
  • After enabling the Hyper-V server role on an HP ProLiant DL785 G5 Server, a black screen displays after the system reboots
      • Upgrade the ProLiant DL785 G5 server to version A15 of the System ROM dated 08/14/2009 (or later).
  • The virtual machine network is not working when the external virtual network is connected to 1-Gbps NC375i NIC on an HP ProLiant ML370 G6 Server
      • This issue has been reported to HP and is being worked
      • The network driver will be released to the support and drivers page after the issue is resolved

Networking Challenges

  • The total network throughput requirement on Hyper-V host is significantly higher than on traditional servers
  • Consolidated servers may not have same requirements
      • Access to different VLAN’s
      • Access to additional bandwidth
  • Varying requirements lead to additional complexities
      • Increased number of uplinks
      • Increased number of ports
      • Increased number of cables

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If you add up all the NICs that are required for all the networks with full redundancy in an ideal configuration, you end up with staggering numbers.

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In fact this could be downsized a little in my opinion. Let’s say you use fibre channel SAN and a Hyper-V R2 cluster with Live Migration, I would normally advise:

Network Minimum Sufficient
Domain Access + Management + HB 2 2
Live Migration + CSV + HB 2 2
Production VM’s 2 4
Total 6 8

In previous Windows failover clusters there was a requirement for a Cluster Heartbeat (HB) or Private Network. In Windows Server 2008 Failover Clusters, an alternative path is recommended so if one NIC goes down, another NIC is used to check the cluster heartbeat. In our example the first two networks can serve this purpose. Since Windows Server 2008 the heartbeat/cluster NIC is supported in a NIC Teaming configuration.

For production VM’s at least two teamed NIC’s can be used with at least 2 x 1GB speed. Maybe even 4 x 1GB speed to allow for more network throughput. If 8 NICs are used we end up with eight Gigabit switches in a typical HP c-Class 7000 blade enclosure. Counting these switches including, cabling and core Ethernet switch ports plus tedious management, this can easily become a very expensive solution. For this reason HP has developed HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 Interconnects. With only two of these modules, each BL ProLiant BL G6 and higher server can be configured to split the two 10Gb Ethernet ports into 8 so called FlexNICs which are not virtual but fully functional hardware based Ethernet NICS. The speed of these FlexNICs can be set to any speed between 100MB and 10Gb Ethernet.

With Flex-10 the table looks like this:

Network FlexNICs Gbps
Domain Access + Management + HB 2 2
Live Migration + CSV + HB 2 4
Production VM’s 2 8
or devote some FlexNICs to iSCSI 2  
Total 8 20

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If more is required in the future with even higher densities of cores, memory and consequently VM’s, we can add up to six HP VC Flex-10 Interconnect modules with the total capacity of 24 NICs per server blade. Who said blade servers are not scalable? Unfortunately I cannot tell you what HP showed us in the NDA room, but servers are surely bound to become bigger and much more scalable. Sorry, you have to wait until some time next year. But rest assured that the current HP ProLiant G6 family is very scalable and even half-height blades can handle up to 24 cores, 192GB of memory and 4 x 10Gb of network capability (if you include an extra dual-port 10Gb Ethernet mezzanine module. Of course scalability will improve further in the next year. And you can grow with it, while keeping the server blade infrastructure in place.

HP Insight Portfolio

HP offers several management products for its ProLiant servers: HP Insight Foundation (included), HP Insight Control and HP Insight Dynamics.

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The best news for HP and Hyper-V users is the tight integration of HP Insight software with Microsoft System Center:

  • Provides seamless integration of the unique ProLiant and BladeSystem manageability features for customers who have standardized on System Center management platforms
  • Delivered as part of HP Insight Control 6.0
      • In addition to the full Insight Control capabilities, it provides a set of extensions to Microsoft System Center
      • Requires one Insight Control license per managed (Hyper-V R2) server

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Integration Components

  • HP Insight Control for System Center software CD components
      • HP ProLiant Server Management Packs for Operations Manager 2007
      • HP BladeSystem Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007
      • HP ProLiant PRO Management Pack for Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (R2?)
      • HP ProLiant Server OS Deployment for Configuration Manager 2007
      • HP Hardware Inventory Tool for Configuration Manager 2007
  • HP Catalog for System Center Configuration Manager is downloaded from the HP web
      • No HP Catalog software is included on the CD
      • HP Catalog support included with standard Technical Support and Software Update service

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Storage Support for Hyper-V R2

Check the support matrix for HP storage and Hyper-V R2. The tables show extensive support for the current Microsoft hypervisor. In addition to this also check the Single Point of Connectivity Knowledge (SPOCK) website. You have to create or use an HP Passport for access.

