Over the past few days I have been reviewing e-learning content on Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA). I was amazed by the wealth of training content available on MVA for the Private Cloud.
So, what is MVA?
MVA is a fully cloud-based learning experience focusing on Microsoft Cloud Technologies. MVA provides its users with a virtual university experience: the student can select a track and study the material and then do the self-assessment. Students on MVA can get access to all the information, statistics and advancements of their training career, allowing them to maintain a long-term relationship with Microsoft. Learning through MVA is free of charge, and you can study the contents at any time and at your own pace.
Configuring and Deploying Microsoft’s Private Cloud
After completing this private cloud specialization, you will have an understanding of Microsoft’s vision for cloud computing, from the business perspective to the technical level. The 8 modules are divided into four core courses covering:
1. Private Cloud: Infrastructure Management
Module 1: Configure and Deploy Private Cloud Infrastructure
Module 2: Monitor and Operate Private Cloud Infrastructure
2. Private Cloud: Infrastructure Components
Module 1: Configure and Deploy Infrastructure Components
Module 2: Monitor and Operate Infrastructure Components
3. Private Cloud: Service Delivery and Automation
Module 1:; Configure and Deploy Service Delivery & Automation
Module 2: Monitor and Operate Service Delivery & Automation
During the 8 modules of this specialization, you will be introduced to all the elements of building the Microsoft private cloud. You’ll learn how to optimize and deploy the private cloud starting at the infrastructure layer. You’ll also be introduced to advanced virtualization management features and the concept and implementation of the System Center’s private cloud application service model.
After completing all of the modules you will have an understanding of:
How using Microsoft System Center 2012 can help you build, deploy and manage a private cloud infrastructure.
How System Center 2012 incorporates tools to deploy, update, and manage applications within your private cloud.
System Center 2012’s new abilities to deploy, update, and manage applications within your private cloud.
How using new components of System Center 2012, specifically the Orchestrator and Service Manager components, enable you to deploy, update, and manage service offerings within your private cloud.
How applications are deployed and managed in the Microsoft private cloud.
How to use new capabilities in System Center 2012 to deploy your applications as services.
I highly recommend this training for all IT Pros as an excellent means of updating your skills and build your readiness to face new challenges as cloud computing evolves.
Windows Server 8 beta has caught the world by storm with the cutting-edge hypervisor that’s built into it.
Here is a cool poster for any IT Pro/SysAdmin/Architect to proudly have hanging in the corridor or in their office that shows off these new technologies, how they integrate and how they work.
This poster provides a visual reference for understanding key Hyper-V technologies in Windows Server “8” Beta. This new Hyper-V poster focuses on Hyper-V Replica, networking, virtual machine mobility (live migration), storage, failover clustering and scalability.
Listen to technology leaders from Target, a US retailing company with over 1750 stores throughout the country, on how Microsoft Virtualization and Management technologies help them remotely manage IT environments in each store, save millions of dollars in operating cost, and provide a delightful customer experience.
"It reduces our operating expense by millions of dollars a year through power savings, break/fix maintenance savings, and avoided capital refresh." – Brad Thompson, Director – Infrastructure Engineering, Target
Target runs over 15,000 virtual machines on over 3600 Hyper-V hosts.
IDC has predicted that 2012 will be VMware’s last year as ‘King of the Hill’.
With Windows Server 8, Hyper-V beats VMware not only in pricing but also in features. Even if VMware brought down pricing, Hyper-V still has features that VMware doesn’t.
And do not forget that System Center (the current version as well as 2012) has more mature and complete management features than VMware ever had, and the key to meaningful virtualization or realizing a private cloud lies in robust management tools.
MVP Aidan Finn wrote on his blog with a touch of humor:
And don’t forget that System Center (current and future) smack VMware’s “management” products around like a one-legged little person in a heavyweight MMA fight.
VMware fanboys and trolls please save yourselves the trouble, comments on this blog are moderated.
“Virtualization without management is more dangerous than not using virtualization in the first place.” – Tom Bittman, Gartner VP & Analyst
So you realized that you need to virtualize. The idea of being able to run multiple workloads on a smaller number of boxes sounded interesting to you. You saw how virtualization can save you many a buck in hardware maintenance, energy, cooling, rack space, and were fascinated by it.
