It is with great relief that I can finally tell you all the real reason things have been so quiet around here of late, and why you haven't seen much action on the @vinternals Twitter account either - I've been buried in documentation and labs in preparation for my new role, which I am starting today!
Many of the big vendors, especially EMC, have been snapping up people from the blogging community over the past year or so, and I always said to myself that I wouldn't tie myself to a single vendor but sometimes opportunities come along that are just too good to pass up. And earlier this year, one of those opportunities came my way, and I grabbed it with both hands. So starting today, I will be the new Cloud Technical Evangelist (EMEA) for... Microsoft!
Yes I know it's hard to believe, but Hyper-V has been making great advancements over the past few years, and when you dig deeper into the technology it clearly is superior - Microsoft's main problem has been a complete lack of evangelists on the level of Epping, Denneman, Gray or Laverick and so the level of technical detail in the public domain has been admittedly a little light. I mean try searching for information about the Windows scheduler on the level of something like this from Denneman - it's just not there. The funny thing is, as I was not an employee until today I too didn't have access to any internal Microsoft documentation, but I just _know_ that the deep technical information is there somewhere, to finally prove that Microsoft products absolutely kick the shit out of anything VMware could ever produce. My job will be primarily to spread that technical information, and show how innovative features like Dynamic Memory, Live Migration,... well I'm sure there are others, oh yeh just Cloud in general like I have seen on all those TV ads... well my job is to really show them off to the world and win customers over from VMware platforms. I mean no one is really happy paying the VMware tax, are they! Consolidating tax down to a single company makes great business sense, and in any case Hyper-V is !!!
So I hope you all continue to read my blog and follow me on Twitter, these are going to be interesting times!
UPDATE: I've been wanting to do this April Fools post for years, finally I remembered :). Hope you all got a laugh!
Showing posts with label Microsoft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Microsoft. Show all posts
Friday, 1 April 2011
Sunday, 11 January 2009
Boot Windows 7 From VHD!
In the virtualisation space, one of the often demo'ed features of the upcoming Windows 7 / 2008 R2 is the ability to boot directly from VHD. Microsoft have effectively created a "loopback HBA", which the bootloader can use to address VHD's just like a regular disk. This is pretty cool for a whole host of reasons, and easy to achieve.
1. If you're going to install another Windows 7, first set the boot menu description of your current installation with bcdedit /set {current} description "Windows 7 HDD"
2. Now create a new VHD. You can do this via the GUI in disk management, or via the CLI with diskpart. Since you're gonna need diskpart for the install, might as well use that now. I'm sure you can figure out what I'm doing with diskpart create vdisk file=d:\vhd\windows7.vhd type=fixed maximum=20000
3. Installation time. Drop in your Windows 7 installation media, reboot and when u get to the first screen prompt of the installation hit Shift+F10 to bring up a command window. Run diskpart, then enter select vdisk file=d:\vhd\windows7.vhd, then enter attach vdisk, then exit diskpart. Note that if you have multiple physical disks, Windows PE may not have honoured your drive letter assignments. Enter list vol from within diskpart to see what it's done if you run into any trouble.
4. Continue the installation process, and when you get to the choice of disks to install onto, you should see your VHD sitting in the list of available options just like a regular disk.
5. Select the VHD and go read something while the install finishes. You're done!
When the machine reboots, you'll notice that the VHD boot menu option is now the default. This can be easily changed using bcdedit from within either of the Windows environments you have booted into.
Next thing I'll probably try is to see just how much I can cut down the original install so I can use VHD's for everything, kind of like a semi-client hypervisor. Sounds like a perfect job for Server Core... hopefully it's functional enough to be able to do this, I can't imagine why it wouldn't be.
UPDATE Just been messing around with server core in a VM, looks like all systems are go. Using the same commands as above I could create / attach / format a VHD. Server core looks _great_ in 2008 R2. Installing PowerShell and launching it nearly brought a tear to my eye... finally server core has arrived.
UPDATE 2 Reader Patrick S has just pinged me to let me know that this technique also allows for installation of Windows XP / Server 2003 as well! I assume you'd need to use the Windows 7 PE environment or something... but he's done it, so there's a way. Nice one Patrick, thanks for the heads up!
1. If you're going to install another Windows 7, first set the boot menu description of your current installation with bcdedit /set {current} description "Windows 7 HDD"
2. Now create a new VHD. You can do this via the GUI in disk management, or via the CLI with diskpart. Since you're gonna need diskpart for the install, might as well use that now. I'm sure you can figure out what I'm doing with diskpart create vdisk file=d:\vhd\windows7.vhd type=fixed maximum=20000
3. Installation time. Drop in your Windows 7 installation media, reboot and when u get to the first screen prompt of the installation hit Shift+F10 to bring up a command window. Run diskpart, then enter select vdisk file=d:\vhd\windows7.vhd, then enter attach vdisk, then exit diskpart. Note that if you have multiple physical disks, Windows PE may not have honoured your drive letter assignments. Enter list vol from within diskpart to see what it's done if you run into any trouble.
4. Continue the installation process, and when you get to the choice of disks to install onto, you should see your VHD sitting in the list of available options just like a regular disk.
5. Select the VHD and go read something while the install finishes. You're done!
When the machine reboots, you'll notice that the VHD boot menu option is now the default. This can be easily changed using bcdedit from within either of the Windows environments you have booted into.
Next thing I'll probably try is to see just how much I can cut down the original install so I can use VHD's for everything, kind of like a semi-client hypervisor. Sounds like a perfect job for Server Core... hopefully it's functional enough to be able to do this, I can't imagine why it wouldn't be.
UPDATE Just been messing around with server core in a VM, looks like all systems are go. Using the same commands as above I could create / attach / format a VHD. Server core looks _great_ in 2008 R2. Installing PowerShell and launching it nearly brought a tear to my eye... finally server core has arrived.
UPDATE 2 Reader Patrick S has just pinged me to let me know that this technique also allows for installation of Windows XP / Server 2003 as well! I assume you'd need to use the Windows 7 PE environment or something... but he's done it, so there's a way. Nice one Patrick, thanks for the heads up!
Tuesday, 21 October 2008
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 RTM's!
You read it here first... well, second besides the actual announcement.
I'll definitely be checking it out soon as it's available for end users!
Update: The eval is available for download already!
I'll definitely be checking it out soon as it's available for end users!
Update: The eval is available for download already!
Wednesday, 24 September 2008
Hyper-V Server - Microsoft turns platform arse-about
After a combination of holidays and letting the VMworld blog storm pass, vinternals is back!
For those who may not understand the phrase "arse-about", it means backwards. Which is exactly what Microsoft have done with the upcoming release of Hyper-V Server. The marketing around this product seems to have been a bit lost, so let's recap exactly what this product is (and is not)
- Hyper-V Server is NOT running Windows Server Core 2008 in the parent partition
- Hyper-V Server is aimed at small / dev environments, not enterprises
- Hyper-V Server is running little more than the Windows Server driver model and the virtualisation stack in the parent partition
- Hyper-V Server has the same underlying hypervisor and virtual bus architecture as the Hyper-V found in full-blown Windows Server 2008
So why have Microsoft got the platform ass-about (US English :-)? Because their own best practice recommends keeping the parent partition as lean as possible from an application perspective. So why the hell aren't they keeping the parent partition as lean as possible from an OS perspective? Windows Driver model + virtualisation stack - that's what I want in an ENTERPRISE Microsoft virtualisation platform! I don't want to be running something in the parent partition that is subject to patches like this one! But instead Hyper-V Server is being positioned as the red haired step child of the Microsoft virtualisation offerings.
