Dugie’s Pensieve

Last night I attended the Sydney Windows Mobile User Group, and it was cool.  I was in Brisbane, they were in Sydney - I [pardon the pun] was a virtual attendee, and was able to see the gig via the Roundtable-conferency-thingy.

I must say, the experience was pretty good, I was on a lowly 512 ADSL1 connection.  I could see both the presenter, and the audience (including Jeffa, Rog42 and Johan).  I could even MSN through questions.

I love the idea so much, I might chat to the lads here in Brissie and see if we can hook one up for the upcoming Brissie User Group.

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

Powershell is here to stay.  And rightfully so, all the cool kids are using powershell these days =)

Anyway, If you’re cutting your teeth with Powershell scripts you should check out the PowerShell Scriptomatic.

I’ve taken it for a quick spin, and it’s pretty cool!

Go check out the PowerShell Scriptomatic now.

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.

Yeah ok, you lot.  So I’m back blogging on a regular basis - and you lot return the love, by poking fun at me.  *chuckles*  Figures, serves me right!  =)

Anyway, I’ve decided I’m going to blog all those little [virtualization] questions.  The ones that I get asked every day about interop with Windows in Virtual Machines.  The type of questions, that you often assume, that everybody knows (like Ctrl+C with a messagebox, or F7 at the command prompt)

So sit back, relax, and enjoy all the snippets the follow.

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"

Ahhh, Scotch.  If you’ve spent any time on my blog, you’ll know just how much I enjoy a “wee dram“.   Each year I go through and clean out all the bottles that I’ve kept (and enjoyed) from the year before.  The scotch itself I may not necessarily have enjoyed, but I will have enjoyed it in the company of good friends - so it gets added to the shelf.

Well, I’ve cleaned out the shelf, and here they are (duplicates removed):

• Dalwhinnie 15
• Johnnie Walker 12
• Johnnie Walker Green 15
• Johnnie Walker Blue
• Glenlivet 12
• Glenfiddich 12
• Glenfiddich 15
• Glenfiddich 18
• Glenfiddich 21
• Glenmorangie 10
• Glenmorangie 18
• GlenDronach 12
• Talisker 10
• Ardbeg 10
• Glenwood
• Cardhu
• Suntory - MattO has this bottle
• Laphroaig - went camping never made it back

Here’s “bottom’s up” to the year ahead!

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.