Server consolidation – now that’s a term you liked to hear. Sounds like its going to simplify things up, doesn’t it? The idea of putting more eggs in one basket. Yes, it reduces cost, but how are you going to ensure that these baskets are strong enough to hold your eggs and that they wont break under pressure?
So you let the ‘Hypervisor wars’ begin – Hyper-V, VMware, you decided and chose your weapon. “What next?” you say. Well, the battle has not yet begun. Today, the hypervisor is more like a commodity, whatever you choose, it will let you virtualize – the art and science of creating a thin layer that abstracts operating system environments from the underlying hardware.
Some hypervisors provide more features than the others. The choice is simple. What matters to you is (1) which of these hypervisor features do you really need for your business, and (2) is the feature that you get worth the cost and complexity that particular hypervisor brings with it?
I am of the view that any technology you implement should contribute to the business of your organization. If it does not support the business, then that technology is useless to your organization. If you, for example, chose VMware to virtualize your (otherwise primarily Microsoft) datacenter just because it offers ‘memory overcommit’, a feature which you will probably never use in the first place, (because is not recommended for production), then you know exactly what I’m talking about.
You could go online and spend hours scouring pages and pages of information comparing hypervisors from Microsoft and VMware, but what you’re looking at is basically a piece of code between 1.7 and 3.6 GB in size.
So what does really matter?
What really matters is Management. The ability to manage and monitor every service you offer in your datacenter, end-to-end, physical or virtual. What your users see is not the hypervisor, it is way beyond that – the users see the service that you’re offering. And a robust management tool helps you ensure that services you offer are healthy so that you meet your SLA.
Imagine being able to have to look at one single monitoring dashboard that will proactively alert you of problems on hardware, operating system environments, virtualization layers, apps running on physical servers, and apps running on virtual servers. Imagine being able to look at one interface to discover that your hardware is overheating, or your server power supply is not redundant, and then look at the same interface to discover there is a shortage of disk space on your physical host server or if an application service is stopped. Imagine looking at the very same interface to know that the outbound mail queue on your Exchange Server machine that you virtualized on Hyper-V (or VMware) is building up faster than it should, or discovering that a service on one of your Linux servers virtualized on Hyper-V is failing.
That, my friends, is what I call robust end-to-end management. Microsoft System Center provides you just that. Don’t virtualize without it.
Let’s take one step forward. Let’s say you’re a local bank and you have virtualized your web servers on Hyper-V. You’ve deployed System Center components for managing your gear. Let’s say that you get most hits on your website during the day. During your “peak” operating hours you need 3 machines in a load balancing configuration to handle the load. During “off peak” hours you barely have any traffic, so all you need is one server. In the absence of virtualization or management, you would still leave 3 physical machines running 24/7 to handle the load.
But when you have virtualization with System Center, things are different. System Center Operations Manager is monitoring your servers (physical and virtual) 24/7. You can configure System Center to raise an alert when the number of transactions on your application running on IIS on the first server exceeds a threshold ‘x’, and trigger an event that results in automatically starting the 2nd virtualized web server, and the third, and so on as the number of transactions increase. Similarly, when the number of transactions drop, the additional servers can be powered off automatically, freeing up processor, memory and other resources on the host machine, which can potentially be used by other services that require additional servers to be powered up during ‘off peak’ hours. Hence, you are able to run more servers than the capacity of your Hyper-V host machine by dynamically provisioning and de-provisioning servers and efficiently utilizing your resources. Because your management tool can now see inside your virtual machines. What this means, basically, is that you get ‘more bang for the buck’.
And this is what I’d call a ‘Dynamic Datacenter’. And that’s where we’re taking you with System Center and virtualization. We’re not arguing over who’s got the smallest hypervisor; we’re giving you the much bigger picture and what really matters to you and your datacenter at large.
VMware’s vCenter, on the other hand, does not see “inside” the guest. It cannot monitor the number of connections/sec on your web service, or the length of your Exchange mail queue or the number of transactions on your database. It just sees your VM from a hypervisor perspective and does not know how the application on that VM is performing (or even if it is running). And that’s not sufficient from a service level perspective.
Even if you run VMware, System Center can still work together with it and manage your VMware environment – but of course this is an integration with vCenter. You still have an island of a management tool that you’re joining together with System Center. When it’s an all-Microsoft platform, you definitely have the Microsoft advantage. Everything’s integrated by default and everything works.
