Rob’s Ragg…. Tech Talk & Cool Toys for Grown up Boys & Girls

I received another really good question, so I want to share it.

My servers will be running Windows Enterprise running HyperV with 4 VM's each.   The third server will run Windows Standard 2008 with Microsoft SCVMM.   Is there a way for SCVMM to be installed and manage the Windows Enterprise HyperV hosts and VM's without being a domain admin.   These are being installed on a large secured network and getting Domain Admin privileges to Active Directory will not be possible.

I didn’t know the answer to this one so I was going to do some research.  As I was contemplating how I wanted to tackle this one, Ken Lince, one of my peers spoke up with the right way to handle this scenario, so here it is:

There are user roles that you can define in SCVMM to delegate administrative access across server groups or libraries - and the same with Hyper-V Manager - you can delegate access to specific VM's without giving 'domain admin' type privileges at the server level.  So, the admins can use the MMC consoles and effectively do not need or require administrative access to the server itself.

That said, an Admin will need to install it and add the Hyper-V Servers (requires domain admin type access to do this because you have to supply credentials to add hosts), but past that they should be able to devise an administrator policy so that VMM managers don't require that level of access.

Of course, the  other management tools like SCOM have similar capabilities.

Quick blurb on Delegated Admin:

Delegated administration. The delegated administrator is a new role available to manage hosts and VMs in SCVMM 2008. A delegated administrator can perform all the functions of a full administrator but only on a subset of objects. This kind of job is useful for people who need to perform administrative functions on some but not all hosts managed by SCVMM. This role has broader administrative rights than the selfservice user role. You can control the selfservice user role according to what types of functions are allowed on a per-VM basis, whereas the delegated administrator has full rights on a predefined scope of host servers and libraries. For example, you could delegate administration rights to manage hosts and libraries for a particular region.

Thanks again Ken!

This article does a good job of spelling out the requirements:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd548295.aspx

Until next time,

Rob

I received the following question:

Hi, I have been following your video on setting up Hyper-V server with the Equallogic SAN which we have. It has been really helpful however I am having a problem getting the CSV to work. After creating the cluster the disk we are planning to use is only shown in "Disk Witness in Quorum" and no "Available Disks". Do you have any idea why this may be occurring? The disk that is shown in Quorum is the Custer Disk 1 which we want to use for CSV. Any help\Advice would be greatly appreciated. Many Thanks,

I had the same frustration when I first setup my cluster so I wanted to walk through how to make the change here.

First, the Witness volume does not have to be a very big volume, I use a 1 GB volume for my witness.  The Witness volume must be a dedicated volume, it cannot be used to store VMs or VM configuration files.

Second, you need to make sure you have at least one additional volume in your cluster.  If you don’t have more than one volume in your cluster, here’s how you add more volumes. 

1. From your SAN, provision your new volume.
2. Make sure that each node in your cluster is attached to the new volume.
3. Be sure to format the volume (NTFS).
4. Now just add it to the cluster, by right clicking on Storage and choosing Add a disk.

This will kick off a wizard that will allow you to add additional storage to the cluster.  Note that it will only let you add shared storage that is visible to all of the cluster nodes. 

Now that the cluster is setup, you can see the cluster configuration here:

The one warning I want to point out is that you’ve now added additional disk to your cluster, this additional disk did not get tested by the cluster validation wizard.  As long as you confirm that each node “see’s” the new disk, you should be fine, but if you have the time, re-running the cluster validation wizard is a good idea.  You can tell the validation wizard to just run part of the tests, or the whole thing again, but this way you know that your cluster is valid, from beginning to end.  As I’ve mentioned before, if you run into issues with your cluster, the cluster validation wizard is usually a good place to start your troubleshooting process.

When you setup a failover cluster, the cluster wizard is nice enough to pick a Disk Witness for you (if needed).  Now if you don’t like the choice it made, it’s easy to change the witness.  We start by right clicking on the name of the cluster, choosing More Actions… and then Configure Cluster Quorum Settings…

The Configure Cluster Quorum Settings… starts a wizard that will walk you through your cluster quorum settings.

