Windows Azure & System Center Roadshow

Next month I will travel around in Norway to demonstrate hybrid cloud scenarios with Windows Azure and System Center.

The cloud is for real, and this goes for both the private and the public cloud.

Combining these two gives us a hybrid approach where we can consume, leverage and gain benefits from both. System Center together with Windows Server are the essential ingredients in a private cloud deployment. When we add Windows Azure to the summary, we can utilize a bunch of features and capabilities from this major public cloud from Microsoft.

Management is key and System Center is able to span private, public and service provider clouds (with SPF) to give you a holistic view of the environments and their capabilities.

Why am I doing this?

Windows Azure, back in the days, was first launched as a Platform as a Service cloud only.

This changed dramatically last summer when Microsoft added Infrastructure as a Service capabilities to their public cloud. We can now deploy virtual machines, create virtual networks and have site-2-site VPN between on-premise and Azure. Only this has opened the door to a bunch of new scenarios in the Microsoft world. In addition, several offerings are in preview, and some of these are on the agenda for this roadshow.

I would like to highlight some of the key investments here and show how you and your customers can gain ROI and sleep better in the future.

In the end of the day, I would like you to remember some important things after joining these sessions:

1)      Windows Azure and System Center provides you with premium tools to simplify complex solutions.

2)      You can get started right away and it is fairly easy to understand, deploy and utilize.

3)      We, Lumagate, know what we are doing and are ready to help you with everything I’ll talk about.

I will cover the following topics:

·         Windows Azure Recovery Services

See how using Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Sp1 and Windows Azure make disaster recovery easy together, to secure your environments in a worst-case scenario.

·         Using Windows Azure in your offsite backup strategy

Windows Server 2012, System Center Data Protection Manager 2012 Sp1 and Windows Azure can ensure that you get the sleep you require every night. Instead of using dedicated hardware for offsite backup (long-term), we can now put Azure storage into our consideration when planning for secure backups.

·         Working with Virtual Machines using Windows Azure Portal and App Controller

Windows Server 2012, System Center App Controller 2012 Sp1 and Windows Azure let you expand your datacenter and deploy virtual machines to private, public and service provider clouds in an easy manner. See how to move things around, back and forth while having a simplified management experience for your self-service users.

To join us on this free community event, please register on the following link: http://lumagate.no/windows-azure-og-system-center-roadshow

-kn

Questions regarding Networking in VMM 2012 SP1

Once in a while, I get questions from my beloved readers of my blog.

Some of them may also be quite relevant to the rest of the community, and this is the case for this blog post. I received some questions about networking in VMM and can happily share the Q&A with you here:

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Environment:

I would like to implement the converged fabric method via SCVMM 2012 SP1.  Currently we do not have plans to use NVGRE,everything is using VLANs.
Our hosts have 2x10Gb and 4x1Gb physical NICs. For storage we use HBA's connected to EMC SAN.

Q1: Logical switches:
Is it a good idea to create two logical switches in SCVMM? One for datacenter(vNIC LM, vNIC Cluster, vNIC Mgmt) and one for VM Guests. Should I use the 2x10Gb for the VMGuests and the 4x1Gb for the datacenter traffic?  Will the 4x1 Gb be sufficient for datacenter traffic?

During the MMS 2013 session of Greg Cusanza there is only 1 logical switch used.

A1:

It depends on the physical adapters in most cases. If you have, let’s say 2x10GBe presented on your host, I would create one team (equal to one logical switch in VMM) and have the different traffic spread among virtual network adapters with corresponding QoS assigned to them.

But when you mix with NICs with different speed (1GBe) then you would not be too happy with the load balancing in that team. For this, you can safely create two logical switches with VMM and separate those NICs in those team, and assign the preferred traffic to each team. To decide which team and adapters you should use to each traffic, I would recommend to give Live Migration and Storage (iSCSI or SMB) a higher guarantee on minimum bandwidth. This to ensure that live migration traffic is able to execute faster, and that your virtual machines hard disks have sufficient IOPS.

See common configurations here (Examples are shown in Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 with Powershell): http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj735302.aspx

Q2: Logical networks:
The following blogsite mentions to create an logical network for each traffic (LM, Cluster, Mgmt, AppA-VLAN, AppB-VLAN, AppC-VLAN)
http://blogs.technet.com/b/scvmm/archive/2013/04/29/logical-networks-part-ii-how-many-logical-networks-do-you-really-need.aspx

On the otherhand the following videoblogpost shows to create only two logical networks. 1 Datacenter and 1 VM Guests, each with several Network Sites.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/yungchou/archive/2013/04/15/building-private-cloud-blog-post-series.aspx

What is your opinion about this? Which one is best practice? Has one got (dis)advantages? Would I loose a functionality if I choose one above the other?

