Virtualization Experts Series – Virtualization From A Single Pane of Glass – System Center VMM – An Overview

As our virtualization environments continue to grow with VMware, Hyper-V,  and Xen Servers we need to take a new look at the management capabilities we require to properly do the job of VM administration.  In order to achieve a single pane of glass across all of these Hypervisors today we take a look at System Center Virtual Machine Manager.  With the release of System Center 2012 SP1 several new capabilities and features have been opened up, so let’s dig in.

A quick list of the new enhancements in System Center VMM:

  • Manage bigger clusters (Up to 64 Nodes versus the 16 Nodes in Previous Version)
  • Manage bigger hosts via Server 2012 (320 Cores and 4TB of Memory)
  • Administer larger VMs (64 vCPU, 1 TB Ram)
  • Create and Manage Isolated Tenant Networks Read more

Virtualization Experts Series – Dude where’s my VHDs? – PowerShell Commands For Locating VHDs

Keith Mayer tackles the challenge of locating VHDs, especially good for those who inherit virtual environments from previous admins, or just for a quick scan to see what all is out on the storage.  This post is complete with PowerShell cmdlets and scripts for making the job that much easier!

http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithmayer/archive/2013/03/11/dude-where-s-my-vhds-more-powershell-tricks-with-hyper-v.aspx

Virtualization Experts Series – High Availability – 4 Parts

I’ve been out on the road delivering events and writing my first Windows 8 app, so today I am catching up on the blog series underway with our team.  Here are the articles from last week concerning high availability:

Brian Lewis started off last week with step by step instructions for high availability in Hyper-V:

http://mythoughtsonit.com/2013/03/step-by-step-high-availability-live-migration-part-12-of-20/

Matthew Hester continued the theme with a focus on hosts and clusters:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/matthewms/archive/2013/03/20/20-days-of-server-virtualization-your-hyper-v-hosts-and-clustering-an-availability-story-part-13-of-20.aspx

Keith Mayer gives step by step details for guest clustering:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithmayer/archive/2013/03/21/virtual-machine-guest-clustering-with-windows-server-2012-become-a-virtualization-expert-in-20-days-part-14-of-20.aspx

And Yung Chou provided step by step video instructions for setting up Hyper-V replica:

http://aka.ms/ReplicaBroker

Lots of great reading and watching folks, enjoy!

Virtualization Experts Series – Part 8 – VM Live Storage Migration

Virtualization Experts Series continues with Live Storage Migration explained by Brian Lewis.  This step by step article shows the how, why, and what of moving virtual machine disks from one physical location to another, and the Powershell command is thrown in as well for you scripters out there.  Take a look:

http://mythoughtsonit.com/2013/03/step-by-step-storage-live-migration-part-8-of-20/

Virtualization Experts Series – Virtual Networking in Hyper-V

Our blog series on virtualization has gotten off to a good start.  For today’s article we discuss network virtualization in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.  For the basics, virtual machines need to be presented with a network port in order to gain access to the physical network.  Since the host has a small number of physical network adapters the hypervisor(Hyper-V) needs to split up the network traffic on to virtual network switches.  These virtual switches contain virtual ports, and the virtual ports show up in each virtual machine for which they are assigned as a traditional network adapter.  The diagram below Read more

Virtualization Experts series – iSCSI Explained – With PowerShell – by Keith Mayer

Here’s a little snippet from the great article Keith Mayer just published in the series:

“In this article, we’ll walk through the process of connecting Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V Server 2012 to common iSCSI storage arrays.  Because most of my IT Pro friends are running Hyper-V either on Windows Server 2012 Server Core or Hyper-V Server 2012, both options without a local console GUI, I’ll be providing my examples below in PowerShell.   …   Now Let’s Get “Connected’ … After starting the MSiSCSI service, we can connect from our Hyper-V host to the iSCSI target on the storage array with the following PowerShell command line:

New-IscsiTargetPortal –TargetPortalAddress <IP_Address or FQDN of storage array>

$target = Get-IscsiTarget

Connect-IscsiTarget –NodeAddress $target.NodeAddress“  Read more here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithmayer/archive/2013/03/12/speaking-iscsi-with-windows-server-2012-and-hyper-v.aspx

Hyper-V “Datastores” – Wait we dont need no stinkin’ datastores!

Virtualization Experts Series – Part 4 arrives today.   I originally wrote this article in answer to many requests during my Pro Camp events, but felt it needed added to our series this month.

During my Pro Camp events I often get asked about Hyper-V “Datastores,” in that VMware administrators want to know how to access them, search through the contents, and move files around.   Since Hyper-V doesn’t really use the term “Datastores” I will often take a tangent at this point in the conversation to discuss the differences, as well as point out some of the similarities.

So for sake of this article I will use the term “Datastores” rather loosely.  Datastores hold not only the virtual disk files that a VM utilizes as virtual hard drives, but also the configuration file for the virtual machine itself(in VMware: the VMX file).  Sometimes the configuration files are held on different datastores than the virtual hard drives(in VMware: the VMDK files). So there are definitely occasions where the disk files and config file may not reside Read more