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Full backups of virtual machines and Windows VSS

rastix — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:03:53 +0200

My colleague, Tim Jacobs, has published a good article covering virtual machine backups and VSS integration. In my opinion, VSS clearly is the way to go because the VMware sync driver or other proprietary solutions just don't cut it. Microsoft already included VSS support in Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 and also has it in Hyper-V.

Check out the article on his blog.

SCVMM Beta: Multiple virtual machines on the same LUN in a cluster

rastix — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 10:28:36 +0200

In the previous post, I talked about creating highly available virtual machines on Hyper-V and the fact that SCVMM can only create virtual machines on unused storage. The standard tools such as Hyper-V Manager and Failover Cluster Manager do support multiple virtual machines on the same volume (with a hotfix). So what happens to SCVMM in that case? Have a look at the screenshot below:

The virtual machines are in an unsupported configuration and cannot be managed from SCVMM (no starting, stopping etc...). This will probably be fixed in the final release but if you are testing the product now you know what to expect.

Hyper-V: Creating highly available virtual machines

rastix — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 20:38:57 +0200

When you need to create a highly available virtual machine running on Microsoft's Hyper-V you need to do so on a Failover Cluster. In this post I will show you how to create a highly available virtual machine on a two-node Windows Server 2008 cluster. The cluster is using simple desktop machines with storage on an MSA2012i SAN (iSCSI).

There are two ways to create the virtual machine:

Use the Hyper-V Manager in conjunction with Failover Cluster Management.
Use System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (SCVMM).

The first method is a bit clumsy because it involves two different consoles. That method, however, has more flexibility as you will see later. Let's take a look at the first method and see how you could create a virtual machine in the cluster on a shared volume.

Creating the virtual machine without SCVMM
Without SCVMM you need Hyper-V Manager and Failover Cluster Manager. To start, you need to have a volume available to the cluster. In my case, I had a volume with drive letter S: as available storage to the cluster as shown in the screenshot below.

Even a volume that is not part of a service or application (a resource group in old terminology) is owned by a particular host. In the screenshot you see that hyperv2 owns the disk.

The next step is to use Hyper-V Manager to create a virtual machine. It is important that you store both the virtual machine configuration and hard disk(s) on shared storage. To create the virtual machine, open Hyper-V Manager on the host that owns the disk and create a new virtual machine as shown below. This is the same as on a standalone host as this tool is not aware of the cluster.

A wizard will start to create the virtual machine. Just follow the wizard and make sure you use shared storage. We can now proceed to the next step and that is adding the machine to the cluster.

Now open Failover Cluster Management, right click Services and Applications and click Configure a Service or Application. A wizard will start. Follow the wizard until the screen below and select Virtual Machine (only available when Hyper-V is installed):

When you click Next, the wizard will enumerate the virtual machines on shared storage so that you can select them:

After the virtual machine has been selected, continue the wizard. The end result will be a new service called Virtual Machine with two resources (well, actually three): the virtual machine configuration, the virtual machine and the storage volume. The screenshot below illustrates what you see in the Failover Cluster Management console after running the wizard a few times to add other virtual machines on the same volume.

You can now start the virtual machine directly from Failover Cluster Management and install a guest operating system. If you need to attach an iso first, you will need to use Hyper-V Manager. The Failover Cluster Management tool provides an easy way to start Hyper-V Manager. Just right click the service (here called by default Virtual Machine).

From the moment the virtual machine is part of the cluster you will need to perform actions such as stopping, shutting down and saving state from Failover Cluster Management. If you use Hyper-V Manager to stop the virtual machine for example, the cluster will restart the virtual machine again (with the default resource settings).

Creating the virtual machine with SCVMM
SCVMM, being the 'single pane of glass' for virtualization management provides a way to create new virtual machines on both clusters and standalone Hyper-V hosts. Before you can create a virtual machine on a cluster you need to add the cluster to SCVMM. From the Actions pane, select Add Host as shown below:

In the Add Hosts wizard, type the cluster name in Host server name and press Enter. The cluster should be added to the list as shown below:

Now continue the wizard to deploy the SCVMM agent on each node in the cluster (=automatic). The cluster will be shown in SCVMM as shown below:

Adding a virtual machine is easy but the current beta of SCVMM has some limitations:

SCVMM only supports one virtual machine per cluster volume. This effectively means I need one LUN per virtual machine, something I need anyway if I want to 'Quick Migrate' individual virtual machines.
SCVMM only supports volumes with drive letters (no mount points).

Before you create the virtual machine, make sure there is available storage in the cluster that is not used by any other virtual machine. To create the virtual machine, just select New Virtual Machine from the Actions pane at the right to launch the wizard. The wizard is straightforward but you should not forget to configure the virtual machine as highly available. You do so from the Configure Hardware dialog in the wizard. Scroll to the bottom where there is an Availability section. When the wizard is finished, SCVMM will have created a new service in the cluster called SCVMM vmname Resources. You can now start the virtual machine from SCVMM and start installing a guest operating system.