(taking into account that we currently have 20 VLANs)

A2:

A logical network in VMM should represent the actual networks and sites that serves a function. Let’s say that ‘Management’ is the management network, where hosts connected to this network can communicate with each other. You can have different sites and subnets here (also VLANs) but all in all it’s the same logical network, serving the function for management traffic. Also remember that VM networks (which is an abstracted network of the logical network) is assigned to virtual network adapters while using logical switches and teaming. So in order to get this straight, you must have a logical network for every different network traffic you would use in this configuration. This is because a VM network can only be associated with one logical network.

Typically, you will end up with a similar configuration when using converged fabric in VMM, according to best practice:

1 Logical Network for Management

1 Logical Network (dedicated subnet/VLAN) for Live Migration

1 Logical Network (dedicated subnet/VLAN) for Cluster communication

1 or more Logical Networks for SMB3.0 traffic (to support multi-channel in a scale-out file server cluster)

1 or more Logical Networks for iSCSI traffic

1 or more Logical Networks for VM guests (the VM network you create afterwards will be associated with this logical network. By using Trunk you can easily assign right subnet, VLAN directly on your VMs virtual adapters).

For more information about common configuration with VMM, see http://blogs.technet.com/b/privatecloud/archive/2013/04/03/configure-nic-teaming-and-qos-with-vmm-2012-sp1-by-kristian-nese.aspx

Q3: Teaming:
In the same videoblog of Yung Chou, they mention that for the backend traffic we should use the uplink pp with teaming loadbalance alg: TransportPorts. This would give better loadbalancing.
For the VMguest traffic we should use Hyper-Vport.
This is the first time that I see this recommendation. What is your experience with this?

A3:

This is a tricky question and the answers is depending on how many NICs you have present on your host.

If the number of virtual NICs greatly exceeds the number of team members, then Hyper-V Port is recommended.

Address hashing is best used when you want maximum bandwidth availability for each connection.

I would recommend you to order the book ‘Windows Server 2012 – Hyper-V, Installation and configuration guide’ by Aidan Finn and his crew to get all the nasty details here.

For this to work from a VMM perspective, you would need to create to logical switches with different configurations. 

Intelligent Placement and Dynamic Optimization in VMM 2012 SP1

This blog post will cover what Intelligent Placement is in VMM 2012, how it works and how it fits into Dynamic Optimization.

High-level overview of Intelligent Placement

When you deploy a virtual machine with VMM, there is a lot going on under the hood to ensure that you will have a successful deployment. Things like hardware configuration and host resources is critical, and also consistency when you deploy to a cluster. In summary, there is a lot of variables in the mix that can give you a warning or error. Some of the warnings and errors you might get could seems irrelevant to you at first, but VMM like to ensure that your environment is fit, healthy and properly configured.

 This is why I am writing this blog post to enlighten you to be able to understand what is going on and how to correct these things. I’ve seen a lot of consultants, customers and forum users blaming VMM for not being able to deploy a virtual machine, while it is successful when using Failover Cluster Manager or/and Hyper-V Manager.

Virtual Machine Manager – The Management layer and its intelligence

Once you add your virtualization hosts (Hyper-V) to VMM, the VMM agent gets installed as part of the process.

The VMM management server communicates with its agents on the hosts and get the information its need to detect how the hosts are operating. The Fabric workspace in VMM is where you configure your infrastructure – the building blocks for your datacenter and cloud. This will include storage, network and computing power. Computing power in this context is equal to virtualization hosts and the different server roles required supporting their life cycle. You can configure Host groups within VMM and the host groups contain several properties for the hosts it contains.

One of the properties that is relevant to this blog post and intelligent placement is host reserves and dynamic optimization.

You can specify an amount of resources that should be reserved for the hosts within the host group at all time. VMM will bring this (among other variables, as we will see) into consideration during deployment of virtual machines and services. And just to be a bit more complex, you have the opportunity to specify host reserves on each host individually as well. As you can see, there is a lot of things to be aware of. Someone should keep this in mind all the time. There might be just you that is deploying virtual machines in your organization, or other administrators as well. Luckily, VMM is our rescue here and keep track of this all the time.

Networking is another major factor that may affect the deployment. This is also something you map to your host groups, so that VMM is able to tell if a virtual machine can be deployed to these hosts or clusters and ensure network connectivity.

Imagine this in a huge environment. You would probably need a couple of spreadsheets to keep this documented, and remember you would have to maintain it too.

