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My Hyper-V Wishlist of 2011
Feb 26th
While cleaning up my mailbox, I found a note to myself dating June 2011 about a few feature requests for the next version of Hyper-V and VMM. While talking to customers throughout the year, I often hear about and collect suggestions and product improvements which I can then pass on to the Hyper-V and System Center Product team. In retrospect most items on my list have become a reality in Windows Server 2012 and much, much more!
Online VHD growth and shrink has not yet been realized (although a 64TB dynamic disk supporting unmap pretty much covers all you can desire).
Perhaps the last item on the list is only partly covered by Hyper-V Replica but needs some additional automation or services to make this a complete Recovery solution that could make it even better than RSM. As we know Microsoft is on the right path and a flood of companies are getting really interested in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and System Center 2012 SP1.
Thanks Hyper-V and System Center product teams for listening.
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Announcement: The next Hyper-V.nu event: April 16th, 2013
Feb 25th
… It took a while but we are very happy to announce the next Hyper-V.nu event! The event is scheduled for April, 16th 2013 and will be held in Baarn at VX Company. We are very grateful to VX Company for making this location available for this event.
As usual we have a great program with standout speakers:
| Track name | Speaker | ||
| Intro | 09:30 – 10:00 | Welcome | Jaap Wesselius |
| Track 1 | 10:00 – 11:00 | NIC teaming and Converged Fabric | Marc van Eijk |
| Break | 11:00 – 11:15 | ||
| Track 2 | 11:15 – 12:15 | Cluster Aware Updating | Maarten Wijsman |
| Lunch | 12:15 – 13:00 | Lunch | |
| Track 3 | 13:00 – 14:00 | Make your VM mobile | Hans Vredevoort |
| Break | 14:00 – 14:15 | ||
| Track 4 | 14:15 – 15:15 | The way you can deploy Hyper-V | Peter Noorderijk |
| Break | 15:15 – 15:30 | ||
| Track 5 | 15:30 – 16:30 | Advanced networking capabilities | Didier van Hoye |
| Drink | 16:30 – 17:15 |
Please note that all sessions will be presented in Dutch.
Registration for this event is required, you can register at: http://hyper-v.eventbrite.com/
Due to the following GREAT, GREAT sponsors we can offer free access to this event:
- Comparex
- Duvak
- Imara ICT
- Inovativ
- Savision
- VX Company
- Wortell
Be quick to register because we will apply the policy: Full = Full
If you have any questions regarding this event you can send an e-mail to peter@hyper-v.nu
Video Interview with Ben Armstrong
Feb 25th
During MVP Summit we spent several great days with Hyper-V Product Manager Ben Armstrong aka @VirtualPCGuy. German fellow Virtual Machine MVP Carsten Rachfahl took the opportunity to interview his ‘rockstar’ at CenturyLink Stadium, home of the SeaHawks football team. Very soon you will notice Ben comes from the other side of this planet, at least when you look at it from our angle: ‘Down Under’.
Ben has delivered many excellent presentations on the Hyper-V hypervisor and related subjects at events like TechEd North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Speakers/Ben-Armstrong
He has been working on virtualization software for over 10 years now. The last 9 years have been spent working on virtualization as part of the Windows Core Virtualization team. Ben has been maintaining a blog for the last 8 years as Virtual PC Guy. Chances are that if you have a question about virtualization, Ben will know the answer.
You can find the German Hyper-V blog authored by Carsten Rachfahl here:
http://www.hyper-v-server.de/videos/videointerview-mit-ben-armstrong-ber-hyper-v/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
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W2K12 Hotfix related to Host Level Backup of VMs
Feb 15th
[UPDATE 1/15/2013]: See problems reported after installing this hotfix at end of this forum post. I have opened a line with the product team to find out what is going on
[UPDATE 2/15/2013]: We are now exactly 1 month after I warned you to be very careful with installing http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2799728/en-us as it caused a severe memory leak. If you have followed the forum post mentioned above, you will have gathered that Microsoft has worked feverishly to get on top of the problem. Mike Jacquet who has been very communicative about this issue, has today confirmed that a fix is now code complete, has been fully tested and is only waiting for the KB article to be written.
The memory leak was caused by a fault found in the CSV filter driver (CSVFLT.sys). When the fix arrives (any time now), you can simple install it whether you have applied the hotfix mentioned in this blog or not. The original kb article will be superseded by this one.
