Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1–Hyper-V
The Orinoko Datacentre is running low on RAM. More RAM is the obvious answer, but the nodes we’re running on are looking a little weedy now, so we may be better off just replacing the whole thing, but in the meantime how to squeeze a little more of a return from our investment?
The answer is Server 2008 R2 SP1. The reason this is the answer is that our main limiting factor is RAM. We do, admittedly, also have some issues with storage performance, disk queue lengths are substantially longer than I would like for the hosts and our ailing lab NAS doesn’t support jumbo frames, poor thing. But, RAM availability is our main issue.
As you’re all doubtless aware, SP1 (which is a Release Candidate at the moment) has an excellent new feature “Dynamic Memory”. Briefly, in case you’ve been living in a cave, Dynamic Memory allows a VM to request and release memory to the host as load changes. This potentially allows you to over-commit a host, something we could do with at the moment. For Orinoko this is a likely good fit as we run more virtual desktop OSEs than server OSEs on account of our application packaging function. Our workstations need to have a minimum 1GB allocated, but many are unused for a length of time and many more could likely run with between 512 and 768MB RAM freeing up a chunk for allocation elsewhere.
So, deep breath, although we use Office 365 for our critical business systems, some of this stuff is live…
Installing SP1
I shut down as many VMs as I can and put Node1 into maintenance mode in VMM. This evacuates the rest of the running load onto node 2, then:
Although it says it may take an hour or more, it only takes 45 minutes in this instance.
Nail-biting stuff!
Once it reboots we get a happy message:
Straight into Hyper-V Manager to see the Dynamic Memory bits on one of our App-V Sequencing machines:
Lovely.
Now I take Node 1 out of maintenance mode (MM). I put node 2 into MM, which evacuates the running loads over to the newly service packed node 1. Install SP1 to Node 2 and I’m nearly done.
Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1 (RC1)
We use Virtual Machine Manager to handle our datacentre for Live Migration, Library services and for PRO integration with OpsMgr. VMM 2008 R2 needs a Service Pack to expose the new memory gubbins:
Gotchas?
Only little things. We are running both FCS and FEP (Forefront Client Security and the newer Forefront Endpoint Protection) the older version, FCS, isn’t supported:
So must be replaced with the new version. Apart from that, it all went very smoothly.
