Qatar January 24, 2011 Venue: La Cigale Hotel, Doha

Kuwait February 1, 2011 Venue: JW Marriott, Kuwait City

“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
• Configuration changes for internet-facing hosts.

Also read Jim’s whitepaper on security considerations for virtualized ISA/TMG deployments.

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.

1. 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.
• Here is a list of Intel processors supporting VT.
• 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.

I read with interest a report on ZDNet this morning that the open source company Red Hat will initially offer its hypervisor management tools for Windows systems only.

According to the report, the company based its decision on the fact that Windows still leads as the operating system of choice for desktops.

A strange move this, especially from a company that usually takes the GPL (GNU Public license) route.

It is interesting to note that while Red Hat and VMware offer hypervisor management software only for their own respective hypervisors, Microsoft’s System Center suite offers hypervisor management for BOTH Hyper-V and VMware, physical machine management, virtual machine management, and application (workload) management – all integrated in a common platform – the System Center suite.

The Release Candidate (RC) for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 is now available for download on Microsoft Connect.

The major new features included with SCVMM 2008 R2 are:

• Storage Migration: Enables migration of a VM’s storage while VM is running both within same host (with no downtime) and across other hosts (with minimum downtime).
• Live Migration Queuing: By default Windows Server 2008 R2 can do only one Live Migration at a time. SCVMM 2008 R2 allows queuing of simultaneous live migration requests and retrying later on.
• Rapid Provisioning: Allows administrators to use new SAN technologies to clone a LUN containing a VHD and present it to the host. Saves a lot of time, as the network copy (BITS) is not required.
• Host compatibility Checks: Deep compatibility tests for testing hardware compatibility are included, which allows testing to be done before attempting migration (and subsequently failing). Also includes features that will make the VM compatible with the new host before migration.
• Support for 3rd party Clustered File Systems (CFS): Support for third party clustered files systems similar to Microsoft’s Cluster Shared Volume (CSV). Example: Melo from Sanbolic
• Support for Veritas Volume Manager: SCVMM 2008 R2 now recognizes Veritas Volume Manager disks as cluster disk resources.

Happy virtualization!

January 27, 2009

When you connect to a Windows Server 2008 computer running Hyper-V from a Windows Vista client, the mouse input is not captured when you connect to a guest machine unless you install the Integration Services on the guest machine. You receive the following message:

Mouse not captured in Remote Desktop session.

It is however, possible to remotely manage Hyper-V from within a Windows Vista MMC snap-in upon installation of an optional update. To download the Hyper-V Remote Management Update, follow these links.

• Hyper-V Remote Management Update for Windows Vista
• Hyper-V Remote Management Update for Windows Vista x64

Upon installation, you will find a ‘Hyper-V Manager’ icon in the Administrative Tools folder on your Start Menu.

The IT Evolution 08 event was held today at the Corniche Sheraton, Abu Dhabi. There were several informative sessions on Microsoft Virtualization technologies in the IT Pro track such as Hyper-V and Application Virtualization with SoftGrid/MDOP. The developer track included presentations on SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio .NET 2008 and Silverlight.

Partner presence included HP, Dell and Citrix. Yusuf Bismilla, Anton Delsink, Shahid Gaglani, and Amr El Garhy of Microsoft presented various topics.

Attendees were also given a chance to have their picture taken with the gaming character Master Chief from the Halo 3 game from Microsoft Game Studios.

 
Me with Master Chief of Halo 3 (left)