A Portable Highly Available Hyper-V and System Center Demo Environment – Making Progress
I’ve had the various bits and pieces that I outlined in my earlier post for a few weeks and have had some time to play around with it.
I started out booting Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 from the USB sticks, this works brilliantly but caused me a few headaches… The primary problem is that I want to be able to administer the Hyper-V instance from a remote Windows 7 laptop. This proved to be pretty complicated without the two being in a domain. It’s possible to get most of the way clear outside of the domain using WinRM TrustedHosts and a few other little tips and tricks. This eventually allowed me to load Server Manager remotely, but I absolutely could not get Disk Administrator to load from the remote machine and didn’t have much better luck with Hyper-V Administrator either.
After getting tied in knots with this I eventually created a physical DC, added my Hyper-V Server machine (booted from USB) and my Windows 7 laptop to the domain and I could then do all the admin I liked. This is fine, but obviously I don’t want to have to carry around an additional physical DC, so I P-V’d this into Hyper-V (probably not a great idea). All was fine until I shut everything down. I’m now in a situation where my Hyper-V server is joined to a domain which is virtualised upon itself. This leads to some, err, inconsistencies in the stability of the environment.
After a few late nights and plenty of red wine one of our Active Directory consultants took pity on me. We decided the best approach was to scrap the Hyper-V Server approach for the first node and install Server 2008 R2 on the physical laptop, make this a Hyper-V machine, then make it a domain controller in a shiny new domain. This done, it’s been solid as a rock. Obviously in a live infrastructure these issues would never arise and we would always plan to maintain at least one physical DC.
I now have a stable, currently single node, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V laptop and have virtualised a few machines to provide Virtual Machine Manager and Configuration Manager. Next up is DPM 2010, so more on that shortly.
A last point worth making is that performance is very good. Taking the storage away from the laptop hard disk to a much higher performing iSCSI device makes a massive difference to the performance of the VMs. I have a virtualised Windows 7 machine running Office 2010 very happily within this environment which I just RDP into for email, presentations, etc.