Dynamic Optimization

When you have a cluster managed by VMM, you can enable both Dynamic Optimization and Power Optimization at the host group level. Dynamic Optimization will load balance the cluster(s) when enabled, based on the configuration you specify. You can decide how aggressive it should be (move virtual machines for less gain) and how frequently the optimization should run. Power Optimization will power your hosts on and off when needed, to support the workload. Power Optimization requires Dynamic Optimization to be enabled and that your hosts are configured for out of band management.

Dynamic Optimization is one of the features you should really care of if you want to enable a private cloud and have a dynamic environment for your virtual machines. Instead of check the state of your cluster, hosts prior to a new virtual machine deployment, make sure you have enough resources; VMM will do this for you thanks to intelligent placement, and ensure that the environment is correctly balanced with dynamic optimization.

Dynamic Optimization was first new in VMM 2012 and did not require SCOM integration to work, as it required in VMM 2008 R2.

So instead of using a SCOM agent on your hosts to get this information, VMM monitors and acts natively in the VMM service with the VMM agents instead and relies on the intelligent placement feature.. Since VMM is now in control of it, you will have a centralized decision maker seeing your cloud fabric in context.

We now know that Intelligent Placement is the enabler for Dynamic Optimization and you should really use Dynamic Optimization (and eventually Power Optimization if possible) when managing your cloud environment. We will now have a look at some of the checks that intelligent placement is doing for you

What does Intelligent Placement actually check before it places its virtual machines on the hosts?

Platform type (Hyper-V, XenServer, VMWare)

Three different hypervisors is potential equal to three different kinds of errors.
Hyper-V has its own disk formats and scalability limitations, and the same goes for both VMware and XenServer. If you try to deploy a virtual machine with VHDX disks to an ESXi host, or trying to deploy a VM that has Dynamic Memory enabled when the hypervisor does not support it, this would fail beyond recognition. Intelligent Placement will check this, and you can create hardware profiles for your virtual machines that matches the three different hypervisors that VMM supports and categorize these in the library.

CPU compatibility

Make model, stepping and architecture.
A known rule in the Hyper-V world is that you can perform Live Migration between hosts as long as the CPU is from the same manufacturer. You can also enable the option to allow migration to different CPU architectures on the HW profile for the virtual machine. This is something that VMM checks for you during deployment and intelligent placement.

Host Reserves

As mentioned earlier, each host group and each individual host can have its own reservations. Intelligent Placement will ensure this will be considered during placement of VMs so you do not overcommit your hosts and clusters. 

Logical processor count on the host

With Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012, you can have as many vCPU’s within a virtual machine as there are logical CPU’s on the hosts. The maximum number a virtual machine supports is 64 vCPU’s.
To summarize, if you deploy a virtual machine with 14 vCPU’s and the host only has 8 logical CPU’s, this will result in an error telling you what is going on and why it is failing.

NUMA configuration match between VM and host

VMM detects and check the NUMA configuration to make sure nothing is in disharmony before it deploys a virtual machine.

Snapshot compatibility

Compatibility on migration or deployment from libraries will be checked during intelligent placement.

Host state

Checks if the hosts are available for placement, responding, has healthy agents and so on.

Networking

This could probably be an entire blog post by itself. Networking plays a huge role in VMM, and VMM is responsible and able to ensure that everything is properly configured. Network connectivity for the hosts groups, associated physical network adapters on the hosts to the right logical networks, VM networks associated with the right logical networks according to the host groups and hosts, if network virtualization is enabled on the logical network and/or the logical switch, native port profiles, if the load balancer is available for host group and much more is checked both during placement and during Dynamic Optimization.

Possible owners, preferred owners (Cluster)

Now in VMM 2012 SP1, you can specify both possible owners and preferred owners for each virtual machine. This is a setting we know from Failover Cluster in Windows Server and VMM and these settings are now exposed in VMM. VMM will bring this into consideration during placement and when Dynamic Optimization kicks in.

Availability sets and Anti-Affinity settings

When you configure availability sets for the virtual machines, VMM will not place these virtual machines on the same hosts. Please note that this is not a hard block.

Machine name length

Allowable characters in VM name per platform.

Allowable characters in VM name

This setting is individual to each platform.

Disks

Disk matching, space, classification, disk IO capacity, shared disk type, and pass-through disk checks.

Cluster overcommit checks

VMM can configure ‘cluster reserves’ for each cluster. If the value results in overcommit for your cluster, you’ll get a warning during placement, and dynamic optimization might not run as expected.

RemoteFX

Checks if RemoteFX is available on the hosts compared to the VM configuration

Each of these checks is taking into account on every deployment, migration, dynamic optimization, maintenance mode and is continually evaluated by intelligent placement so that the appropriate actions can be taken if there are any problems.