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One of the first storage products that fully support Hyper-V R2, Cluster Shared Volumes and Hyper-V R2 is HP LeftHand P4000 SAN Solution. Notably the Network RAID and replication capability (included in the price) is responsible for the transparency for the Hyper-V R2 cluster. A multi-site cluster of course requires a good design and proper network setup, but HP LeftHand takes a lot of complexity out of multi-site clustering.

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With storage that is optimized for Hyper-V virtualization and Live Migration, virtual machines can be moved live without downtime for users. Users will not notice that both the server and the storage is moved to another datacenter. When a datacenter breaks down or blows up, virtual machines will take over in a very short amount of time (minutes), comparable to a server crash. The virtual machine is restarted quickly and users can continue their work as if nothing had happened.

Other possibilities:

  • Zero Downtime Array Load Balancing
      • IOPS
      • cache utilization
      • power consumption
  • Zero Downtime Maintenance
      • Firmware
      • HBA
      • Server updates without user interruption
  • Follow the sun/moon data center access model
      • Move the app/VM closest to the users or closest to the cheapest power source
  • Failover, failback, Quick and Live Migration using the same management software
      • No need to learn x different tools and their limitations

HP also showed us an update to HP Cluster Extensions (CLX) for Hyper-V R2 and Live Migration. This solution is intended for HP EVA and HP XP Storage Arrays with multiple sites and synchronous replication (Continuous Access). Because of the architecture of HP Continuous Access it currently cannot use Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV), which is not a problem because Live Migration does formally not depend on CSV. HP CLX therefore uses traditional shared LUNS per VM. In the demo we saw only a few pings lost during a Live Migration of both virtual machine and storage. No packet had to be retransmitted and users would not be aware of the datacenter move.

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From this presentation by Doug Dewerd and Matthias Popp, I got the impression that HP takes Microsoft and Hyper-V very seriously. They have worked together for many years in the Microsoft/HP Frontline Partnership which has now culminated into fascinating products which work really well together.

With the recently formed vBlock called VCE (VMware, Cisco and EMC), I contend that HP is sort of forming an opposing block. I propose calling them MCH (Microsoft, Citrix and HP).

In fact this combination of best of breed server, storage and virtualization solutions happens to be my primary job: designing and architecting fast, flexible, highly available and highly scalable infrastructures. I got a feeling …

For Hyper-V R2 and HP Full Featured DSM / MPIO also see:
http://hyper-v.nu/blogs/hans/?p=292

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TechEd 2009 Europe Sessions (part 1)

Nov 14th

Posted by Hans Vredevoort in Hans Vredevoort

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This year I decided to ignore as many sessions that are part of my core competency set. Broadening the scope to several other topics that might help me in my job as an infrastructure consultant and architect. I went to sessions on Azure, Federation, Exchange 2010, System Center Road Map, Configuration Manager R3 and v.Next, DPM2010, SharePoint 2010, Best Practices Implementing R2 on HP ProLiant Servers.

The sessions that are somehow related to Hyper-V or clustering, I will discuss a sequence of blogs.

The first presentation I will talk about in this edition was presented by Kenon Owens:

The True Value of Microsoft Integrated Virtualisation

If you find an s in the word Virtualisation, you can bet your life on it that the speaker is English, at least not American. Kenon started telling us he had been working for VMware for nine years and had been doing competitive analysis. He has recently joined Microsoft and was now fully enthusiastic about the new world of Windows Virtualization (Although I hold a masters in English, I keep on spelling it the American way if you don’t mind).

The speaker argued that a lot has changed since 2007 for customers and their investment plans. Two years ago companies focused on growth, now on survival. It is all about saving money and With Less, Do More.

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Nevertheless, CIO’s still think that Server, Storage en Desktop Virtualization as well as Cloud Computing are among the top four trends driving spend decisions for this year and the next.

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Of course the differences between vSphere and Microsoft Virtualization + System Center clearly boil down to this slogan of With Less, Do More. Even for an ex-VMware employee this was easy to convey.