[UPDATE 2/17/2013]: The hotfix is available from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2813630/en-us
[UPDATE 2/18/2013]: If you are still seeing a problem, take a look at this (which is an excerpt from the forum post mentioned above:
“Cluster Shared Volume ‘Volume2′ (‘ClusterStorage Volume 2′) is no longer available on this node because of ‘STATUS_CLUSTER_CSV_AUTO_PAUSE_ERROR(c0130021)’. All I/O will temporarily be queued until a path to the volume is reestablished.
STATUS_CLUSTER_CSV_AUTO_PAUSE_ERROR is generated when csvfs filter attempts to retrieve the Copy On Write bitmap for a snapshot volume that has been cleaned up. This error is most likely occurring on large scale hyper-v deployments and is one of the issues we discover after fixing other scale out problems addressed in the V2 fix. Due to ongoing long haul testing required to be done, we did not want to hold up V2 of the fix that we just released, so the Windows group will release a more compressive V3 patch a little later to address that and other issues found during large scale testing.
For any customers still experiencing the same symptoms as outlined in KB2813630 after installing the fix, please check binary versions on all nodes.
File name File version File size Date
====== ========= ====== ====
Csvflt.sys 6.2.9200.20626 205,824 06-Feb-2013
Clussvc.exe 6.2.9200.20623 7,217,152 07-Feb-2013
Ntfs.sys 6.2.9200.20623 1,933,544 07-Feb-2013
If Binaries are correct on all nodes, please open a support case so we can investigate the issue further.”
Installing and configuring Windows Azure for Windows Server – Part 1
Feb 12th
This blog series on enabling the Cloud OS with Windows Server and System Center for Hosting Service Providers consists of the following parts
- Installing and configuring System Center Service Provider Foundation
- Installing and configuring Windows Azure for Windows Server – Part 1
- Installing and configuring Windows Azure for Windows Server – Part 2
- Installing and configuring Windows Azure for Windows Server – Part 3
- Installing and connecting System Center App Controller to System Center Service Provider Foundation
In the previous part of this blog series we enabled multitenant access to the Cloud OS through an ODATA web service by installing and configuring System Center Service Provider Foundation.
My previous blog on the technical preview of Windows Azure Services for Windows Server includes an installation guide. The new features and bug fixes in the official release combined with numerous installations resulted in an updated installation and configuration guide.
This blog describes part 1 of the installation and configuration of the Service Management Portal and API.
Scenarios
Single servers or distributed installation
The Service Management Portal and API consist of two sites and three APIs. These web services can be divides into two categories. Services that should be publicly accessible and services that should be secured to internal access only.
- Publicly accessible
- Service Management Tenant Site
- Service Management Tenant Public API
- Secure internal access
- Service Management Admin Site
- Service Management Admin API
- Service Management Tenant API
All the components can be installed on a single server using the Express installer. It is also possible to run a distributed installation and select the location for each individual component. This blog will describe both installation procedures.
Single domain, Workgroup or Multiple Domains
The Service Management Portal and API can be installed in the same domain as System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1 and System Center Service Provider Foundation 2012 SP1 is running in. It is also possible to install the Service Management Portal and API in a workgroup or in a separate (dedicated) domain. This can be useful when you have a single Service Management Portal environment that connects to multiple stamps in different domains. The only connection between the Service Management Portal and API and the System Center VMM 2012 SP1 environment is a local user account on the Service Provider Foundation that is user for registering and authenticating to the Service Provider Foundation ODATA web service.
5Nine Security Manager for Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V–part 1
Feb 7th
In this two-part blog article we will take a look at 5Nine Security Manager for Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. In the first part I will give a global overview and take a look at the installation of this product. In the second part we will take a look at the configuration of this interesting solution. So here we go…. 
In the ‘classic’ world of physical machines there’s in most cases a lot of attention for a secure server environment. People make their environment as secure as possible with firewalls, intrusion detection systems and anti-virus/ anti-malware protection. These products are working very well in the classic physical server environments.
However the world of IT is changing and virtualization of servers and devices has become common. Although we are using virtualization techniques for a couple of years now we are still using the security solution in the classic way by installing anti-virus/ anti-mallware agents in the virtual machine and try to controll VM traffic through a physical firewall.
These classic ways of securing the IT infrastructure are not efficient and cause unnecessary load inside the virtual machines. This can be fixed smarter, don’t you think so?
In Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Microsoft introduced the extensible virtual switch. The Hyper-V virtual switch is a software-based layer-2 network switch. With built-in support for Network Device Interface Specification (NDIS) filter drivers and Windows Filtering Platform (WFP) callout drivers, the Hyper-V virtual switch enables independent software vendors to create extensible plug-ins (known as Virtual Switch Extensions) that can provide enhanced networking and security capabilities.