I would like to thank Hilton Lange on the VMM team for providing me with valuable insight and tips to create this blog post. Thank you!

There is a lot more going on, and I will likely be updating this blog post when something new is added – or detected on the way.

System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager Cookbook

System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager cookbook

A couple of months ago, I got an e-mail from a fellow MVP, Alessandro Cardoso.

And it’s funny how this community works. I remember when I started at the forums, and especially the Hyper-V forum, there was this person called ‘Alessandro Cardoso’ who served long and detailed answers to the Hyper-V community. The same Alessandro Cardoso was asking if I could be the technical reviewer of his book ‘Virtual Machine Manager – Cookbook’.

Before you continue reading this blog post, make sure you will grab a copy right now:

http://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-system-center-virtual-machine-manager-2012-cookbook/book?utm_source=mention.com&utm_medium=link&utm_content=forum&utm_campaign=mdb_010198

I have been writing a similar book myself, and participated on several other on this topic. That’s why I keep doing this. Working with Hyper-V, Windows Server and System Center is a part of my day job, and when it comes to Virtual Machine Manager (which is my second home), I cannot resist.

It was a pleasure assisting Alessandro on this book and help him with my insight on network virtualization and the other hot new topics in Service Pack 1.

It is very well written and covers a bunch of ninja tricks and tips for you to get the kick-start you need with this technology.

Update Rollup 2 for VMM 2012 SP1

Last but not least, the Update Rollup 2 for System Center 2012 SP1 – Virtual Machine Manager became available last week.

Important note:

You must uninstall Update Rollup 1 prior to installing Update Rollup 2.

If you install Update Rollup 2 from Microsoft Update Catalog without uninstalling Update Rollup 1, you should uninstall both 2 and 1 before installing 2 again.

Also note that Update Rollup 2 won’t be available through WSUS if Update Rollup 1 is installed.

More information about this can be found here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/scvmm/archive/2013/04/23/update-on-system-center-2012-sp1-update-rollup-2-ur2-for-virtual-machine-manager.aspx

After you have installed Update Rollup 2, you must update the VMM agents on your servers in Fabric. The servers will have a warning that requires your attention, and you can simply right click on the servers and proceed to update the agent. This won’t require any reboots.

Bug fixes:

A lot has been fixed related to networking, virtual network adapters, logical switches, uplink port profiles, extensions, classification and so on. I have encountered many of these bugs in the field myself and it’s great to have them solved.

Virtual Machine Manager Server (KB2826405) and Administration Console (KB2826392)

Issue 1

The SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 operating system is missing from the Linux OS list.

Issue 2

A virtual machine cannot start after migration from Windows 7 to Windows 8 when the DiscardSavedState method is used.

Issue 3

A connection to the VMware virtual machine remote console session cannot be established.

Issue 4

Externally published VMNDs are filtered incorrectly.

Issue 5

When you remove a virtual switch extension property or edit a virtual switch extension manager connection string, a user-interface generated script also removes the HostGroups that are associated with VSEM.

Issue 6

UPPSet is not set on a physical network adapter when you add the network adapter to a team and when the network adapter is the first in the list of network adapters.

Issue 7

The default gateway is missing on a host virtual network adapter after you add a second physical network adapter to the logical switch.

Issue 8

Static IP pool that has the first address in a subnet fails for external network type.

Issue 9

VMM crashes during host refresher when VMM is unable to create a CimSession with the remote host.

Issue 10

Standard (legacy) virtual switch creation on Windows 8 hosts with management virtual network adapter does not preserve the IP properties of the physical network adapter.

Issue 11

The administration user interface crashes with a NullReferenceException error when you click Remediate on a host instead of a virtual network adapter.

Issue 12

The Virtual Machine Manager user interface displays a network adapter in a "Not Connected" state.

Issue 13

The Virtual Machine Manager stops responding with high CPU usage for five to ten minutes when you configure a VMND that has 2,000 network segments.

Issue 14

The host virtual network adapter property for a management adapter does not show port classification.

Issue 15

Live Migration fails at 26 percent when the network adapter is attached to an isolated virtual machine network.

Issue 16

The Virtual Machine Manager Service crashes when a virtual machine that does not have a port profile is migrated to a cluster by using a logical switch that has a default port profile set.

Issue 17

Running Dynamic Optimizer on a cluster with incompatible host CPUs causes a Virtual Machine Manager Service crash.

Issue 18

The Host refresher crashes for any host that has the RemoteFX role enabled.

Issue 19

The minimum memory for dynamic memory greater than 32GB is a security risk.