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Many businesses are progressing from a traditional datacenter towards a virtualized datacenter with consolidated servers increasing utilization and transforming to private clouds, further decreasing cost and introducing IT as a service. It could be only a small step to move parts or all IT services to a public cloud, provided that the next step is evolutionary as is promised with Azure. Returning from the cloud, backup to the private often on premises cloud should also be possible. For instance if security dictates that certain data should be kept in-house. It could be risky living on a cloud. The metaphor of the cloud does not bring much confidence in the stability of its foundation. If you risk falling off a cloud, the way back should be guaranteed. This is exactly what Microsoft Azure has to offer. In another presentation on SQL Server Azure, I saw the same database of the private cloud exported to Azure and back. Exchange 2010 will probably also live in the combined world of the private and the public cloud. Moving mailboxes back and forth has become a non-brainer.

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This evolutionary approach seems in step with what many business find reasonable. Confidence in the cloud and its foundation is of utmost importance. This process can be prepared by virtualizing greater parts of the traditional datacenter.

Owens went on to stress the importance of Dynamic IT and all the different technologies from server, application and desktop virtualization. Central and integral management of physical and virtual devices, deep knowledge of the applications running on top of those devices make Microsoft Virtualization a very viable solution.

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The Microsoft Infrastructure Optimization model and tooling has helped to gradually progress to the dynamic virtualized private cloud, getting ready to take the final jump to the public cloud, already taking profit of Microsoft Virtualization at a relatively low cost.

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In troublesome times it is certainly important to not only talk about this, but also delivering on those promises. The product suite around virtualization and management is certainly able to do this.

What are the steps to actually accomplish this goal of Dynamic IT and reaching the steppingstone to the public cloud?

Here they are:

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I actually work for one of those Microsoft Gold Partners and they can help you attain your goals. In our practice we build local clouds with products from Microsoft, HP, Cisco and Citrix.

In my next blog I will talk about a session presented by Doug Dewerd from HP talking about best practices for Windows Server 2008 R2 on HP ProLiant Servers.

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VHD Attach

Nov 13th

Posted by Hans Vredevoort in Hans Vredevoort

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Here’s a nice little tool to atttach and detach VHD files. It can be used with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2:
http://www.jmedved.com/?page=vhdattach

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Advertisement for Hyper-V R2

Nov 13th

Posted by Hans Vredevoort in Hans Vredevoort

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Check this ad for Hyper-V R2

http://www.beingmanan.com/wp/2009/11/microsoft-openly-challenges-vmware-in-new-ad/

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Sourced from http://bink.nu

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Happy customer with Hyper-V R2 and HP LeftHand storage

Nov 10th

Posted by Hans Vredevoort in Hans Vredevoort

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My colleague Bert de Reus sent me a stimulating email. He has been implementing Hyper-V R2 at a customer site with HP ProLiant G6 servers and HP LeftHand storage (virtualization bundle).

The customer had an aging HP ProLiant ML350 G3 with seven U320 SCSI disks and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 holding several databases. A typical query on a 70GB database located on a Hyper-V Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) lasted 1 hour and 38 minutes.

The newly implemented infrastructure consists of a 3-node Hyper-V R2 cluster using HP ProLiant DL380 G6 with 8 cores and 64GB of memory and two HP LeftHand P4500 boxes with a total of 24 450GB 15K SAS disks. The databases were moved to a VM with 4 vCPU’s and 4GB of RAM. The operating system was Windows Server 2008 x64 SP2 and the database was leveled up to SQL Server 2008 x64 SP1.

The exact same query took only 7 minutes.

The customer was extremely impressed with this 14-fold performance improvement.

Extra information (November 11th, 2009)

A second database test was even more rewarding: A query which normally took 2,5 hours was cut back to only 12 minutes (15.8x faster)

Databases were consolidated from several physical servers to four virtual SL Server 2008 SP1 x64 virtual machines.

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Opening of Microsoft TechEd Europe 2009

Nov 9th

Posted by Hans Vredevoort in Hans Vredevoort

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Today I was present at the opening day of Microsoft TechEd Europe 2009 in Berlin.

Whilst there were large scale festivities around the fall of the wall, Microsoft let Exchange 2010 and ForeFront Protection 2010 out of the door. Together with Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 including Hyper-V R2 plus the full System Center suite, we have an impressive set of domino stones which can set the new efficiency into motion.

