Dugie’s Pensieve

We’ve all got the burning question, and it looks like Johann’s getting answers.  Check out more in Johann’s post “Hyper-V is here.. what about Exchange”, and a snippet is below:

Microsoft will be publishing a support statement with respect to Exchange Server on Hyper-V within 60 days of today.

…In terms of best practices and requirements, the following guidance was released:

• We’re only supporting guests running Exchange Server 2007 SP1 on Windows Server 2008.
• We’re only supporting fixed disks, and not dynamic disks.
• Storage should be on spindles that are separate from the Guest operating system VHD physical storage.
• Storage must be SCSI passthrough or iSCSI (with a preference of SCSI passthrough for queues, databases and log files).
• All Exchange server roles, except for the Unified Messaging server role, will be supported.
• There’s a limit on VHD size of 2040 GB.

It was also mentioned that Hyper-V is a good fit when Exchange servers in branch offices cannot be consolidated to a central datacenter (for example, because of bandwidth or connectivity issues).

…So what’s the really great thing about this soon-to-be-released guidance?

60 days from now is just in time for Tech.Ed Australia and New Zealand!!!

Yes, I know it says “We’re only supporting guests running Exchange Server 2007 SP1 on Windows Server 2008.”  So let’s see what happens in 60 days..

If you’re not reading the  blog scottlowe.org, you should be, ’cause there is a lot of good virtualization stuff there.  So go add it to your RSS feeds.  =)

Whilst you’re at it, check out Scott’s latest posts, snippets below:

• Hyper-V Clustering Scenarios
• Finding UNIX-Enabled Accounts in Active Directory MMC
• Virtualization Short Take #10
• Melio FS, Hyper-V, and VMware ESX
• One More Tech-Ed Schedule Change
• VIR350: System Center VMM Advanced Integration
• Significant Networking Problem with Hyper-V
• VIR358: Hyper-V Architecture, Scenarios, and Networking
• MGT374: Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool

Scott, if you’re reading this, many thanks for your coverage of TechED this year!

We all know (or at least it’s publicly written) Hyper-V will RTM in about ~40 days.  There have even been some announcements with Microsoft already rolling out some of their public facing production roles on Hyper-V. 

…and even before it was cool Devin Murray was the man driving Microsoft’s internal virtualization adoption (I also got to meet the man in person last year; cool huh?).

Anyway, with the RTM of Hyper-V right around the corner; David Lef (Microsoft IT Technology Architect) dropped me a lovely little comment on my blog about what the lads at Microsoft IT are busy working on.  A snippet is below:

David Lef [MSFT]
I am the platform architect working for Devin Murray, subject of the TechNet article and webcast.

Microsoft IT has indeed been deploying production workloads on Hyper-V for several months now. We are currently about approaching 25% virtualized overall, up from the 7% figure discussed previously. (A big effort is underway to push as many new server requests into VMs as possible.) Part of this effort it redirecting many new server requests into Hyper-V VMs, where a few short months ago we would have been required to deploy them to dedicated physical machines. (Multi-processor, 64-bit, or other basic requirements that could not be satisfied by Virtual Server 2005 VMs.)

We have about 350 production Hyper-V VMs running as of mid-June 2008. We anticipate we will increase that number by about 100 in the next month, then bringing Hyper-V VMs in as a commodity standard available for our internal server customers.

We already have upwards of 300 machines in a queue, ready to be ordered and deployed when we can get the capacity ready. Natural adoption will take over shortly after the Hyper-V final release. With the knowledge we have about our environment and experience we have with Hyper-V so far, I am very confident we will meet or exceed our target to provision 80% of new instances into VMs.

From Microsoft IT’s [using] Hyper-V in production, 2008/06/18 at 12:46 AM

Now, not all of those VMs are on Hyper-V, but some are, if only a few percent - the interesting gem,  80% of all new servers will be virtualized (phwaaar!  that’s what I like to see).

If you want to hear more of what David has to say, check out his webcast next Tuesday, How Microsoft does IT Management and Operations. It’s a level 300 session, so expect some technical juicy goodness.  That works out to be 3am Australian time, so if I can drag myself out of bed, you’ll see me there =)

Microsoft have released two more VHD’s for download.  (Ok, released 1 new VHD, and refreshed an old favourite)

The Internet Explorer VPC has been refreshed and available in IE6, IE7 and IE8.

…and before I forget:  Microsoft’s Forefront "Codename Stirling" VHD has also been published (at a whopping 16 Gb) for all 5 VHDs:  Exchange, ISA, Stirling, Vista and Sharepoint.

Anway, I’m about to download the IE8 VPC and try it in Workstation 6.5 - I want to try the seamless window (aka "Unity").  I’ll post back with the details.

Microsoft have release Windows Server 2008 images for both Hyper-V and Virtual Server.

Each set of images come in two flavours, Full and Core.  If you want to know more, go check out the Microsoft Website, and a snippet is below:

VHD Images for Microsoft Virtual Server:

• WS08_RTM_x86_EnterpriseVHD.zip (single file)
• WS08_ServerCorex86_EnterpriseVHD.zip (single file)
• or download the multi-part image:  2008 VHD Images for VS2005

VHD Images for Microsoft Hyper-V:

• WS08_RTM_x64_EnterpriseFULL.zip
• ServerCorex64_Enterprise.zip 
• or download the multi-part image: 2008 VHD Images for Hyper-V

I’ll download a copy as soon as I can, and convert them to VMDK’s (using converter) and see how they run under ESX.

