Rodney Buike - Founder and original lazy admin.
Daniel Nerenberg - Microsoft MVP and lazy admin.
Disclaimer
These postings are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. You assume all risk for your use.
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Sorry for the alphabet soup title but I thought some explanation was due in regards to iSCSI redundancy options and issues you may have with IPv6.
Multi-path I/O (MPIO) and Multiple Connections per Session (MCS) are two options you have to provide load balancing and redundancy to your iSCSI connections. MPIO and MCS are the same but different. MPIO leverages Device Specific Modules (DSM) to manage the requests over multiple paths.
MCS is part of the iSCSI protocol and allows for teaming of iSCSI connections. In order for this to work your SAN vendor must support it and your virtualization platform must support it as well. VMWare supports MPIO but not MCS and Hyper-V supports both.
Whichever you choose is not relevant but there is something you should be aware of in regards to MCS. MCS does not support using both IPv4 and IPv6 with the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator. If you have IPv6
Continue reading MPIO, MCS, IPv6 and iSCSI
System Center Virtual Machine Manager uses a service account to complete it’s tasks. You can use LOCAL SYSTEM, which is the default, or a domain account. If you are going to integrate SCVMM with SCOM and enable Performance Resource Optimization (PRO) you will need to use a domain account. Even if you are not going to implement PRO at this time, use a domain account.
The domain account does not need any special permissions other than Local Administrator rights on the SCVMM server and it needs to be given priviledges in SCOM.
Now here is why you want to do this at the start, even if you are not implementing PRO at this time. Even if you never plan on it, one day you might change your mind and the only way to change the VMM Service Account is to uninstall VMM
Continue reading SCVMM Service Accounts
I recently posted a set of articles on deploying Citrix XenDesktop. XD can use Hyper-V R2 and SCVMM R2 as it’s virtualization and management layer but doing so does require a few configuration changes to SCVMM for optimal performance. While not mandatory they will ease management especially as your VDI infrastructure grows.
In a large (150+ hosts) environments one of the recommendations is to enable Server Optimized Garbage Collection. Enabling this replaces the default Workstation Garbage Collection and reduces the CPU utilization on the VMM server. Even if you do not have that many hosts in your VDI infrastrucutre it is still recommended to enable this to reduce SCVMM CPU utilization. To enable server-optimized garbage collector (GC) on the VMM server, create a file that is named vmmservice.exe.config place it into the %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Program Files\Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2\Bin directory on the VMM server. The file should contain the
Continue reading SCVMM VDI Configuration
I know a lot of people using XP Mode to solve app compat issues as they move to Windows 7. It is simple enough to deploy and great for the few user scenarios where you don’t want to deploy MED-V. Managing the XP Mode VMs is an important task and the easiest way to manage it, outside of deploying MED-V, is to join it to the domain. That way you can manage it the same way you manage all the other machines in your domain. Joining the XP Mode VM to the domain is done the same way as any other machine but there are a few permissions that need to be configured to get it to work properly once it has been joined.
Because the local user context will be changed from the default local account in XP Mode to a domain account you will need to add Domain Users
Continue reading Joining XP Mode VM to the Domain
With the release of SP1 for Server 2008 R2 a long awaited feature is now available to Hyper-V R2 servers, Dynamic Memory. Dynamic Memory allows you to set a start-up and maximum amount of RAM available to the VM and then let Hyper-V dynamically increase and decrease the memory available to a VM. This will allow you to increase the number of VMs on a host without running out of memory.
Dynamic Memory is configured on the VM and will set a start-up amount of memory as well as a maximum amount of memory available to the VM. You can also set a priority to available memory as well as allocate a buffer with the sliders.
The Hyper-V host must be running Server 2008 R2 SP1 or Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1 and the VMs must run one of the following operating systems:
- Windows Server 2003 including R2
With the relase of Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V R2 the big new feature from the virtualization standpoint was Live Migration and Cluster Shared Volumes. Both provide benefits to highly available virtual machines and the clusters they run on but there is some confusion on the matter as well, as they are two seperate features that can be combined to provide additional benefits but do not need to be.
The biggest misconception is that you need CSV to do Live Migration. This is not the case. Live Migration is a feature in itself and does not require CSV to function. In a Live Migration the following happens:
Live Migration is initiated via the Failover Cluster Manager or SCVMM 2008 R2.
Once initiated, a virtual machine is created on the target host. Since the VHD(s) is stored on a clustered storage there is no copy of a VHD over the network.
Once the VM
Continue reading Hyper-V, Live Migration and CSV
In Hyper-V R2 there is a new option you can enable called Processor Compatibility. This allows you to do a two different things:
- Run older, legacy, operating systems (NT4 for example)
- Migrate between hosts with different CPUs
The first option is pretty easy to understand, if you are running NT4, enable this or your VM may not boot and if it does, it won’t be very stable. But what about the other option, does this allow me to Quick/Live Migrate a VM from an AMD to an Intel CPU? No, but it is still a very useful option in any Hyper-V cluster.
The one physical piece of hardware a VM sees is the CPU and like any physical system there are processor features that are presented to the VM and made available to the OS and any applications running. Different CPUs have different processor features and this is where issues can occur
Continue reading Hyper-V R2 Processor Compatibility
The otherday I wrote about how you can do a system requirements validation in MDT 2010 Update 1 to ensure the hardware meets the requirements of the OS being deployed. One thing I discovered in lab testing is that Virtual PC7 reports the CPU back to MDT as a 1MHz CPU. Naturally this will cause issues when you try and do a test deployment to a Virtual PC7 VM.
The workaround is simple, just remove the processor speed check in the New Computer – Validate section of the Task Sequence.
Hope that helps!
There is an issue in Windows Server 2008 and R2 Hyper-V VMs that can arise when moving Windows Server 2008 x86 (only) VMs from Virtual Server and/or Virtual PC 2007. It is an easy one to fix but threw me for a bit of a loop today but after some poking around I fixed it. If you have ever moved, or are going to move a Server 2008 x64 VM from Virtual Server or Virtual PC 2007 to Hyper-V (R1 or R2) you might find that the Integration Components don’t work. If you look in Device Manager you will see that the ACPI shows a generic device and under System Devices the Virtual Machine Bus won’t load leaving you with a warning. If you look a little deeper you will see that it cannot load due to “not enough resources”
This isn’t actually low system resources and throwing more
Continue reading Hyper-V VMBus and ACPI
Migrating a physical machine to a virtual machine can be done a number of ways. You can use System Center Virtual Machine Manager, PlateSpin PowerConvert or a host of other tools. One of those tools is the free Disk2VHD tool from Sysinternals. Disk2VHD will take a snapshot of a running machine and write it to a VHD that you can boot up in Hyper-V (or Virtual PC). The process is pretty straight forward and in Part 1 we captured the source machine. In part 2 we will bring it online in Hyper-V.
With the VHD copied to the Hyper-V Server we simply have to create a new virtual machine. When you get to the Connect Virtual Hard Disk screen simply select the VHD you captured with Disk2VHD.
You will have to make sure all the hardware settings are similar. If you had 4GB of memory on the physical machine
Continue reading P2V with Disk2VHD – Part 2
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