John Quirk's Blog

The Windows 7 work that’s been going on internally recently has kept me pretty busy, but along with that I’ve also been sticking my oar into expanding our System Center offerings. We already participate heavily in delivery of Desktop Deployment Planning Services (DDPS), essentially a Solution Accelerator for the implementation of Microsoft Deployment Toolkit and System Center Configuration Manager for large-scale (oftentimes remote) OS deployment and desktop optimization. We also participate in DOVO, an offering from Microsoft around adoption of Vista and Office 2007 and in SMO, Service Management Optimization, which is a System Center Operations Manager adoption approach in the same solution catalogue as DOVO.

At MMS this year Microsoft (and others) demonstrated some pretty cool stuff with Hyper-V R2 and System Center combining to provide superb functionality. Much of this new functionality relies on the latest of everything, including the R2 System Center releases and the latest server platforms (for example HP’s G6 models). The hardware aspects are interesting as they deliver advanced environmental monitoring which is exposed to OpsMgr. This in turn enables OpsMgr to communicate with VMM to make intelligent placement suggestions via PRO. For example, we might set a power SLA for a particular server, or a particular rack and should the virtual machine load on the server result in the power SLA being exceeded, OpsMgr can inform VMM via PRO, VMM can then Live Migrate VM(s) to less utilised servers to bring the SLA back into compliance.

This is all great, and certainly something that customers are very interested in, but to demo it’s pretty complex. We have a decent demonstration suite at our Head Office, but I want to be able to take this stuff on the road to show to customers, so a portable environment is required.

The first new aspect to all of this stuff is a need for shared storage. iSCSI is the obvious solution and after a bit of research, the QNAP TS-119 looked as good a choice as any… This has so far proved to be a good choice, the build quality is superb which for a portable device is very important of course and with 1TB storage it comes in under £300 which is a great result.

Then I need something to boot into Hyper-V. I already have an excellent (if now slightly old) HP Compaq NW9440 laptop with 4GB RAM which I use every day, this will ably act as one host, but obviously for high availability I need another, my purchase req for that is in at the moment. In the mean time I need a way to boot this machine into Hyper-V. I don’t particularly want to dual boot Windows 7, and fortunately I don’t need to. Windows Server 2008 R2 is fully supported booting from removable media, so a couple of 16GB Kingston USB memory sticks are required. While we’re at it, I need a way of hooking the computers to the NAS. This Netgear 5 port Gigabit switch is slightly smaller than two packs of cards, supports Jumbo Frames and again boasts excellent build quality, excellent for £56.

Lovely.

Now to make it work!