I would suggest that you not make any changes on the screen above unless you really know what your doing (or your doing it in a lab).  If you change the number of nodes in your cluster, you might make a change here, but for this example, we are just going to choose Next >.  This will now take us to the section that will let us make our change to the Witness drive.  As you can see from the screen shot below, it lists all of the available storage and you just check the box for the Witness drive you want to use.

One you make your selection and complete the wizard, your new Witness drive is configured. 

That’s all there is to it, please let me know if you have any questions.

Until next time,

Rob

I posted a blog on the technet blog site and wanted to point you to it here.  Please check it out and let me know what you think.

Until next time,

Rob

I’ve been putting it off, but I finally had time to install Office 2010.  Now I did spend a little time with it when I was experimenting with App-V, but I just rebuilt my Tablet-PC and thought I’d go with Office 2010 Beta.  I really like it.  Of course I’m biased, but Outlook 2010 has the one feature I’ve long for for a long time.  The Zoom control!  Check out the lower left corner of outlook, it contains the zoom control just like Excel 2007.  Here’s a shot of the zoom control in Outlook 2010.  As I’ve aged, I’ve found that I enjoy the bigger text on my screen, so this zoom control has made a big difference! 

Don’t worry, there’s more cool stuff in Outlook 2010.  I’ll talk about some of the thread clean up controls soon.

Until next time!

Rob

I received a question a few days ago about how to license SQL (per processor) within a Virtual Machine on a Hyper-V server (or other hypervisor based host).  There has been a lot of confusion on this, at least I’ve been confused, so I wanted to dig into this and see what I could find.  I found the SQL 2008 Licensing Guide.  It can be found on the SQL 2008 Licensing page here. 

The problem with SQL licensing when you look at the per processor licensing option is, “How do I license SQL in a virtual environment?  Do I have to license every processor on the Hyper-V server?”  So I’m going to point out a few pages of this SQL licensing document that will help you understand how to work this out.

The SQL 2008 Licensing Guide can be downloaded from the page above, or it can be downloaded from here.  This document does a great job of working through the licensing scenarios.  Chapter 4 is where it actually gets interesting with respect to virtualization, but you need to read Chapter 3 first to understand the licensing models.  I’m going to focus on the per processor licensing, that is the one that is less obvious in a virtual environment.  Page 25 is where we get started, let’s first take a look at the introductory explanation. 

The thing I like about this is that now we have a straight forward formula.  Page 28 talks about running SQL in multiple Hyper-V machines and how you should handle that licensing scenario, it even points out the following detail: 

Note: If all of the physical processors (data point C) are licensed for SQL Server Enterprise, then instances of SQL Server may be run on as many VMs as the hardware and
operating system will support. That means you never need more Processor licenses than the total number of physical processors.

Taking directly from the document again, if I have a dual CPU server with Hyper-Threading enabled, the server has a total of four threads.  Using the formula, if you give your SQL VM four virtual processors, you will need to acquire two processor licenses to fully license your SQL server.

I hope this helps clarify some of the SQL licensing questions.

Until next time!

Rob

I’ve talked to a lot of partners about Hyper-V, and the same question always comes up.  Which version of Hyper-V should I choose?  We have a page that lays out the differences between the different versions of Windows Server 2008 R2 and the Microsoft Hyper-V Server.  I’ve included the chart below, if you click on the chart, it will take you right to our page that explains what the free Hyper-V server has to offer.  As you saw from my earlier screen casts, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to setup and use the Microsoft Hyper-V server.  Using the Microsoft Hyper-V server as a stand-alone solution and as a clustered solution was very easy to use.  We’ve updated the management of the Microsoft Hyper-V server in R2, we now have sconfig.cmd file.  Sconfig.cmd is night and day better than the version that shipped in the original Microsoft Hyper-V server.  If you haven’t looked at the free version yet, give it a look.

To me, the biggest difference I saw was the GUI and the additional server licenses included with Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise and Data Center editions.  Adding additional server roles to your Hyper-V server is useful for a lab, but in production, I’d recommend Hyper-V as your only role on your Hyper-V servers.  If you need licenses for your virtual machines, and you’re using more than 4 virtual machines per host, check out Windows Server 2008 R2 Data Center Edition.  Data Center Edition provides unlimited Windows Server licenses for the virtual machines hosted on your Data Center Edition server. 

