Archive for the ‘Windows Server 2008 R2’ Category
Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1–Hyper-V
Filed under: Hyper-V, Virtual Machine Manager, Windows Server 2008 R2 |
Leave a Comment 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.
DPM 2010 Beta 1
As I’m all Hyper-V R2 for my demo environment I figure I may as well have a look at DPM 2010 Beta 1 than deploy the excellent DPM 2007 SP1 (there’s no Hyper-V R2 support in the current version).
I’ve created a new Server 2008 R2 x64 VM and downloaded the DPM beta.
I have also created a new LUN on my excellent Qnap TS-119 called “Backup”.
The iSCSI initiator on the new DMP VM connects to this:
Disk administrator wants me to initialize the disk:
Now I’m ready to give this disk to DPM. I don’t need to format it, DPM will manage that.
DPM’s setup routine is very attractive!
Oops, I’m not logged on with domain credentials. Also the Single Instance Storage engine isn’t installed. DPM setup will handle this, but it’ll need a reboot.
I’ve been lazily using the built in Administrator account to date, Windows has a minor irritation of thinking you want to log on locally when you type in “Administrator” and switches the logon context as you type, consequently you have to enter DOMAIN\Administrator every time. Perhaps it’s best if I create a new account, this also gives me chance to try out Windows Server 2008 R2 “Active Directory Administrative Center”
I don’t do a lot of support, but I can see that this thing would be a boon for account management types. No more multiple-dialogue-tab hell, just everything in a nice neat expandable list. You can remove the sections that you don’t use and get everything relevant in a great, easy to use view:
What’s not to like, this is great. The search is really quick and doesn’t suffer from the terrible user interface horrors of AD U&C.
Anyway, back to the DPM install…
Logged on with my new domain credentials I’m good to go!
This being an R2 server I already have PowerShell and Installer 4.5, so the SIS goes in.
DPM comes with its own copy of SQL 2008, unlike the rest of the System Center Suite… Quite why this is I have no idea, but if you wish you can let it do its own thing with SQL… 
And we’re done.
I then pushed out an agent to a test SQL box from the Management node. On this server I’d created a dummy database with a single table. I added two dummy records to this table, then created a DPM Protection Group to protect this database.
One of the new features is illustrated above, I can now protect a SQL Instance (HYPERV-VMM above) the bonus being that whenever I add a new database it’s automatically protected.
I left this running for a while and now I can recover back to any point in time:
I delete some records from my demo database, pick a time from just before I did that and as if by magic, the data reappears…
With DPM I can elect to recover my data in a few different ways. One cool feature with SQL restore is I can take a SQL 2005 backup and recover to SQL 2008.
Having selected my recovery option I see a summary of the items to be recovered, then we’re done.
When this completes, the restore is complete. The DPM interface is very polished, I reckon it’s hard to get excited about backup, but there’s some really good stuff here and with the integration of online services (DPM to cloud backup) things get very interesting…
A Portable Highly Available Hyper-V and System Center Demo Environment – Shopping for kit…
Filed under: Hyper-V, System Center, Virtual Machine Manager, Windows Server 2008 R2 |
Leave a Comment 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!