Issue 20

The status of the network adapter is displayed as Not Connected in Virtual Machine Manager.

Mastering new Microsoft Technologies while doing what you love

A couple of weeks ago, I spent some nights at a boring hotel in the middle of Norway.

I was wrapping up on my work stuff, and had finally some time to dive into some of the new stuff that I have not had the time to, yet.

So to gain better understanding about PVLAN configuration, requirements and some of the news in DPM 2012 SP1, I headed over to the MS forums.

This is truly the best source of knowledge and experience an IT-pro working with Microsoft technologies can get.

Back in 2010 when I was working solely with virtualization and Hyper-V, I wanted to master the technology and get my certification. It was 3 exams back then to become MCITP: Virtualization Administrator 2008 R2. But guess what? There were no official preparation from Microsoft, like the usual books published by Microsoft Press.

How could I get the experience, the hands-on and so on to adopt the skills I needed?

I went to the MS learning overview of each certification to see what skills they was measuring during the exam. This was quite useful, so I could see the different categorization I needed to know.

Therefore, I had my own lab, some time off and decided to get it done. I participated so hard in the Hyper-V and Failover Cluster forums, that I actually was pinged from several forum users directly, for assistance.

It was a new and stimulated way of doing work. I solved real world problems and helped many users, customers and organizations out there through the community channels. One thing lead to another and I started my blog as well, to share knowledge directly from my experience.

The end of this story is that I was awarded the Microsoft MVP award, for helping the community.

And it felt good because I felt I had put some effort to achieve this.

However, it didn’t make me relax and jump away from the forums, because the forums is the channel that makes me continue to be sharp, having the experience before others and learning and teaching the wide world of community users.

Twitter, facebook, LinkedIn and other bits of the social media are all very useful to help the community, but nothing, and I mean nothing beats the forums. It’s the best way of doing community work (both for you and the community) and also to learn new technology and products. I strongly encourage you to participate, share your experience, tips & tricks, and join the communication in the forums of your expertise.

If you have a favorite Microsoft product, or maybe just a subset of some features, there might just be a forum for that as well. Explore it and join and you are suddenly hooked ;-)

Closing the gap with Windows Azure Recovery Services

It has been a while since Windows Server 2012 had its launch, and System Center 2012 SP1 followed up in January this year. However, one of the most interesting features that was shipped with Hyper-V in Win 2012, wasn’t covered by System Center.

Or was it?

You would suspect that VMM would expose these settings, and let you configure Hyper-V Replica, but there was not any button in the GUI nor cmdlets for this.

However, Hyper-V and the Hyper-V Replica feature is fully exposed through Powershell, so it was very easy – and possible to achieve great workflows through the power of Orchestrator.

But just recently, Microsoft announced Windows Azure Recovery Services.

This is another feature (currently in preview) that is helping to mind the gap between private and public, and makes it easier than ever to have hybrid solutions. And when you think about it, a disaster recovery service is probably a good thing to have outside of any of your locations. Right?

Your management layer of Hyper-V Replica would be in Windows Azure, using both Hyper-V and VMM on-premise to give you the opportunity for disaster recovery.

Together with the backup to cloud offering in Azure, you are able to make the most of it while leveraging your System Center components.

If you click on the link above and read the instructions on Windows Azure, you can see that it is an agent that you deploy to your fabric infrastructure: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/services/recovery-services/configure-a-hyper-v-recovery-vault/#header-2

More info from the feature preview on Windows Azure: 

 

Hyper-V Recovery Manager (Preview)

Orchestrate protection and recovery of private clouds

Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager can help you protect important services by coordinating the replication and recovery of System Center 2012 private clouds at a secondary location.

Automated protection

System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager private clouds can be protected through automating the replication of the virtual machines that compose them at a secondary location. The ongoing asynchronous replication of each VM is provided by Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Replica and is monitored and coordinated by Hyper-V Recovery Manager.

Orchestrated Recovery

The service helps automate the orderly recovery in the event of a site outage at the primary datacenter. VMs can be brought up in an orchestrated fashion to help restore service quickly. This process can also be used for testing recovery, or temporarily transferring services.

To try this feature in preview, you will need a Windows Azure account. To begin your sign up, click here.

Note: This limited preview program is available to a small group of customers in specific geographic locations¹ using Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1. However, we are always on the lookout for additional customers who will provide us with interesting and actionable feedback. If you would like to be considered for this program please complete the Microsoft survey located here. Thank you in advance for your responses! We will only be contacting those of you that have been accepted to participate.

¹ Only customers located in the following countries will be considered: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, Netherlands, Finland, Australia, