Virtualization Team

Infoworld has published a quite interesting comparison between Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, & VMware at  Virtualization shoot-out: Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware. Its quite detailed and the methodologies and comparison basis was documented clearly which make it worth going through.

Although I agree with the comparison to a great degree I still had few comments to post on it. First of all let look at the great news the article has brought:

- VMware are the leaders when it comes to Advanced/Creative features.

As our company is a partner of VMware, Citrix, & Microsoft. Yop, you heard it all of them at one shop. I get to visit many customers & try to help them find the best virtualization product for their enviornment. Lately, I have noticed a tendancy of many customers saying, “I will go Hyper-V as Microsoft know how to virtualize their products better than others.” It seems the Microsoft local partners have found a good stereo type to use that “the solution for every customer virtualization need is a hammer.”

I decided to do some study & find out if Microsoft really support their products in Virtualization better than others & below some of the findings that make me believe the opposite.

I have been hearing many IT Professionals on many forums on the web complaining that their DHCP Server which is setup at the parent partition of their MS Windows 2008 Hyper-V Server is not working. Further more many of them has reported an error similar to the below one in their error logs:

1041:
The DHCP service is not servicing any DHCPv4 clients because none of the
active network interfaces have statically configured IPv4 addresses, or
there are no active interfaces.

The first thing I would like to bring to these administrators attention & to everyone else trying to setup any services or application in the parent partition of Hyper-V to consider avoiding that if possible at all cost. As its not recommended and almost not supported to use the parent partition for serving roles & services beside the Hyper-V role.

This article title say “Sony VAIO laptops disabled Intel VT“, but what should that mean to you. It should mean the world to a lot of us. It should mean think twice trice before you buy a Sony VAIO laptop, due to the amount of limitation that come with disabling Intel VT. Ok, let’s see some of the most obvious limitation:

1- Sony VAIO Laptops will not support Windows 7 XP mode, which require enabling hardware Virtualization:

Windows 7 will be offering a great feature which is called XP mode, which will allow you to run most of XP applications on Windows 7 without having to worry about application compatibility with Windows 7. As Windows 7 XP mode requires Hardware Virtualization which Sony has decided to disable on their laptops. This means if you are upgrading to windows 7 then Sony VAIO laptop might not be for you.

In a very interesting article by Jeffrey Schawartz in Readmondmag.com, has published an interesting news about Microsoft’s decision – “unthinkable” until a few days ago – MS “open” more than 20,000 lines of code to the Linux community under the license GPLv2 (General Public License version 2).

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The code, published on Monday, includes three device drivers that will allow any business enterprise or any distribution of Linux community to use this device in a virtual machine within the stack virtualization of Microsoft Hyper-V battery.

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This would be the first time Microsoft opened its code to the Linux community, free of any licensing or patent restrictions under the GPLv2 license.

Citrix Systems, Inc. has just made available to the general public, Citrix Essentials for HyperV – Express Edition version, for free.

The new version of Express Edition is available for immediate download and includes Citrix StorageLink technology. With StorageLink, Windows administrators can dramatically simplify storage management.

The Express Edition version of Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V is designed specifically for IT professionals in Windows environments that are in the early stages of adoption of Hyper-V.

Express Edition Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V supports up to two servers and a Hyper-V cabin storage.

This version can be upgraded easily to the Enterprise version ($ 1500) or Platinum ($ 3000) which include dynamic server provisioning and management through automated workflow orchestration.

I have just came across a video of Microsoft trying to bust VMware top Myths, but what is funny to me it seems Microsoft had just busted them selfes in the video than anything else. The link to the video is below:

http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/details/f8c3314f-c82d-4f8d-8b19-6a59733670f8

I have seen Gabe reply on his blog at his Gabes virtualization Blog which seems to be a great busting to this video. Below is what Gabe is saying on his blog or please read it directly on Gabe blog at http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/?p=445. Please give credit to Gabes & read this on his blog .

============== Directly from Gabes Virtualization Blog ===========

This video is just what the title said, MS Hyper-V Crashes under heavy load. Watch out what a mess you are planning to go into!!!!!

I expect to see too many comments on this one, don’t get me disappointed .

In this series of posts, I will explain how to build a Windows Server 2008 cluster with Server Core and Hyper-V. There will be three posts as linked to below. Each post will be published as it get ready. Each post will have step-by-step snapshots. If it happens a certain image thumbnail is not good enough for you, then click on the snapshot to see a larger image.

1st Part: Hyper-V & Server Cluster – Server preparation

2nd Part: Hyper-V & Server Cluster – ISCSI Storage preparation & Configuration

3rd Part: Hyper-V & Server Cluster – Creating Windows Server Core 2008 & Hyper-V Cluster (You are here)

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In this series of posts, I will explain how to build a Windows Server 2008 cluster with Server Core and Hyper-V. There will be three posts as linked to below. Each post will be published as it get ready. Each post will have step-by-step snapshots. If it happens a certain image thumbnail is not good enough for you, then click on the snapshot to see a larger image.

1st Part: Hyper-V & Server Cluster – Server preparation

2nd Part: Hyper-V & Server Cluster – ISCSI Storage preparation & Configuration (You are here)

3rd Part: Hyper-V & Server Cluster – Creating Windows Server Core 2008 & Hyper-V Cluster

.

In this series of posts, I will explain how to build a Windows Server 2008 cluster with Server Core and Hyper-V. There will be three posts as linked to below. Each post will be published as it get ready. Each post will have step-by-step snapshots. If it happens a certain image thumbnail is not good enough for you, then click on the snapshot to see a larger image.

1st Part: Hyper-V & Server Cluster – Server preparation (You are here)

2nd Part: Hyper-V & Server Cluster – ISCSI Storage preparation & Configuration

3rd Part: Hyper-V & Server Cluster – Creating Windows Server Core 2008 & Hyper-V Cluster

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One of the worst documented area in Virtualization, most confusing, and most troubling to Virtualization newbies is networking in a Virtualized environment. Although network settings in a virtualized environment is quite simple it requires a good understanding of few concepts and terms discussed into this post.

While virtualization architectures and how the virtualization stack makes use of the network resources of the host & host teaming are different in Virtual Server and Hyper-V, the concepts are similar for Virtual Networks.

As we find out more about Windows Server Virtualization, it is only natural to start having doubts about its features. One of the most famous is Live/Quick Migration.

I would therefore like to spend some time clarifying everything I can about this subject.

First of all, Quick and Live Migration are not the same thing. They are not synonymous or interchangeable terms. Quick Migration is completely different from Live Migration.

The WSV RTM will have Quick Migration available right away while Live Migration (which is the equivalent of VMware VMotion) will be ready in an update a few months after WSV RTM.

Drivers and Synthetic Hardware

What is Synthetic Hardware?

How can I tell if the hardware in my virtual machine is emulated or synthetic?
An easy way is to look at the hardware administration console: emulated hardware appears with the name of the hardware manufacturer, while synthetic hardware appears with names like “Microsoft VMBus”.

Virtual networks

How do I set up virtual networks?

When you’re making a recovery plan and back-up of your virtual environment, you should take into consideration the various factors that may interfere with your back-up such as: the state of the virtual machine at the time you made the back-up (system state, shut down, running) and the type of storage you use for these back-ups.

The integration of the support service with the Volume Shadow Copy service of Hyper-V allows you to make a back-up of both the virtual machine as well as the Hyper-V configuration. There are two basic methods you can use for this type of back-up:

1. Make a back-up copy from inside of the operating system of a virtual machine. This method is useful when you need to save data from a storage device that is not supported by Hyper-V VSS.