Right at this moment I watch the domino stones fall at the Berlin wall, to the great excitement of a huge crowd consisting of people from east and west. Today Berlin is a modern city and not a shadow of what it was twenty years ago. There is abundant pride, joy, hope and a celebration of freedom. Why do I see so many parallels? TechEd 2009 could not have been held at a better place and at a better time.

We now have all the building blocks for a phenomenal redesign of current IT infrastructures in which the wall between on premises and the cloud is virtually nonexistent. Exchange mailboxes and SQL databases can be local, hosted or somewhere in Azure. There is no wall keeping you from returning a service from the cloud back to on premises. It is your own free choice and all that matters is cost, flexibility, availability and scalability.

Many large companies have already started migrating to Windows 7. They save somewhere between 75 and 125 euro per year per workstation, for instance by setting a power saving group policy. Do more with less is now rephrased to With less do more. A subtle change with large possibilities, especially in challenging times like these. Early adopters of Exchange 2010 claim 8 times bigger mailboxes at 50% of the cost. Again with less do more.

The inherent power saving options of Windows Server 2008 R2, especially combined with HP Dynamic Power Control, will save companies significantly on there power bills.

Virtualizing servers and applications by Hyper-V and App-V respectively means serious cost reduction as well. With less servers do more. Deployment is made really easy. We were shown the strong library and template functionality of Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 and integration with SCOM and SCCM. Really good stuff!

I expect large scale adoption of the new Microsoft technologies and I am more than happy with the high quality of the software. No need to wait!  Go go go!

This was in fact the motto of the keynote. 

 

Quick and handy slideshow on 10 little known features of Windows Server 2008 R2:
http://content.zdnet.com/2346-12558_22-362766.html?tag=gald

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System Center Essentials 2010 beta

Nov 4th

Posted by Hans Vredevoort in Hans Vredevoort

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Another much anticipated beta has arrived: the new version of System Center Essentials in the 2010 wave. A perfect match for medium and small businesses.

With SCE2010 management of virtual environments has been added. A welcome addition. Here are the features relevant to Hyper-V and Virtual Server.

Inventory and Reports

  • Virtualization candidates—Essentials 2010 helps identify physical computers in your environment that are good candidates for conversion to virtual machines.
  • Host virtual machine utilization—Essentials 2010 shows resource usage and the number of virtual machines running on selected hosts for load balancing.

Virtualization Management

Virtualization management features—The virtualization management component in Essentials 2010, built on System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) technology, now provides centralized administration for managing your virtual machine infrastructure. Virtualization management tasks you can perform from within Essentials 2010 include the following:

  • Designating and configuring host servers
  • Creating and managing virtual machines
  • Converting physical machines to virtual machines or copying existing virtual machines (P2V or V2V)
  • Managing virtual machine snapshots for quick, temporary backups
  • Importing existing virtual hard drives and VMware virtual servers
  • Choosing virtual machine host servers based on intelligent placement rating calculations
  • Flexibility for your environment—The virtualization management component in Essentials 2010, now integrated into Essentials Setup, can be added or removed at any time. Essentials 2010 also supports the following:
  • Windows Server 2008 and above with Hyper-V for x64
  • Windows Server 2003 SP1 with Virtual Server 2005 R2 and above for x86
  • Maximize physical resources—Virtualization management in Essentials 2010 helps you maximize your IT resources with the following:
    • Comprehensive monitoring of physical and virtual machine resources, including hardware, operating systems, applications, and services
    • Rapid provisioning of hosts and virtual machines
    • Preconfigured virtual machine templates

http://blogs.technet.com/operationsmgr/archive/2009/09/29/microsoft-system-center-essentials-2010-beta-now-available.aspx

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Data Protection Manager 2010 beta now available for download

Nov 4th

Posted by Hans Vredevoort in Hans Vredevoort

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Today the Data Protection Manager development team released the public beta of Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM2010), the third generation of Microsoft backup software. Actually backup is not the right word since it is data protection and guaranteed data recovery what makes DPM really stand out. It was really designed for backup to disk.

The first generation (DPM2006) was a first but limited attempt to offer protection and easy recovery for file servers. Much like the volume shadowcopy for shared folders, it was easier to protect fileservers from a central location, creating replica’s and recovery points to a DPM storage pool. With DPMv1 there was no direct tape support and a second backup product was required for long term protection.