Have you used the Microsoft Hyper-V server?  If so, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Until next time,

Rob

I received a question about one of my old screen casts, and I thought I should share it, and the answer, with you:

Rob,

I have viewed you video on dual boot xp and win 7 beta. My question is will the same procedure work with xp and the newly released windows 7? I had my computer refurbished and to my dismay, it does not support HAV. So, I am wondering if the procedure you have in your video will work.

Thanks, Tony

This answer is, yes!  Dual Boot in Windows 7 RTM works just like it did in the Beta and it does not require Hardware Assisted Virtualization (HAV) since neither Operating System is running in a Virtual Machine.

Until next time,

Rob

I’ve talked before about the fact that we cannot Live Migrate from an AMD CPU to an Intel CPU or vice-versa, but what about Live Migrating from an older Intel CPU to a newer Intel CPU?  I’m going to show you a Live Migration from a three year old Intel Xeon 5050 CPU to a new Intel Xeon 3440 CPU.  Below the video, I’ve also included the comparison chart that compares the Xeon 5050 to the Xeon 3440 CPU so you can see the progress Intel has made in the last three years. 

So why is the three year old CPU a 5000 series CPU and the newest CPU is a 3000 series CPU?  The 5000 series CPUs are for multi-processor configurations, the 3000 series CPUs are for single-processor configurations.  It’s the last three numbers that Intel has actually been updating as they’ve improved their processors.

The biggest reason that I put this together is that I wanted to demonstrate that customers that have an existing Hyper-V cluster can add new servers to to their existing cluster, to scale out their clusters, even with newer hardware and CPUs.  I want to make sure that I dispel the myth that your Hyper-V servers must be identical.  While identical servers do make your clusters easier to deploy and manage, as this video shows, it is possible to increase the size of your cluster over time as needed.

Here’s the comparison chart that compares the two CPUs so you can see the technical differences between them.

I again would like to thank Intel, Crucial, and Dell for the loan of this equipment.  The server C4 is the Intel CPU and MBO, the memory in it is from Crucial, and of course the live Migration was hosted on the Dell Equallogic SAN. 

I hope this information has helped, if you have any more questions, please let me know.

This session is one part of a whole series of screen casts around Hyper-V, you can go to this link to access the whole series.

So you want to get started with Hyper-V? Start here! – In Summary

Until next time,

Rob

This is the second part of setting up the Microsoft Hyper-V Server Cluster.  This time I will cover the remote management, shared storage, the failover cluster configuration and Live Migration between Hyper-V Servers.  Remember, you can download your free copy of the Microsoft Hyper-V Server here.

If the Video Playback window does not appear below, you will need to install Microsoft Silverlight.

I hope this information has helped, if you have any more questions, please let me know.

This session is one part of a whole series of screen casts around Hyper-V, you can go to this link to access the whole series.

So you want to get started with Hyper-V? Start here! – In Summary

Until next time,

Rob

As you know by now, I’ve spent a lot of time with Hyper-V and I continue to learn new things.  I love sharing these “Ah-ha” moments with you, so here comes the next one.

I’ve been wanting to put together a Hyper-V cluster using our FREE Microsoft Hyper-V Server for some time now, and I took time over the week of Thanksgiving to do just that.  My goal is to show how someone can put together a low cost Hyper-V solution.  First I need to say “Thank you” to a few companies that actually loaned me some of the hardware to make this happen.  Please check out my posting thanking Crucial, Dell, and Intel for their loans to my test lab. 

Now, on to the fun!  Here’s my scenario:

I setup a demo domain named Demo.local.  This hosts my one Domain controller named DemoDC.  It’s my AD and DNS server, and I also use it to remotely manage my Hyper-V Servers.  I’m using static IP addresses just so I could make my life easier.  You can also use DHCP, that’s what I typically use, but I opted for Static IPs so I could put this setup on my same network with everything else.

I have two servers running the Microsoft Hyper-V Server, you can download your free copy here.  I will walk through the setup of these servers over the next few screen casts.  The first one will start with setting up the Hyper-V server.  I’m assuming that you’ve already downloaded the ISO, burned it to a DVD and installed it on your servers.  I will start with the initial configuration and go from there.