Removing a non-existent VMM Library Server
Feb 5th
I admit, you don’t have to remove a non-existent VMM Library Server everyday, but today happened to be such a day. Let me explain what happened. In addition to a SQL Server 2012 AllwaysOn cluster for the VMM database and a VMM 2012 SP1 Failover Cluster, I wanted to also make the VMM Library Server highly available because the management foundation for a production Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V hosted cloud would soon become too big too fail.
Let me concentrate on the VMM Library cluster. I created an ordinary guest based 2-node Windows Server 2012 cluster using the new synthetic virtual Fibre Channel adapters, connected to an EMC VNX5300 storage system. After documenting the WWN’s and WWPNs for both adapters and requesting the SAN admin to create a few disks and to correctly zone the FC devices, creating the failover cluster was really a very quick deal. For some reason after installing EMC PowerPath 5.5 SP1, only one node of the cluster detected the correct Multi-Path Disk Device while the other thought it was dealing with a VRAID SCSI Disk Device.
Because uninstalling the devices or removing and reinstalling EMC PowerPath didn’t do the trick, I just went on to create a standard clustered file server role and add a share to be used for the VMM Library.
SMB 3.0 Storage solutions are on their way!
Feb 1st
EMC announced SMB 3.0 support in their EMC VNXe series! As we can read in the published whitepaper the VNXe series now support the SMB 3.0 protocol that was introduced with Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012.
As of VNXe Operating Environment version 2.4 the SMB 3.0 protocol is enabled by default.
For all the details see this published whitepaper: http://www.emc.com/collateral/white-papers/h11383-vnxe-introduction-wp.pdf
KB2510009 – Microsoft support policy for 4K sector hard drives in Windows
Jan 31st
Microsoft have updated an knowledge bases article stating their support statement about the coming transition from 512-byte sectors to 4,096-byte sectors (also known as 4K or 4KB sectors).
The article discusses three types of drives because the support policy differs for each.
Drive type Support/functionality 4K native (4K logical sector size) Supported on the following operating systems:
- Windows 8
- Windows Server 2012
Advanced Format or 512E (4K physical and 512-byte logical sector size) Supported on the following operating systems:
- Windows Vista
- Windows 7
- Windows Server 2008*
- Windows Server 2008 R2*
- Windows Server 2012
- Windows 8
*Except for Hyper-V. See the "Application support requirements for large-sector drives" section.
Specific requirements are listed in the following section. Run only applications and hardware that support these drives.512-byte native (512-byte physical and logical sector size) Supported on all platforms.
The article also describes the support statement per Operating System and it contains some information regarding application support requirements for large-sector drives, known compatibility issues and some unsupported Scenarios.
Installing and configuring System Center Service Provider Foundation
Jan 30th
A couple of months ago I posted a blog about the Technical Preview of Windows Azure for Windows Server. My fellow blogger Hans Vredevoort (MVP Virtual Machine) and I discussed possible configuration scenarios. The Windows Azure for Windows Server development team also provided us with great help. There are a lot of products involved in the setup and this makes a simple walkthrough more difficult. With the experience taken from the Technical Preview and the official release I have created a walkthrough for the end to end solution.
Because there are so many moving parts I decided to split this walkthrough into the following blog items.
- Installing and configuring System Center Service Provider Foundation
- Installing and configuring Windows Azure for Windows Server – Part 1
- Installing and configuring Windows Azure for Windows Server – Part 2
- Installing and configuring Windows Azure for Windows Server – Part 3
- Installing and connecting System Center App Controller to System Center Service Provider Foundation
This blog is a complete walkthrough on installing and configuring the Service Provider Foundation.
Introduction
The Service Provider Foundation enables service providers to offer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The infrastructure of System Center VMM 2012 is exposed through the Service Provider Foundation as an extensible OData web service, that supports REST-based requests. The web service handles these requests through Windows PowerShell scripts. By using this industry standard Microsoft enables Service Provider to leverage their existing investments in custom management Portals.
The Service Provider Foundation is placed on top of a System Center VMM 2012 environment. This blog will not cover the installation and configuration of System Center 2012 VMM. I can advise a great book called Microsoft Private Cloud Computing written by Aidan Finn, Hans Vredevoort, Patrick Lownds and Damian Flynn that I use as a reference frequently.
Prerequisites
The Service Provider Foundation uses SQL server for its database. Depending on the size of your environment you can either use the same SQL server as your System Center VMM 2012 SP1 environment or use a dedicated SQL server for the Service Provider Foundation. The database is supported on SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2012.
Before we install the Service Provider Foundation some prerequisites must be installed.
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