Dugie’s Pensieve

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.

A picture is worth a thousand words =)

…and I happen to whole heartedly agree!

I’m a bit excited, infact I’m a lot excited.   I saw an email today, and then it all hit home.  The email was from one of the product teams announcing internal availability of a new technology.  It’s one of the technologies that really make me go "phwaar".  (And I thought it was phwaar even before my life here at VMware) — and the phwaar is getting closer, every day. 

It’s all NDA type stuff, but that doesn’t matter.  Ok, so maybe the word "matter" is the wrong word.  Why?  Because "internal", will eventually mean it will become beta, and beta’s turn into RTM. 

How can I explain it better?  It’s kind of like Christmas.  You know it’s coming; you can expect [it] all year long, but it’s not until the Christmas decorations go up and the presents start arriving under the tree, that it really sinks in.  Then once it arrives, it’s a flurry of wrapping paper, and eagerness, and, and   …well you know the rest of the story.

Anyway.  It’s such a such a simple, (some might mistake it as almost trivial) technology, but it’s so fundamentally exciting that it will change the rules of "traditional computing" [again] completely.  …and the coolest bit, just when you thought you had a handle on it, the next wave will come along and completely knock your socks off!

Virtualization is sooo much more than server consolidation, it’s tired of hiding in the server room, it’s coming baby.

Phwaaar!

I wanted to blog some info on how much power [in my non-scientific trials] you can expect to ‘burn’ from your different types of desktop clients. 

So with the help of Patrice, here is the typical power consumption (in Watts) from hardware we had available at the time of testing:

A few quick notes:  These non scientific results were measured using a power meter from Jaycar; In Australia we use ~240v; when testing the desktop hardware we excluded the monitor (add another ~22w for a 17" LCD); and all desktops were running windows. 

Obviously more watts = more $$$, if you don’t know exactly how much you pay for power (and your power provider here in Australia can’t seem to tell you), you can try the Artog Website.

I still have to write Part II, but the point I wanted to make here is power consumption does vary between computers.  A couple of watts on a single computer, might not be such a big deal, but a couple of watts across a 100 computers (or more) over a couple of years can potentially be a big deal.

Furthermore, power consumption varies on the role the computer performs (Jeff Atwood has a great breakdown in his post "How Much Power Does My Laptop Really Use" and again in "When Hardware is Free, Power is Expensive").  I’m sure at some level we know that, but it’s not until you see a table like this that you start to get the old noggin’ thinking.

I was reading through Microsoft’s TechNet and came across this:

All of Microsoft IT’s Hyper-V production and pre-production hosts are scheduled to run on a Server Core installation. This is because the more secure and available the virtualization host or parent partition is, the more stable and secure the virtual machines are….

Cool.  Maybe this means a good portion of Microsoft infrastructure is running in [Hyper-V] virtual machines - that means Microsoft should have nearly virtualized 80% of their production workloads including 64 bit; but it does say scheduled, so maybe they are yet to start. (I know that’s alot of ‘maybes’)  I wonder what they are using to manage it?  Although I couldn’t find any hints, I can only assume a pre-beta build of SCVMM R2/vNext.

I’m hoping this means we’ll see an update to all the Virtualization support KB’s  (like Exchange 2007, please pick Exchange.  Exchange officially supported outside of Premier support would make me a very happy camper)

Ok, I digress.  Anyway, it looks like Microsoft are using Hyper-V in production.  Gotta go, back soon.

Yup, it’s official, Hyper-V is availables will be listed as an "Optional Update" via Windows Update for all Windows Server 2008 SKUs.  

Cecilia Cole (WSUS Program Manager) has all the juicy details:

Today, April 8, the Windows Update team is making the Hyper-V Release Candidate package available as an "Optional Update" via Windows Update for all Windows Server 2008 SKUs. It will also be published as an "Optional Update" to WSUS…