If the Video Playback window does not appear below, you will need to install Microsoft Silverlight.

I hope this information has helped, if you have any more questions, please let me know.

This session is one part of a whole series of screen casts around Hyper-V, you can go to this link to access the whole series.

So you want to get started with Hyper-V? Start here! – In Summary

Until next time,

Rob

As you saw from my earlier post, I've been loaned some new hardware and I have a plan for it as follows:

I can now demonstrate a cluster larger than three servers.  In fact, I’ve already created a five node cluster and it’s pretty cool!  The only downside to my five node cluster is that three of the nodes are AMD CPUs and the other two are Intel CPUs.  Yes, your cluster can have a mix of CPUs, but you can only Live Migrate from an Intel CPU to another Intel CPU, or an AMD CPU to another AMD CPU.  Remember, I talked about that here.  The only thing the mixed CPU cluster gives me, from a Hyper-V perspective, is failover.  If my workloads are running on an Intel CPU and the server fails, an AMD based server can restart the workloads since the workloads have to be rebooted.  I get HA, but not Live Migration.  In my environment, I actually shut down a number of my computers over Thanksgiving. One of my DCs is an Intel machine, the other is an AMD.  I left the two of them running in a cluster.  While I couldn’t Live Migrate from one to the other, I didn’t need to.  My goal was just to make sure that if I lost a server, my workloads would be restarted.  I don’t see this as a very viable production scenario, but scenarios like this have made my lab a lot more flexible. 

I’ve also been able to build two separate clusters and plan to show how SCVMM can manage more than one cluster at a time.  I’ve taken my five node cluster and broken it into two clusters.  One three node AMD cluster, and one two node Intel cluster.  This is pretty cool and it gives me a bit more flexibility from a test perspective.  I’ve already moved a workload from my AMD cluster to my Intel cluster via SCVMM.  I had to take an outage to move the workload since I was moving CPU architecture, but it gave me some additional insight.  I’ll show you SCVMM and how we can manage both clusters while of course still utilizing the one library they both share.

With the loan of the Intel CPU and motherboard, I’m now able to cluster together two Intel machines running Hyper-V.  My original Intel machine is a Dell Precision 490 with a 3 year old Xeon 5050 CPU in it.  The newest Intel CPU is the XEON 3440.  My goal is to show you how you can Live Migrate between two different generations of CPUs.  Why?  Well let’s look at our customers that have already virtualized, or even those that are about to.  As quickly as the hardware is progressing, if our customers build a three node cluster now; what do they do when that cluster needs to be expanded in six to twelve months?  We need to give them the confidence that they can scale their cluster out as their demand increases.  We can define a clear starting point and growth path as their business dictates.  This is another area where Virtualization will allow our customers to scale at their pace.  I will show you that as their clusters need to grow they can continue to economically scale their cluster and continue to leverage new innovations without having to start over on new platforms.

For now, I’ll go to work on this list of ideas and get them delivered to you as soon as I can.  As always, I’ll update my Hyper-V summary page here with these new updates as I get them posted.

Until next time!

Rob

I’ve spent a lot of time with Hyper-V.  I’ve put together a lot of blogs, screen casts and demonstrations of Hyper-V.  While Microsoft is a software company, Hyper-V and our products run on hardware.  I office from home and I’ve put together a pretty good lab, but it hasn’t been easy for me to keep up with the newest hardware… Until now.  I’ve been funding my lab myself, but I need to thank a few hardware providers for their recent loans.  Between Intel, Dell and Crucial, I now have access to some of the newest hardware and can now show you some of this newest hardware in action!  Dell loaned me an Equallogic SAN around July.  This SAN has made a big impact in what I’ve been able to learn and share with our partners.  Recently, Crucial and Intel loaned me some of their newest hardware.  Now I can show you Hyper-V on some of the newest Intel hardware.  I would like to thank them for their investment in us.  Yes I said us, because their reason for loaning me this hardware is so that I can show you some of our newest solutions. 

Crucial, the Memory Experts.  Jim Jardine, one of Crucial’s Product  Managers, agreed that showing our partners how to put together a Hyper-V cluster benefits everyone.  As you know, every server needs memory and Jim was great enough to loan me memory for my servers so I could make this happen.  Jim put memory in my laptop and he put memory in my servers.  I’ve already talked about the positive impact his memory has had on my laptop here, now I’ll be able to show you what that memory has done for my servers.  The additional memory will help with the increase in VM density on my Hyper-V hosts.  Jim even put 12 GB of RAM in the Server motherboard Intel loaned me (below).

Intel, they are more than just CPUs!  Intel loaned me an Intel  Xeon X3440 CPU and a S3420GPLC motherboard to put the CPU and memory into.  This CPU is a Nehalem class CPU, but its built for single CPU motherboards.  The X5500 series Nahalem’s are for the multi-CPU motherboards.  For what I’m doing, one eight threaded CPU is enough for now.  Yes, you read that right.  This X3440 CPU supports eight simultaneous threads.  Check out my posting here, where I included a screen shot of task manager and the eight threads.  My understanding is that this is a quad core CPU and each core supports hyper-threading.  From the perspective of this software guy, I can just tell you its fast! 

Intel also loaned me two Dual port NICs.  These are Server  class NICs and boy have they made a difference!  As I’ve assembled my lab (on my own dime), I’ve usually opted for the economical NICs, not the server class NICs just because of the cost.  Now that I have a couple server class NICs, boy can I see a difference.  These NICs are well worth the investment.  Please don’t think you can “get by” with the cheap NICs, especially if you’re using iSCSI for storage.  My “low cost” NICs very seldom reach 50% saturation.  These server class NICs have seen almost 100% saturation to and from the SAN and between Hyper-V hosts during Live Migrations.  The performance improvement these NICs have provided are very impressive.  It makes me wish I had three of four more!  The only down side to having these NICs is that I don’t know what I’ll do when I have to give them back <LOL>!

Dell is more than just workstations these days!  They loaned me an Equallogic SAN.  I’ve been using the SAN for all of my cluster work for the past few months and I’ve been very impressed.  Shared storage is a necessity for Hyper-V clusters, and the thing I love about the Equallogic over traditional SANs is that the Equallogic takes care of the spindle management for me!  I’ve spent a lot of time with this SAN and it makes the effort of planning your spindle load a thing of the past.  All you have to do is define the size of your desired volume and the SAN will take care of balancing the spindles required to support your workload.  If you haven’t investigated SANs yet, this automatic spindle management is the thing that differentiates the Equallogic.  The traditional SAN is just a bunch of disks that you have to manage.  When you create a volume, you have to define the physical drives (spindles) that will support your volume.  The Equallogic SAN does this for you.  It monitors the I/O and can spread the workloads across multiple spindles (when needed) to ensure optimal I/O for the workloads.  This makes sure that your workloads with high I/O demands receive the performance they need without having to over-size every workload just in case I/O might increase.  To me, this is cool enough, but then when you look at scaling the SAN, it’s just like frosting on the cake! 

What do you do when you run out of capacity on your SAN?  With the Equallogic; it’s a frame-less architecture.  What’s that mean?  If you need more capacity, you can rack a second (or third, or …) SAN and the new SANs capacity can become part of the existing SAN.  You don’t have to move data or point servers to a different SAN, your servers are just able to leverage the increased capacity.  The more time I spend with this SAN, the more impressed I become.  I can’t do it justice in just a few lines, but if your looking for a good storage solution, ask Dell about their Equallogic SANs.

While I’ve assembled all of the hardware and software components to show you how we can meet business needs, please remember that I couldn’t have done it without these fine companies.  Please, next time you go to make a purchase, take a look at their offerings to see if they can help you and your customers.

Now that I have this hardware, what am I going to do with it?  I’ve started a plan, and I’ve posted it here.  I’ll tackle this list and I suspect that while I’m working through these ideas, other ideas will pop up.  If you have some ideas, send them my way and we’ll see what works!

Until next time!

Rob

While I understand that the Windows Experience Index is not the most accurate measure of a computers’ performance, I was surprised to see my memory performance improve when I upgraded my laptop from 4 GB of RAM to 8 GB of RAM.  Here are the two screen shots:

Memory operations per second with 4 GB of RAM

Memory operations per second with 8 GB of RAM

Jim Jardine, a Product Manager at Crucial memory, loaned me two DDR3 4 GB sticks of memory for my laptop.  They are the same speed as my old 2 GB sticks (8500), but I was surprised to see that the additional 4 GB of RAM did make a performance improvement.  I’ve seen how moving from 1 GB to 2 GB, or even 2 GB to 4 GB can improve performance, but I didn’t expect to see anything in the move from 4 GB to 8 GB, but it did!  The reason I wanted to move from 4 GB to 8 GB is for Hyper-V.  8 GB of RAM allows me to run more than one or two VMs on my laptop. 

Even though the speed of my 2 GB and 4 GB sticks are the same, could the Crucial memory really be faster than my original memory?  I’d like to think so <grin>.

I’d like to thank Jim and Crucial; they were gracious enough to loan me memory for my laptop and a few of my Hyper-V servers.  Don’t worry, I’m working on new screen casts so I can show you more of the new Hyper-V R2 improvements, but I’d like to make sure that I acknowledge Crucial for their help.  I can’t do any of this without memory, and Crucial really stepped up to help me out.  Please, next time you consider adding memory to your computers, please check out (if you haven’t already) Crucial.

Until next time!

Rob

I’m working on a Microsoft Hyper-V Server cluster and wanted to play “What if”, so I added one of my Hyper-V Servers to my existing Windows Hyper-V Cluster.  I was able to add it, but it failed when I then ran the validation tests on my cluster:

Validate Operating System Installation Option

Validate that the operating systems on the servers use the same installation option (full installation or Server Core installation).

Validating that all servers have the same operating system installation type (Full/Core).

Node	Installation Type
c4.	Full Install
dc1.	Full Install
hv1.	Core Install

This is a fatal error under the System Configuration Section.  I get a lot of warnings in my test scenarios and can work past them, but errors like this will prevent your cluster from being a Supportable Cluster, so I’d caution against deploying a mixed installation cluster in production.

I’m one that wants to understand the why of a situation, but I don’t have an explanation for this one… yet.  I’m looking around to see if I can find any detail on this situation.  If I find anything I’ll share it, but for now, please take note that you cannot mix Full Installations and Core Installations, or Full Installations with the Microsoft Hyper-V Server, if you want to maintain a supportable cluster.  

I have an update on the why.  The reality is that a Server Core installation does not support all of the roles and features that a full installation supports, so we found it made more sense to require similar installs for our clusters.  If we have a mixed installation there could be scenarios where some nodes of your cluster cannot support a failover event, so we chose to require similar installations.  While it is possible to make a mixed configuration work, the bottom line is that our supported configuration, the configuration that puts you in the best position for success, is to ensure that all of the installations within your cluster be either full, or core, not a mixed configuration.

Until next time!

Rob

I’ve been honored to work with Intel lately on some of their technical trainings they present to their partners.  Part of these events involve ongoing training where Intel provides an afternoon of partner technical training that walks them through building out a newer generation server.  To me, the education I received just by hanging around was awesome! 

Since I was spending so much time with their newest hardware, they were nice enough to loan me one of their Xeon X3440 CPUs and the corresponding server motherboard.  I’ve built this puppy out in my lab, and I’ve gotta tell you, 8 threads in task manager is pretty cool!  Thank you Intel, I’m putting it to good use in the form of upcoming screen casts.  Stay tuned for more on Live Migration between different Intel CPUs!

BUT first, there’s a hotfix you need to install on your servers before you head into production.  I found the heads up on this situation from Ben Armstrong’s blog here, and then I checked out our knowledge base article here. 

Now the article discusses the 5500 series Xeon, and I told you that I have the Xeon 3440, what gives?  According to Intel, the 3440 CPU is the uni-processor implementation of the 5500.  I experienced the very same blue screen mentioned in the article, so I’ll bet my CPU will benefit from this hot fix as well.  I just installed the hot fix, so I’ll update you if there are any changes, but I wanted to share what I learned so everyone else can take advantage of this killer SMB server solution. 

Don’t worry, I’ll talk more about the server soon enough, but for now, make sure you grab this patch so you can virtualize away!

Until next time,

Rob