I'll still take a look at Hyper-V Server when it comes out... there are some fundamental infrastructure design differences that may not be so obvious to those of us who have been designing VMware infrastructures for a while, that may still be applicable to Hyper-V Server... sounds like a good topic for SAAAP :-)
For those who may not understand the phrase "arse-about", it means backwards. Which is exactly what Microsoft have done with the upcoming release of Hyper-V Server. The marketing around this product seems to have been a bit lost, so let's recap exactly what this product is (and is not)
- Hyper-V Server is NOT running Windows Server Core 2008 in the parent partition
- Hyper-V Server is aimed at small / dev environments, not enterprises
- Hyper-V Server is running little more than the Windows Server driver model and the virtualisation stack in the parent partition
- Hyper-V Server has the same underlying hypervisor and virtual bus architecture as the Hyper-V found in full-blown Windows Server 2008
So why have Microsoft got the platform ass-about (US English :-)? Because their own best practice recommends keeping the parent partition as lean as possible from an application perspective. So why the hell aren't they keeping the parent partition as lean as possible from an OS perspective? Windows Driver model + virtualisation stack - that's what I want in an ENTERPRISE Microsoft virtualisation platform! I don't want to be running something in the parent partition that is subject to patches like this one! But instead Hyper-V Server is being positioned as the red haired step child of the Microsoft virtualisation offerings.
I'll still take a look at Hyper-V Server when it comes out... there are some fundamental infrastructure design differences that may not be so obvious to those of us who have been designing VMware infrastructures for a while, that may still be applicable to Hyper-V Server... sounds like a good topic for SAAAP :-)
Sunday, 29 June 2008
Hyper-V on Every Box in the Enterprise
Yes, it's more Sunday evening than afternoon but I'm gonna squeeze this one in under the guise of another installment of Sunday Afternoon Architecture And Philosophy.
With the release of Hyper-V 1.0, I got to thinking... why wouldn't you put it on every x64 physical box in the enterprise? Theoretically, the parent partition should incur no virtualisation overhead - it has physical hardware access and doesn't need to worry about managing VM's if it's running on it's own. It doesn't cost anything more for software assurance customers, and let's face it - if you're running a physical box today (and according to IDC and the like, 80-90% of servers are still physical) then almost all the reasons for choosing ESX over Hyper-V simply don't apply as you don't get any of those features with physical boxes anyway. So if that phsyical box is running at 5% resource utilisation and the owner has a need for another environment (be it for dev, UAT, tiering an app, whatever), if we have Hyper-V installed already then we have the potential to exceed expectation by quickly provisioning a box for them that doesn't require the (usually) lengthy process of ordering and racking. If we think of virtualisation purely in terms of maximising hardware utilisation, then as far as I'm concerned there's no argument to be had - I'd rather have one less physical box by running it on Hyper-V than not having Hyper-V at all.
Of course we all know there are so many other benefits to be had by virtualising on VI3, but as I said if only 10% of boxes are virtual currently then we're missing something. Maybe your business is still uncomfortable with virtualisation. Maybe your chargeback model is so close to the cost of physical boxes that your business doesn't care to virtualise (naively ignoring the cost of rack space, power, cooling and having to build a new datacenter when you run out of those). I'm sure there are a myriad of reasons, and even more certain that none of them are technical. But if we can leverage Hyper-V by putting it on every box and giving our business customers a taste of virtualisation, then maybe we can effect a change in attitude. And maybe next time they go to buy that physical box, they'll ask around as to how that virtual box has been running and reconsider. We've tried the 'boil the ocean' approach with virtualisation over the past few years, and it clearly hasn't worked if only 10% of servers are virtual. It's time for baby steps.
So to wrap it up, let me be absolutely clear - I'm not suggesting we start migrating our virtual infrastructures to Hyper-V now or in the forseeable future. What I am suggesting is that we don't write off Hyper-V by comparing it with VI3 and closing the door on it immediately. A slightly unconventional use case it may be, but it could be the most valuable tool we have had so far in assisting with the virtualisation of that other 80% of the enterprise. And I certainly hope that VMware will imminently release an update to Converter to provide full support for V2V from Hyper-V ;-)
With the release of Hyper-V 1.0, I got to thinking... why wouldn't you put it on every x64 physical box in the enterprise? Theoretically, the parent partition should incur no virtualisation overhead - it has physical hardware access and doesn't need to worry about managing VM's if it's running on it's own. It doesn't cost anything more for software assurance customers, and let's face it - if you're running a physical box today (and according to IDC and the like, 80-90% of servers are still physical) then almost all the reasons for choosing ESX over Hyper-V simply don't apply as you don't get any of those features with physical boxes anyway. So if that phsyical box is running at 5% resource utilisation and the owner has a need for another environment (be it for dev, UAT, tiering an app, whatever), if we have Hyper-V installed already then we have the potential to exceed expectation by quickly provisioning a box for them that doesn't require the (usually) lengthy process of ordering and racking. If we think of virtualisation purely in terms of maximising hardware utilisation, then as far as I'm concerned there's no argument to be had - I'd rather have one less physical box by running it on Hyper-V than not having Hyper-V at all.
Of course we all know there are so many other benefits to be had by virtualising on VI3, but as I said if only 10% of boxes are virtual currently then we're missing something. Maybe your business is still uncomfortable with virtualisation. Maybe your chargeback model is so close to the cost of physical boxes that your business doesn't care to virtualise (naively ignoring the cost of rack space, power, cooling and having to build a new datacenter when you run out of those). I'm sure there are a myriad of reasons, and even more certain that none of them are technical. But if we can leverage Hyper-V by putting it on every box and giving our business customers a taste of virtualisation, then maybe we can effect a change in attitude. And maybe next time they go to buy that physical box, they'll ask around as to how that virtual box has been running and reconsider. We've tried the 'boil the ocean' approach with virtualisation over the past few years, and it clearly hasn't worked if only 10% of servers are virtual. It's time for baby steps.
So to wrap it up, let me be absolutely clear - I'm not suggesting we start migrating our virtual infrastructures to Hyper-V now or in the forseeable future. What I am suggesting is that we don't write off Hyper-V by comparing it with VI3 and closing the door on it immediately. A slightly unconventional use case it may be, but it could be the most valuable tool we have had so far in assisting with the virtualisation of that other 80% of the enterprise. And I certainly hope that VMware will imminently release an update to Converter to provide full support for V2V from Hyper-V ;-)
Thursday, 26 June 2008
Hyper-V 1.0 released - let the Hyper-bole begin!
Well it's all over the web, and I generally try not to report on stuff that everyone else does but I'm making an exception this time... more so I can remember the date than anything else ;-)
Download here now!
Download here now!
Tuesday, 15 April 2008
Clustering Guests - no longer possible with Windows Server 2008?
It seems Microsoft have ditched the ability to use a parallel SCSI device as a shared disk resource in Windows Server 2008 failover clusters, which now require a SAS, FC or iSCSI LUN for the job.
I have yet to work somewhere that clustered a lot of VMs, but potentially this and the 'one physical node / one virtual node' are not possible anymore with 2008 unless you have iSCSI available. Coincidentally perhaps, I have also yet to work somewhere with a lot of iSCSI deployed :-)
I haven't tried it in ESX (yet) but the Windows Server 2008 cluster validation wizard fails with a Workstation 6 based cluster. If anyone else out there knows / tests it out before me, let me know!
UPDATE: As expected, it doesn't work on ESX either. Wonder if it will work on Hyper-V...
I have yet to work somewhere that clustered a lot of VMs, but potentially this and the 'one physical node / one virtual node' are not possible anymore with 2008 unless you have iSCSI available. Coincidentally perhaps, I have also yet to work somewhere with a lot of iSCSI deployed :-)
I haven't tried it in ESX (yet) but the Windows Server 2008 cluster validation wizard fails with a Workstation 6 based cluster. If anyone else out there knows / tests it out before me, let me know!
UPDATE: As expected, it doesn't work on ESX either. Wonder if it will work on Hyper-V...
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