Towards the end of 2007 the second generation arrived with DPM2007. It added other data source protection such as SQL Server, Exchange, Sharepoint Portal Server, Virtual Server and SystemState. An important missing data source was Hyper-V. Even though Hyper-V R1, as we can call it now, arrived in February 2009 as a beta with the RTM of Windows Server 2008 and the RTM of Hyper-V R1 in June 2008, we had to wait until January 2009 before Hyper-V data sources could be protected at the host level with SP1 of DPM2007. Microsoft Office SharePoint System (MOSS) and SQL Server 2008 were also added.

However, having to wait for seven months before being able to protect a very strategic product like Hyper-V is unacceptable to say the least. There was also no clear message when Hyper-V protection would arrive. Compared to the 60 days after Hyper-V R2 message from the Virtual Machine Manager team, this leaves room for improvement.

Hopefully the gap between Hyper-V R2 RTM and DPM2010 RTM will be smaller, although I have reason to doubt this. Expect the final version of the third generation DPM somewhere in the first quarter of 2010. Again much too late for customers who want to protect virtual machines which are placed on Cluster Shared Volumes.

This leaves us with adding a DPM Agent to the virtual machines only and forgetting about the host until April 2010 or so. But that’s enough for the criticism.

We can finally lay our hands on the beta of DPM2010 after about 50 customers have been able to test the new data protection product in a Technical Adoption Program. Apparently DPM2010 is ready to show to the world and welcome it is. The majority of our customers have abandoned their traditional Symantec Backup Exec, NetBackup and HP Data Protector backup programs in favor of DPM and I must say the product has become notably better in the last few months with SP1 and a couple of hotfixes. Nevertheless there were plenty of product improvements I have been able to share with the development team and hopefully most of these have made it in the product.

In the light of this Hyper-V blog we are of course most focused on protection of Microsoft virtualized environments and specifically Hyper-V R2.

Here is a quote from the DPM blog:

Virtualization

“This has been one of the biggest investments that we made in DPM 2010, and we hope that you will absolutely love the features.  First and foremost, DPM 2010 Beta protects highly available virtual machines (VM) deployed on Windows Server 2008 R2 using Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) clusters — in addition to standalone Hyper-V servers and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V clusters. For all above mentioned server configurations, DPM 2010 Beta supports:

Seamless protection of Live Migrating VMs (For Windows Server 2008 R2): DPM 2010 is Live Migration aware and seamlessly protects a VM after it migrates to another node of the Hyper-V R2 cluster to another without manual intervention.

Item Level Recovery from host level backup: DPM 2010 Beta supports item level recovery (ILR) which allows you to do granular recovery of files and folders, volumes and virtual hard disks (VHD) from a host level backup of Hyper-V VMs to a network share or a volume on a DPM protected server.

Original Location Recovery: DPM 2010 Beta supports online recovery of the protected VM to the original location.

Alternate Host Recovery: DPM 2010 Beta supports alternate location recovery (ALR) which allows you to recover a Hyper-V VM to an alternate stand-alone or clustered Hyper-V host.”

Notable the Item Level Recovery from host level backup is a really fantastic feature which for certain can not be matched by any product in the VMware world. We have Bare Metal Recovery of virtual machines including the ability to perform a specific restore of selected items within the host level backup of the virtual hard disk (VHD).

Of course there is a shipload of improvements to the product which can be found at the following locations:
http://blogs.technet.com/DPM/
http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/dataprotectionmanager/en/us/2010beta-overview.aspx

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Thinking beyond Hyper-V

Nov 4th

Posted by Hans Vredevoort in Hans Vredevoort

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I don’t normally read Linux magazines, but Twitter has more than opened the world to me. Someone referred to a blog from Ken Hess in Linux Magazine. Ken wondered why a VM could not be fully hypervisor aware, meaning not only for one hypervisor but for all the major players.

If you take Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2, they are aware of the Hyper-V R2 hypervisor. No need to install any Hyper-V guest components at all until the next service pack I presume.

Today it was announced that the Hyper-V guest components were accepted in the Linux kernel only two months after Microsoft made them available to the Open Source.