Conclusion
Creating a highly available virtual machine is easy but as you have seen, there are several ways to do it. There are also some discrepancies between what you can do with and without SCVMM. The final version of SCVMM will have to solve this so that you can truly use it as your primary management tool for Hyper-V.

REMARK: I my setup I installed the following hotfix: http://support.microsoft.com/?id=951308. This hotfix provides more functionality and virtual machine control for Hyper-V in a failover cluster.

HP: Overview of MSA2012i Configuration

rastix — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:02:12 +0200

I got my hands on an HP MSA2012i and thought I'd share some of the configuration screens with you. Part of the HP StorageWorks 2000 Modular Smart Array family, this particular model is the iSCSI model with one controller (it is not meant for production so we did not need the 2nd controller). The MSA2012i has twelve SAS drive bays for 3.5 inch disks and we filled it with 146GB 15K disks. There are two other models: one fibre channel and one SAS.

Each controller has three ethernet ports, one for management and two for data access. I connected the management port to our network and pointed my browser to the IP address assigned by our DHCP server. After logging in with username manage and password !manage (defaults) the configuration can start.

The first thing to do is to configure the ethernet ports. To configure the data ports, go to General Config and then host port configuration:

The addresses above (port 0 and port 1) are used for the iSCSI discovery process and of course disk access as well. In the Microsoft iSCSI initiator for example, you would set one of these (or both) in the Discovery tab:

The MSA2000 works with the concept of vdisks and volumes. A vdisk is nothing more than a collection of physical disks configured with some protection level (RAID5, RAID10, ...) and optional spare disk(s). There are two ways to create a vdisk:

Automatic virtual disk creation (policy-based)
Manual virtual disk creation (detail-based)

The policy-based method just asks you for a fault tolerance level (none=RAID0, medium=RAID5 or high=RAID50), the size of the vdisk in GB and the number of volumes to create in the vdisk.

I will show manual disk creation to create a vdisk with 11 disks and one spare (no best practice or anything, just demo). The first screen asks for the vdisk name and the RAID level (RAID0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 50):

The second screen asks for the disks and whether or not you want spare drives:

The third screen asks for the spare disk(s):

After clicking continue, a summary is shown with a button to create the vdisk:

After clicking Create Virtual Disk, the vdisk will be created and initialized. Initialization can take a long time but during that time volumes can already be created and used.

The next thing to do is to create volumes. Let's create a 100GB volume on the vdisk we just created. From the Volume Management section at the left there is the add volume option. In the screenshot below, a volume of 100GB is created without assigning a LUN number. When you assign a LUN number you present the LUN globally. If you do not want that you set LUN to NONE and assign the volume to a host from the volume mapping link.

After clicking Add Volume the volume is shown in the volume map of the vdisk:

To map the volume to a host:

Of course, hosts don't just magically appear in the above list. You can add hosts manually (there is a link somewhere in the menu at the left) or make them appear by using the iSCSI initiator on the host to connect to the MSA target. When the volume is mapped to the host it will appear if the iSCSI initiator was configured correctly:

As you can see, configuration is very simple although not as easy as an Equallogic box, a reference for configuration simplicity. I did notice one bug though and that is the fact that every other vdisk is owned by the second (in our case, non existent) controller. This might be solved by a more recent firmware though.

ThinApp 4.0: Application Link

rastix — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:26:54 +0200

Application link is a feature VMware added to the Thinstall product they acquired a while ago. As the feature name implies, it allows you to link ThinApp'ed applications. You could for example link a browser to a Flash plugin or a Java plugin. In this post I will show you the basics of application link. I will link Opera 9.5 to a Flash plugin. The steps to get this to work are as follows:

Create separate projects for Opera 9.5 and the Flash plugin.
Configure the package.ini of Opera 9.5 with the application link.
Deliver the packages to end-users taking into account the placement of the plugins.

This post does not discuss the first step. Check the two previous blog posts to see how to do that. When you create the project for the Flash plugin, download a standalone installer for Flash and use it during Setup Capture. I ended up with the following projects:

The second step, configuring the application link, is easy. In the package.ini of Opera 9.51 you will find the following line:

Just remove the ; in front of the highlighted line and build the project using build.bat. With this default configuration (plugins\*.exe) you need to put a plugins folder in the folder that contains Opera.exe:

The Flash project resulted in a file called NPSWF32_FlashUtil.exe and that file is put in the plugins folder. Because application link is configured with *.exe, the plugin will be picked up at runtime. It does not matter where the exe's are located. They can be put on the local workstation, a USB drive or a network share.