Thanks for reading and be sure to subscribe to this blog for more to come.
I thought I’d share this great video by Jim Harrison on considerations to make when planning to run Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) (or ISA Server, for that matter) on a virtualized environment.
In this video, he discusses:
Performance, security and management considerations
Why it’s not recommended to place TMG on the parent, and how to configure the parent partition
High Availability with TMG in a virtual environment
As of today, we have three Gold Certified partners based in Qatar, qualified and certified in the Server Virtualization competency within the Microsoft Partner Network.
1. Information & Communication Technology WLL
2. EBLA Consulting
3. Mannai Trading Co.
Information & Communication Technology WLL (ICT) is the first Microsoft partner in Qatar to complete the requirements to be certified on Server Virtualization solutions.
All partners above have completed the required training at the Partner Academy. Mannai Trading and EBLA Consulting have sent their consultants to the Dynamic Datacenter Workshop held earlier this year in Dubai. All of the above partners have the required experience in deploying advanced server virtualization scenarios with Microsoft technologies and have a number of notable customer references in Qatar.
At Microsoft, virtualization means helping IT departments maximize cost savings and improve business continuity. Our solutions address both physical and virtual infrastructure, and can be easily managed through a single console. Microsoft virtualization provides a completely virtualized infrastructure for your enterprise, from data center to desktop.
The Microsoft Partner Network recognizes qualified solution providers and helps them create new opportunities, increase demand, and achieve their business objectives. The network allows partners to leverage unique resources to help drive business innovation and form a trusted foundation for strategic decision making, increased agility, and long-term competitive advantage.
There are certain points to keep in mind while selecting hardware for a virtualized test lab environment, some of which I will enlist here.
Processor
This is one of the most important components to be taken into consideration:
The higher the clock speed, the better. Remember, the clock speed of the processor is the speed at which ALL your guest virtual machines are going to run. If all it takes to step up to the next clock speed level is a few dollars, it might really be worth it.
Similarly the more cores a processor has, the merrier it gets with Hyper-V. Consider a Quad core processor to a Duo Core processor
Make sure your processor supports hardware virtualization. Yes, there are still desktop processors available that do not natively support virtualization. For Intel processors, this is known as Intel VT (Virtualization Technology), for AMD, this is called AMD-V.
The processor must support x64 bit.
Intel eXecute Disable (XD) bit, or NX (No eXecute) bit on AMD processors.
If you want to check if a particular Intel processor model supports VT, 64-bit, or eXecute Disable (XD) bit, try the ProcessorFinder on Intel’s website.
Hardware-enforced DEP (Data Execution Prevention)
Processor cache: Again – the more, the merrier. The desktop processor I selected (Intel Q9650) has a 12 MB cache, 3 GHz clock speed and is Quad Core.
2. Motherboard & Memory
Make sure the motherboard and BIOS supports Virtualization. Check with the board manufacturer before you buy.
Make sure the motherboard can accept a large quantity of RAM. At the time of writing, desktop motherboards that support up to 16 GB RAM are available.
The more RAM you have, the better – for the simple reason that you can run more number of virtual machines simultaneously.
3. Storage
Hard drives should be fast. I use SATA 2.0
Get as much storage as possible, as the VHD files can get pretty big.
4. Networking
You might need an additional network card for testing advanced/firewall configurations
It goes without saying that you need proper cooling on your system chassis, a decent graphics card, a DVD-RW drive, and an LCD monitor that won’t strain your eyes too much.
Hope this helps you geeks out there in planning hardware purchases for your home lab . Post a comment below to discuss this topic.
For a list of Microsoft servers and products that are tested and supported in virtualized environments, see the Microsoft KB article 957006.
Be sure to bookmark this article, as the page is regularly revised as new products are supported. As of writing this post, the page is at Revision 10.0.
MVA is a fully cloud-based learning experience focusing on Microsoft Cloud Technologies. MVA provides its users with a virtual university experience: the student can select a track and study the material and then do the self-assessment. Students on MVA can get access to all the information, statistics and advancements of their training career, allowing them to maintain a long-term relationship with Microsoft. Learning through MVA is free of charge, and you can study the contents at any time and at your own pace.
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. Post a comment below to discuss this topic.