PS:  Mental note, I’ll also read the EULA too, and see if anything virtualization vendor specific pops up

Getting support for for Virtualized Microsoft environments is a tough gig when you don’t have Premier Support.  More so with the numbers of customers I have virtualizing Exchange 2007. 

I reckon I’ve memorised KB 897615 word for word –  But interop and support are very dear to my (sometimes bitter and twisted) heart, and a story for another time  =)

Anyway, I’m hoping that [all vendor] virtualized support will change with the RTM of Hyper-V   …but until then I’d like refer all those beautiful people running VMware in production to the following VMware URL, Support for Microsoft Software in VMware Virtual Machines, an edited snippet is below:

The support options vary, depending on how customers purchase the VMware and Microsoft software.  For customers who purchase:

1. OEM VMware products with Dell hardware and Dell Gold Enterprise Support or Dell ProSupport, the vendor provides end-to-end support—including the VMware software and certified Microsoft operating systems that are run within virtual machines.

2. VMware products with Fujitsu hardware and a Fujitsu SupportDesk agreement, Fujitsu provides end-to-end support – including the VMware software and licensed Microsoft software run within virtual machines.

3. OEM VMware products with Fujitsu-Siemens PRIMERGY hardware and OEM Gold/Platinum SNS support, the vendor provides end-to-end support – including the VMware software and licensed certified Microsoft operating systems that are run within virtual machines and covered by a respective Service Contract.

4. VMware products bundled with HP hardware and/or HP Services (Consulting & Integration & HP Outsourcing) and have a current HP support and subscription agreement on VMware and Microsoft, HP provides end-to-end support — including the VMware software and any licensed Microsoft software that is run within virtual machines.

5. VMware products with IBM hardware and an IGS support agreement, IBM provides end-to-end support – including the VMware software and licensed Microsoft software run within virtual machines.

6. OEM VMware products with Unisys hardware and Unisys Gold or Platinum Support, the vendor provides end-to-end support – including the VMware software and certified Microsoft operating systems that run within virtual machines.

7. VMware products directly (or from an authorized reseller) and who have a Microsoft Premier-level support agreement, Microsoft will provide “commercially reasonable efforts” to support its software running within VMware virtual machines…

8. VMware products directly (or from an authorized reseller) and who do not have a Microsoft Premier-level support agreement, Microsoft’s level of support is more restrictive. Microsoft support specialists may request that customers first replicate the issue on a physical machine. Item #897615 in Microsoft’s Knowledge Base describes this policy http://www.support.microsoft.com/kb/897615.

Hopefully this will help spread that "virtualized lovin’" until something better comes along.

Nowdays creating VMs with multi-processors is an easy thing.  It’s not necessarily a good thing.  I Highly recommend you stick with single vCPUs — and only really use multi-cpu VMs if you really need the raw thumping multi-threaded grunt.  (such as the Microsoft Transporter for Domino)

So now you have the problem of a multi cpu VM, with a Multi Processor HAL.  But you need to convert it back to a single processor VM.  You need to do more than remove a virtual CPU, you need to also downgrade to a uni processor hal. 

I’ll round up some resources and post them back here.

My good mate James, has taken a new role as Sales Engineer for Vizioncore for the Australia and NZ region.

Vizioncore do some seriously cool stuff with VI3, Vizioncore’s solutions include (copy and paste from his email) -

• vRanger Pro – Hot image backups for virtual environments
• vReplicator – Host-level replication for virtualised environments
• vCharter Pro – Enterprise class virtual infrastructure performance monitoring and analytics
• vConverter – P2V and V2V to VMware, XenServer and Microsoft Virtual Server
• vMigrator – Easy migration from ESX 2.5 to VI3
• vOptimizer – Optimisation of Windows-hosted VMware and Microsoft VM’s
• vPackager – Virtual appliance packaging for Windows VMs

So if you’re in Sunny Queensland (or Australia for that matter), drop James a line, and say g’day.

I heard a bit of geek humour that made me giggle today:

If your in an airplane, would you rather it have "High Availability" or "Disaster Recovery"

Windows Centro is the codename for Windows Essential Business Server.  I think it’s a very cool offering.  Take the fully fledged products of Exchange 2008, SQL 2008, System Center and wrap them up on 4x Windows Server 2008 installs.  Codename Centro comes in at $7200 USD (about $7500 AUD) and scales to 300 users.

So I’ve been doing some "field testing" with Centro and configuring 7x VM roles across 3x physical hosts using VMware VI3.  I’m using the Microsoft official system requirements and some fairly vanilla resource pools; It’s all working really well.  The VI3 install was easy, installing Centro on top of that was straight forward. 

Everything is humming along quite nicely. My seven Virtual Machines so far are (a mix of x64 and 32 bit):

1. Centro Management Server
2. Centro Messaging Server
3. Centro Security Server
4. Centro Database Server
5. Microsoft Terminal Server
6. Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server
7. VMware Virtual Center

I’m toying with the idea of adding a Web Server VM in a DMZ, I’ll need to make a few snazzy changes to my virtual switches;  Cool huh?

It’s a pretty sweet setup - my plan is to have enough capacity left over to use VMware Lab Manager to create an identical copy of all the whole environment on the same hardware.  If I put the copy in it’s own resource pool, I can have a full test environment.  So it’s constantly updated without incurring a performance or storage hit.  I think it’ll hit a sweet spot!!

Once I get it all sorted in a few weeks I’ll post back.