ThinApp 4.0: Building a project

rastix — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:49:16 +0200

In the previous post I showed you how to install ThinApp and run a Setup Capture. Unless you are completely new to the technology, those things are rather straightforward. Now we will take a look at some other aspects of the package building process.

Setup Capture generates a project that you can customize before the build process. The default project location is in C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware ThinApp\Captures\. As an example, I chose to virtualize Opera 9.5 and that resulted in this project folder: C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware ThinApp\Captures\Opera 9.51.

When you open the project folder you will get something like in the screenshot below.

One of the most important files is the package.ini file because it contains parameters that drive the build process. The VMware site has full details about the settings in package.ini here.

Some interesting parameters can be found in the general purpose parameters section:

SandboxName: the sandbox is the location where the user's application settings are stored. By default that is %appdata%\Thinstall\SANDBOXNAME. %appdata% is a directory in the user's profile that can be redirected to a network location using Group Policies. Note that VMware did not change Thinstall to ThinApp here.
PermittedGroups: to configure who is allowed to run the application
RemoveSandboxonExit: to clear the sandbox when the user quits the application, useful when you always want the user to start from the default settings in the package.
SandboxNetworkDrives: to allow or disallow access to network drives from the package. Access is allowed by default.
SandboxRemovableDisk: similar to the network drives setting but for removable disks.

Near the end of package.ini you will find the entry points to the application. In my case there is a section called [Opera.exe]. In some cases you will find other entry points that you don't need. In my case I had entry points called [cmd.exe], [regedit.exe] and [iexplore.exe]. Although you can disable these entry points during Setup Capture I usually remove them from package.ini afterwards as well.

Now that you know about package.ini, let's build the project. In the project folder there is a batch file called build.bat. Just run that file to start the build. It's that simple! You will get a new folder called bin. In my case there are two files:

You can just take the opera.exe application and run it on another computer. One of the strengths of ThinApp is the fact that it is agentless. It is agentless because the virtualization engine is actually included in each executable that is generated.

When you run a ThinApp'ed application you get the following in the right bottom corner of the screen:

The application then starts as if it was installed locally. In virtual Opera, I added my blog to the list of bookmarks. Since that is a user preference, it is saved in the sandbox at C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Thinstall\Opera 9.51. You should note that by default, if you install add-ons like Flash, they are also installed to the sandbox. When you delete the sandbox directory and start the application again you start with default settings in the package. Talk about a simple way to reset the user environment on a per application basis.

The features described above are essentially the same as in Thinstall 3.0. VMware added some new features like Application Sync and Application Link but that is for another post.

ThinApp 4.0: Installation and Setup Capture

rastix — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:11:49 +0200

I just downloaded ThinApp 4.0 from the VMware website. The screens below show the installation screens and setup capture screens to have some idea about what the product looks like.

The installer is very small (around 7MB). I created a Windows XP virtual machine in VMware Workstation, installed ThinApp 4.0 and created a snapshot. The snapshot allows me to revert to it after creating a package in order to start with a clean machine whenever I create a package. Note that it is recommended to start the ThinApp setup capture process from a network share instead of installing it on your capture workstation.

First, let's start the installation.

You have to enter a serial number and license display name. You can get a trial key at www.vmware.com for 60 days. The trial includes VMware Workstation 6 as well if you don't have it yet.

After installation you get the following shortcuts in the Start Menu:

With ThinApp Setup Capture you capture the installation of a piece of software. When launched, you get the following screens:

Of course, you need to run setup capture on a clean computer. The next dialog tells you that but also allows you to set advanced settings.

The advanced settings:

You normally don't need to change anything in the Advanced settings. Continuing with the setup wizard, the prescan starts. Scanning is very fast.

When the prescan finishes you get the dialog below. Now it is time to start an installation. I installed Opera 9 (not shown).

After installation, you click Next in the dialog above. ThinApp can now start the postscan in order to determine the differences.

Now you can select the entry points. Multiple entry points are possible, for example when you virtualize Office with Excel, Word and PowerPoint.

You can configure the application so that only specific users can run it. AD groups are used for this purpose. The sandbox location is a location where ThinApp can store the user's settings. If the user sets favorites in Opera for example, they are stored in the sandbox.

The next dialog asks for the isolation mode. The explanations in the dialog speak for themselves.

You can accept the default location for the project. The MSI generation checkbox is not checked by default. It generates a standard MSI that can be deployed to user's desktops with tools such as Altiris or SCCM 2007.

The project is then created.

In the final screen you can browse the project and make changes or build the project. I will not do that and click Finish to end the capture.

Note that when you just click Finish, your virtualized application is not created. You need to actually build the project for that. A next post will show you how the build process works without using the Build Now button in the dialog above.

Microsoft: SCVMM 2008 Hotfix for Hyper-V RC1

rastix — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:05:14 +0200

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.

Microsoft: Windows Server 2008 RODC Compatibility Pack

rastix — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:02:14 +0200

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.

