From Arlindo's Blog I picked up that there is a hotfix to get SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager) 2008 to work with Hyper-V RC1. Now I can finally update my Hyper-V test system.

You can get the hotfix from http://connect.microsoft.com.

From Jorge's Quest For Knowledge I learned that there is a compatibility pack for Windows Server 2003 and XP clients that are deployed in conjunction with Read-Only Domain Controllers (RODCs). Because an RODC is read-only, several functions might not work as expected and those are described in KB article 944043.

Douglas Brown has written a reviewers guide for Virtual Desktop Manager 2.1. I am not sure if this guide is really needed as the VMware documentation is clear and the product is simple to install and use. However, if you are looking for one document that contains an overview from start to finish it is a very good read.

Get it here.

As a side remark it seems that Provision Networks VAS (Virtual Access Suite) still has the upper hand when you look at the features and the price of the product. They just need to put some extra work in their documentation, support site and troubleshooting FAQs because those leave a lot to be desired.

This week somebody asked me if it was possible to sync a Windows Mobile device using a VMware VDM virtual desktop. The following screenshots show how this is done. I am running VDM 2.1 and the virtual desktop is Windows XP SP2 with ActiveSync 4.5. The client is Windows Vista SP1 with the VMware VDM Client and my Windows Mobile SmartPhone is connected with a USB cable.

From the VDM Client, the user logs on to the desktop by double clicking it:

The remote desktop session is started but it is wrapped in the VMware VDM Client's user interface. The window's title bar contains a menu:

If the Windows Mobile device is connected on the client, it will show up in the Devices menu:

The user just needs to click the device to "connect" it to the virtual desktop. As soon as the device is redirected it can be used. In my case, I need to provide a password to the device first:

The device is now connected and ActiveSync in the Windows XP virtual desktop can work with it:

The mobile device also shows up in My Computer as expected.

A couple of things you should know here. USB device redirection like this requires the VDM agent in the virtual desktop and VMware VDM Client on the client.

CoreConfigurator is a great tool to easily configure Windows Server Core using a simple GUI. The CoreConfigurator tool has now been updated with a couple of new functions:

• Windows Update configuration
• Windows Server Backup performance setting: full or incremental backups

Download the new version here.

Hyper-V RC1 is available for download. More info can be found here. A couple of things to note:

• Saved-state files and online snapshots are different so discard these before upgrading.
• The current SCVMM 2008 Beta does not support RC1.
• There is support for Windows 2000 SP4 guests.
• Integration Components disk (iso) contain the binaries needed for all Windows guest operating systems including Windows Server 2008.
• Static IPv4 migration when you create a virtual network bound to an adapter with an existing fixed IPv4 address.

While we are on the subject of Hyper-V, check out the Microsoft Virtualization Team Blog. It contains a couple of interesting posts including some more WMI examples.

I stumbled across two configuration issues with the beta of SCVMM 2008 (available on http://connect.microsoft.com). Here they are:

1. SCVMM does not like : in a path

I use local storage on my ESX server and ESX automatically gives that storage a label in the form of hostname:storage#. When I tried to deploy a virtual machine to ESX with SCVMM, it failed saying that the volume name was not recognized. Removing the : in the label solved the issue.

2. Issue with USB flash devices in Hyper-V host

When I added my Hyper-V host to SCVMM everything seemed to work fine except the Refresh-Host job. It turns out that in the beta, that job fails when you have USB flash devices in the system. Because I use an HP Desktop machine with built-in card readers, I had to disable them all in device manager. After disabling those devices, Refresh-Host completed without errors, making the Hyper-V host available for deployments.

I downloaded and installed SCVMM 2008 today and installed it to check out the VMware integration. I created a new virtual machine with Windows Server 2008 x64 with 1,5GB of RAM and started the installation from an attached ISO. When I did that the installation failed during WAIK installation. I copied the WAIK files (from \Prerequisites\WAIK\1033) to the server and installed WAIK from there. I than reran the setup procedure and SCVMM installed fine.

The first thing you do after installation is to add some hosts. This beta of SCVMM 2008 supports the following virtualization hosts:

• Virtual Server 2005
• Hyper-V (on Windows Server 2008)
• VMware VI3 (with VirtualCenter)

To manage ESX you need to add a VirtualCenter server. SCVMM cannot connect to ESX servers directly. The result (click to enlarge):

In the screenshot above at the right, you'll see an action called Add VMware VirtualCenter. That action launches a wizard that asks you for the name of your VirtualCenter box and your credentials. Upon completion, the wizard adds folders to SCVMM for each VMware datacenter object and then adds the ESX boxes.

If you look at the screenshot further, the Summary tab shows some information about the ESX host like CPU, memory, storage and the virtual machines on the host. The Storage and Networking tab shows the following info:

When you click on the Virtual Machines button and select the ESX host you get a list of virtual machines:

From that list you can do what's expected: stop, start, suspend, modify the virtual machine settings, VMotion, etc... You can also connect to the console of virtual machines. The first time you do this you need to install an ActiveX control. The console looks like this:

That's all I have time for today. Next I will check out how SCVMM works with ISOs and virtual machine templates and how that ties in with VirtualCenter. I will report those findings later.

Scott Lowe has written an interesting post about enabling jumbo frames for VMware's software iSCSI initiator. VMware does not support this (yet) but it appears you can already enable it. For full details, check his blogpost.

A jumbo frame's size is typically set at 9000 versus the standard size of around 1500. Setting the frame size (or mtu) to 9000 actually lowers the amount of packet processing (assembly/disassembly) by a factor of six. The overhead for ethernet packets also decreased because you send less frames. In general, you should see a performance increase of around 20 to 30%. Note that you have to enable jumbo frames on all levels of your infrastructure: the ethernet switch, the server and the storage box (e.g. NetApp, EqualLogic, ...).

Microsoft published a very interesting whitepaper about their use of Exchange Server 2007 and Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR). I was surprised to learn that they use DAS instead of a SAN-based solution. When you think of it, it makes sense because it eliminates some complexity and dramatically lowers the implementation costs. A big advantage of that design is that it avoids what they call hot-spot contention when another workload is using the same spindles as Exchange Server 2007.

All in all a very interesting read! You can find it here.

After redirecting the Favorites folder on Vista to a different location I could not save a link in my favorites. It turns out you have to run the following command:

icacls "path_to_new_favorites_folder" /setintegritylevel (OI)(CI)low

This has something to do with IE in protected mode and the integrity levels that were introduced in Vista.

I also found out that I could not print a web page. To solve that I had to create a directory called low under my temp folder and also set the integritylevel with the icacls command.

A while ago I did a talk at the Microsoft Techdays in Belgium about migrating from public folders and file servers to SharePoint. In that talk I mentioned the fact that public folders are not dead and that you can continue to use public folders if you really want to. I mentioned the guidance from a blog post at msexchangeteam.com and that guidance has now been updated. You can find the updated guidance here.

The guidance boils down to these main points:

1. Public Folders have full support for 10 years after the release of the next version of Exchange Server. That is longer than the initial reported date of 2016.
2. SharePoint is the better option for document sharing and custom applications (e.g. workflow) even if you currently use public folders for this.

For many users, the strength of public folders comes from the fact that there is full Outlook integration. It is easy to drag and drop e-mails as msg files in public folders or share things like calendars and contacts. Although some of these things can be done with Outlook 2007 and SharePoint, the features are not exactly the same. Outlook 2007 does not do two-way sync or allows you to drag and drop e-mails as msg files in document libraries. A tool such as Colligo Contributor is needed if you need those abilities. Colligo Contributor works really well and is worth having a look at.

Another strength of public folders is the built-in replication. SharePoint does not do replication but there are several 3rd party tools that can do it such as those from Infonic.

It would be great if the next version of SharePoint would include features such as replication and better Outlook integration because that would make it even easier to migrate without having to incur extra (potentially high) costs for these extra features.

Check out PowerTerm WebConnect for WS08 if you want some extra features for Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services for free:

• Ability to publish multiple applications from multiple terminal servers in one step.
• Ability to publish applications to specific users and groups.
• A web interface with single sign-on that only shows your published applications (and not all of them like in Windows Server 2008)

Note that WebConnect is not completely free. When you download the installation package you actually install the full version. After 30 days, only the free features remain with some limitations. More information about these limitations can be found here.

In my test environment I use a couple of base disks to easily create new virtual machines. I have a base disk for Windows XP SP3, Windows Server 2008 (32-bit and 64-bit), Windows Server 2008 Core and Windows Server 2003. Each time I create a new virtual machine, I create a differencing disk based on one of the base disks and tell the virtual machine to use that base disk. This functionality is the same as in Virtual PC and Virtual Server.

I wanted to automate the creation of differencing disks using a PowerShell script and it turns out to be very easy. The following two lines are all you need:

$img_svc=Get-WmiObject -Namespace root\virtualization -class msvm_imagemanagementservice

$img_svc.CreateDifferencingVirtualHardDisk("path for new disk", "path to parent disk")

You can find this information here but at this time the information there is pretty basic. You'll probably learn more by listing the WMI classes in PowerShell and playing with them a bit. To list the classes just use the following command:

Get-WmiObject -Namespace root\virtualization -list

I tried to find out how to create a virtual machine using WMI but that seems to be rather difficult. At first glance there is no simple method you can use with some parameters like the name, amount of memory, disk and so forth. Oh well, when SCVMM will have support for Hyper-V there will be native PowerShell commands to do just that so it's no big deal.

• Microsoft released the Microsoft Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows Vista with SP1. Download the correct version for your operating system: x86 | x64
• They also released an update to enable remote management of Hyper-V RC0: x86 | x64
• If you did not take a look at Hyper-V yet, now is a good time. The release candidate works a lot better than the beta. I installed it on a quad core box with 8GB of RAM and it is quite fast. And with support for Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3 it is much more useful especially as a test environment.
• You don't like to configure Windows Server 2008 Server Core using the command line? Then this is something for you: CoreConfigurator.
• If you want to setup your own ESX 3.5 (or 3i) server, take a look at the ASUS P5BV-SAS motherboard. It comes with an LSI Logic 1068 RAID controller, built-in VGA and supported network cards (2x 1Gb). I plugged in a quad core Intel CPU, 8GB of RAM and 4 500GB SATA disks. ESX installs perfectly on this box and the performance is quite good!

Hyper-V Release Candidate is now available and includes support for Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3 guests (among other improvements). Full details about installation can be found here.

The SCVMM product is available today to manage Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. But somewhere this year, another version of SCVMM (vNext) will be available that also manages Hyper-V and VMware VI3.

What you should know about this is that SCVMM does not replace VirtualCenter. In fact, SCVMM requires VirtualCenter because it uses the VI3 APIs of VirtualCenter to do all of its work. If you have multiple VirtualCenter servers, SCVMM will be able to talk to all of them to enable management across all instances. It seems a bit too hard for Microsoft to talk to the ESX servers directly which surprises me because there are APIs to do that.

I am not sure if using SCVMM together with VirtualCenter is a compelling scenario. Sure, SCVMM's PowerShell functionality is cool but VMware itself is hard at work to get their VI PowerShell launched. VI PowerShell will beta this month and from what I have already seen it works very well.

Another SCVMM function, intelligent placement, is also something that has been available for a while on VI3. I continuously hear people say that this is a feature that SCVMM vNext will bring to VI3 and that is just incorrect. See also this article about this common misconception.

The library feature is not that interesting either because you can easily store ISOs, floppy disk images and virtual machine templates on VMFS or NFS datastores. SCVMM does provide a nicer GUI to work with those assets but that is not something that justifies an extra management tool.

I do see some benefit in the integration of SCOM 2007 with SCVMM vNext especially if Microsoft were to release a management pack for VMware VI3. Performance information from ESX hosts and virtual machines could then be fed into SCCM vNext to improve VMotion recommendations, intelligent placement calculations and so on. I don't except this will happen soon but today at the Microsoft TechDays in Ghent, a Microsoft employee told us that we should expect some big announcements around the timeframe of the Management Summit. Will there be more VMware-related integration? Time will tell...

So although I think SCVMM is great for Virtual Server and Hyper-V deployments, I don't think it is very useful in a VMware environment. But maybe you have a different opinion so let me know what you think.

You probably know that the different versions of Windows allow you to run additional virtual instances of Windows. The standard version allows you to run one additional virtual instance, the enterprise version allows four virtual instances and the datacenter version allows unlimited instances. The additional virtual instances are linked to a physical server. This means that when you buy the enterprise version of Windows for example, you can run four virtual instances on one physical server.

You should also know that these rules are not linked to Microsoft virtualization technologies such as Virtual Server or Hyper-V. They apply to VMware VI3, XenServer and any other hardware virtualization product.

But what happens in an environment with live migration features such as VMotion, XenMotion or even Quick Migration like in Virtual Server and Hyper-V? In that case you need enough licenses for the amount of virtual machines that can potentially run on one physical server.

An example should make this clearer. If you have two hosts running ESX with eight virtual machines in total and VMotion/HA enabled you might be tempted to buy two Windows Server Enterprise licenses. You can do this but then you have to run four virtual machines on one server and four virtual machines on the other and never move them! (Note: there are some exceptions to this in the official Microsoft documents)

So how many Enterprise licenses do you have to buy? The answer is you should buy four Windows Server Enterprise licenses: two for the first server and two for the second server. Depending on the amount of physical processors in the server, Windows Server Datacenter licenses will quickly become cheaper.

More information: Microsoft

Check out the following blog: The things that are better left unspoken. Lots of good Server Core info about IP configuration, page files, remote desktop and more.

Go check it out already!