Hess writes:

“A hypervisor aware operating system is an interesting concept. From the most basic bits, this OS is built for hypervisor-based virtualization. In fact, in a perfect world, the OS would detect the hypervisor type and offer its own set of optimizations for that platform. Native or near-native performance is what we’re after by using hypervisor-based virtualization so why not have the best possible selections already made”

I think Hess hits a major point, strongly offsetting those who are still fighting hypervisor wars. Thanks for the insight!

Source: http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7523

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Comparing CSV to VMFS3 and storage improvements in Hyper-V R2

Nov 4th

Posted by Hans Vredevoort in Hans Vredevoort

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In my previous blog I asked what CSV sizes were used in Hyper-V R2 environments. One of my Twitter contacts, James Price (@SpinMasterJP) replied he was starting out at 2TB if the array supports Thin Provisioning. James also mentioned having discussed with the Microsoft Cluster Team over 500 VM’s per CSV while seeing good IO and seamless IO scalability leveraging Active/Active IO with MPIO.

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How do Cluster Shared Volumes stack up to VMwares NTFS3?

Borrowing from Jason Perlow at http://blogs.zdnet.com/perlow/?p=10743:

“Clustered Shared Volumes, or CSV, provides a shared file system overlay on top of Windows 2008 R2’s NTFS for multiple Hyper-V hosts to centrally store virtual machines. A CSV provides a consistent file namespace, much in the same way VMWare ESX uses VMFS-3 datastores.

However, unlike a VMFS-3 datastore, which is limited to 2TB each, can only hold up to 256 VMs per volume (with a practical limitation of 32 per due to I/O constraints)  and must use VMWare’s proprietary multi-path I/O (MPIO). NTFS CSV can be up to 256 terabytes in size, it can use a variety of MPIO solutions including EMC PowerPath, and has no limitation on the number of VMs per volume. CSV’s will also directly integrate with existing Windows-based backup solutions and not require “Proxied” backups, such as with VMWare’s Consolidated Backup for ESX.”

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If I calculate right, it would take 1000 VM’s with 250GB VHD’s each to eat up the 256TB disk space. With a limit of 384 VM’s per Hyper-V R2 host, it would take only 4 Hyper-V hosts including a cluster reserve of 1. I guess we will need a storage array with a large number of spindles and multiple IO paths, preferably at the speed of a 4 or 8Gb Fibre Channel SAN.

[Correction Sept 14th 2009: I learnt from Matthijs van Seldam’s blog that only single Hyper-V R2 servers support 384 VM’s, at least when the host has 64 processor cores and enough memory to support them. A clustered Hyper-V server is limited to 64VM’s which means that a 16 node cluster can support 1024 VM’s per cluster. Big clusters like these should have a cluster reserve of 2 which limits a Hyper-V R2 cluster to 14 x 64 = 896 VM’s. Still awesome!
http://blogs.technet.com/matthts/archive/2009/09/08/how-many-vm-s-in-a-hyper-v-server-2008-r2-cluster.aspx]

With VMFS3 you cannot extend a VMFS partition. However you can create another VMFS partition and add it as an extent. This will show as one larger VMFS partition but is not a best practice. With VMware it is advised to create separate VMFS partitions and spread the VM’s over these LUNS to avoid SCSI locks.

With CSV not only the maximum size of a contiguous partition is much larger than VMFS3, it also much easier to dynamically increase or decrease the size the underlying disk and partition which make up the CSV.

For limits of Hyper-V R2 see:
http://hyper-v.nu/blogs/hans/archive/2009/08/25/requirements-and-limitations-of-hyper-v-r2.aspx

Storage improvements from Windows Server 2008 SP1 Hyper-V to Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V

The following table shows changes in storage.  Some of the changes are performance related like hot add of storage.  This helps performance by reducing the time it takes to add new storage.  The big things to note are increases in IO Sizes passed from VM’s and huge improvements in Dynamic VHDs.

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Learning from the other guy
In a Dutch article on disk IO optimization for VMware environments the following best practices are suggested:

VMFS-3, How Do I Despise Thee
Jason Perlow’s frustration on the closed nature of VMFS3
http://ow.ly/oy3G

Monitoring disk performance of a VM
How to monitor virtual machine disk performance on a Windows Server 2008-based computer that has the Hyper-V role installed:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975036

Peformance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2008 R2
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/Perf_tun_srv-R2.mspx

I welcome your feedback and experience from the field!

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