VMware: VDM 2.1 Reviewers Guide

rastix — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:53:20 +0200

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.

VMware VDM: Using Windows Mobile Devices

rastix — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 22:55:37 +0200

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.

Server Core: CoreConfigurator Updated

rastix — Tue, 20 May 2008 23:16:04 +0200

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.

Microsoft releases Hyper-V RC1

rastix — Tue, 20 May 2008 20:01:29 +0200

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.

SCVMM 2008: Quick Configuration Tips

rastix — Tue, 06 May 2008 21:03:15 +0200

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.

SCVMM 2008 and VMware integration

rastix — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:18:06 +0200

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.

ESX Server, IP Storage and Jumbo Frames

rastix — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:48:12 +0200

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 IT: Storage Design for Exchange Server 2007

rastix — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:13:14 +0200

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.

IE7 on Vista Troubles

rastix — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 00:55:47 +0200

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.

Exchange Public Folders and SharePoint

rastix — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 16:38:25 +0200

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:

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.
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.

Want some extra features for Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services?

rastix — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 23:40:19 +0200

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.

Hyper-V: Creating a differencing disk with WMI

rastix — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:24:44 +0200

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.

Quickies

rastix — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 21:56:55 +0100

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!

Microsoft: Hyper-V RC

rastix — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 22:52:54 +0100

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.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and VMware

rastix — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:57:15 +0100

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.

Windows licensing and virtualization

rastix — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:00:50 +0100

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

Want some good articles about Windows Server Core?

rastix — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 15:27:06 +0100

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!

Microsoft Hyper-V: Booting without the hypervisor

rastix — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 14:53:22 +0100

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:

At the command prompt, type the following:
bcdedit /copy {default} /d "No Hypervisor"
The above command should say: The entry was successfully copied to {guid}. Copy that guid to the clipboard including the curly braces.
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...

Windows Server 2008: Sample sysprep unattend file

rastix — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:51:53 +0100

If you are testing Windows Server 2008 in a virtual environment you probably get tired of answering setup prompts after each new template gets deployed. Although you can use sysprep as with Windows Server 2003, the answer file for sysprep has changed quite a bit.

The answer file is now an XML file instead of an INF file. In the past, you could generate the answer file with setupmgr.exe but that cannot be done with Windows Server 2008. Instead, you will need to use Windows System Image Manager to create the XML file. Windows System Image Manager is part of WAIK and can be downloaded here. Although much more powerful, Windows System Image Manager is not as easy to use as setupmgr.exe.

The XML file I generated with Windows System Image Manager is very basic but enough to do the job of automating sysprep. Here it is for x86 and nl-be regional settings:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<unattend xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:unattend">
    <settings pass="specialize">
        <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup" processorArchitecture="x86" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
            <ComputerName>*</ComputerName>
            <ProductKey>AAAAA-BBBBB-CCCCC-DDDDD-EEEEE</ProductKey>
            <RegisteredOrganization>Org</RegisteredOrganization>
            <RegisteredOwner>Org</RegisteredOwner>
            <ShowWindowsLive>false</ShowWindowsLive>
        </component>
        <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Security-Licensing-SLC-UX" processorArchitecture="x86" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
            <SkipAutoActivation>true</SkipAutoActivation>
        </component>
    </settings>
    <settings pass="oobeSystem">
        <component name="Microsoft-Windows-International-Core" processorArchitecture="x86" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
            <InputLocale>nl-be</InputLocale>
            <SystemLocale>nl-be</SystemLocale>
            <UILanguage>en-us</UILanguage>
            <UserLocale>nl-be</UserLocale>
        </component>
        <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup" processorArchitecture="x86" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
            <OOBE>
                <HideEULAPage>true</HideEULAPage>
                <NetworkLocation>Work</NetworkLocation>
                <ProtectYourPC>1</ProtectYourPC>
                <SkipUserOOBE>true</SkipUserOOBE>
            </OOBE>
            <RegisteredOrganization>Org</RegisteredOrganization>
            <RegisteredOwner>Org</RegisteredOwner>
        </component>
    </settings>
</unattend>

To actually use this XML file, you copy it to your template. I copied mine as sysprep.xml to c:\windows\system32\sysprep. That is the folder on a Windows Server 2008 system where sysprep.exe is located by default. From that location, you execute the following command:

sysprep /generalize /oobe /shutdown /unattend:sysprep.xml

The system will shut down. The next time you start this system (or better a copy of it), it will ask you nothing and install with the settings in the XML file. The computername will be automatically generated.

Update: if you want to use this unattend file on an x64 system, replace x86 with amd64.

Microsoft Hyper-V: Network Adapters

rastix — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 22:52:12 +0100

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.

Microsoft Hyper-V: Integration Components

rastix — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 22:16:33 +0100

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: