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.

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.

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, ...).

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.

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

If, for some reason, you want to boot Windows Server 2008 without the hypervisor you can create an extra entry in the boot loader. Here's how:

1. At the command prompt, type the following:
   bcdedit /copy {default} /d "No Hypervisor"
   
2. The above command should say: The entry was successfully copied to {guid}. Copy that guid to the clipboard including the curly braces.
   
3. Now, type the following command:
   bcdedit /set {guid} hypervisorlaunchtype off
   
   In the above command, replace {guid} with what you copied in step 2. The above command just sets a property in the boot entry that will not load the hypervisor on boot.

That's it. If you now boot your machine you will get a boot menu with an extra option.

Now why would you do it? Troubleshooting is one reason but for test/dev/training purposes you might want to run something like Virtual Server or VMware Server/Workstation on the same box. Running those with the hypervisor turned on will give you all sorts of problems: it will be slow, you won't be able to run x64 guests in VMware, etc...

When you install Hyper-V on a system and you select a network adapter for virtual machines some changes will be made to your configuration. Before installation of Hyper-V, I had the following connection:

I had only one adapter because I used a standard HP desktop. The adapter was configured with a static IP. During installation, I chose the above adapter for virtual machine networking (click to enlarge):

After the reboot when the installation is complete, the network adapter configuration changes. In my case:

Local Area Connection is the same as before. It represents the physical network adapter in the system. But the configuration only has the Microsoft Virtual Network Switch Protocol configured. IPv4 and other configuration settings are not active anymore:

The Local Area Connection 3 adapter is actually a virtual adapter that is available to the parent partition (the actual installed operating system running on top of the hypervisor) for management. You set the IP address for your physical machine there. This virtual adapter is actually bridged over Local Area Connection just like a virtual machine.

When you disable the network adapter that represents the physical adapter (Local Area Connection in my case), virtual machines and the parent partition will lose connectivity. When you disable only the virtual network adapter of the parent partition (Local Area Connection 3 in my case), you will lose network access to the parent partition but your virtual machines will still have access to the network. This is because they still have their virtual interface bridged over the physical adapter.

After installing a virtual machine from the same media as Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V beta 1, I noticed that the integration components were already installed. Device manager showed the following devices:

The list of services on the server had the Hyper-V services already running:

There is no need to install the integration components from the Action menu:

I installed Windows Server 2008 x64 with Hyper-V Beta 1 on an HP Desktop and installed the Hyper-V role from Server Manager. Everything worked fine and the machine rebooted properly after installation. The role was available but the Virtual Machine Management service refused to start. It threw the following error: "Error 87: The parameter is incorrect".

The reason for the error seems to be that you need to install Windows Server 2008 using the US English locale. I chose Dutch - Belgium during the installation and that results in the error above. The solution came from here.

Mike Laverick has done it again. He has written a great guide about the new features of VI 3.5. Take a look here for download links.

A couple of things I learned from the guide that I did not read anywhere else:

• Virtual disks can now be enlarged from VI Client. No need for vmkfstools.
• Power-on boot delay for guests and an option to boot directly in the BIOS after a guest reboot.
• You can set a static MAC address for a guest from the VI Client.
• The new datastore browser allows you to upload files to and from the datastore.
• You can configure time synch with NTP from VI Client.

There is much more in the guide so I urge you to read it. Great stuff and thanks Mike!!!

Go and take a look at the download page for Windows Server 2008 RC1. It contains a link to a version with Hyper-V Beta. The Windows Server Division weblog has more details about the release.

Some critical new features in this release are:

• Support for quick migration and cluster HA (16 nodes).
• Installation from Server Manager.
• Support for running on Server Core!
• VSS support.
• 64 GB of memory for a VM (just like in ESX 3.5).

Integration components are available for Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 (x86 and x64). Integration components for Linux are available in beta form.

Quite a surprising release. Everybody was expecting this only at the release of Windows Server 2008 in February.

The release of ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 brings a lot of interesting features. A good overview can be found in the release notes and more information in a what's new document.

Some of the changes I like in this release are:

• Integration of tools like Guided Consolidation and VMware Converter in the VI Client.
• Image customization of 64-bit guests. This is probably still based on the sysprep format for Windows Server 2003 and earlier. Remember that Vista and Windows Server 2008 use a different format (xml-based).
• Provisioning across datacenters. In previous versions, you had to have templates in each datacenter.
• Datastore browser that supports file sharing between hosts. You will be able to just cut and paste files between ESX hosts. Seems like a basic feature to have but in the past you had to do this from the console.
• Support for 256GB of RAM in the ESX host and 64GB of RAM for a guest. Interesting but I doubt there will be many customers who need more than 16GB for a guest. Gotta run the race though. ;-)
• Lockdown mode: the ability to prohibit management of a host when it is already managed by VirtualCenter.
• Limit the amount of remote console connections.

For our customers, the features of most interest will probably be:

• Update Manager: provides a patching solution for ESX hosts and (some) guests. This includes offline patching. Microsoft is also working on an offline patching solution with codename "Himalaya". See virtualization.info for more information. It will be interesting to see how the two stack up to eachother.
• Storage VMotion: the ability to migrate virtual machines from one LUN to another without downtime. The migration needs to be done on the same host. You just present the source and target LUN and off you go.
• VMware Converter integration into VI Client: makes it easier to do V2V and P2V right from VI Client and also allows customers that use VCB to restore backed up virtual machines right from VI Client.

We have some DL380 G5 servers with a P800 controller and a MSA50 enclosure. The enclosure is full of disks to have 1,2TB of storage in RAID5. ESX 3 fully supports the P800 controller and the MSA50 enclosure if you have the correct patch level. For ESX 3.0.2 it is best to run update 1.

ESX sees the 1,2TB volume but when we want to create a VMFS volume on it we get the following:

Error during the configuration of the host: Failed to update disk partition information.

In the vmkernel log, we see:

WARNING: SCSI: 5739: Can't write through read-only handle 0x741
WARNING: SCSI: 5616: status Read only, rstatus 0xc0de00 for vmhba1:0:0.residual R 999, CR 80, ER 3
BC: 1521: Failed to flush buffer for object def5 16 6 3 1eee350000000000: Read only
WARNING: SCSI: 5739: Can't write through read-only handle 0x770

The only way to create the VMFS volume is with the service console and the following commands:

• Run fdisk /dev/cciss/c1d0 and then type n to create a new partition, t to change the partition id to fb and w to write partition table to disk.
• Run the following vmkfstools command to create the VMFS volume: vmkfstools -C vmfs3 -b 8M -S volumelabel vmhba1:0:0:1

We use c1d0 because it's the second controller and the first logical disk and vmhba1:0:0:1 because it is the first partitition we are creating.

We have opened a support call with VMware to find out why exactly this is happening because we would like to create volumes (and basically do all our management) with the GUI. I know, I know, not cool but it makes life a bit easier for those who have to implement our procedures.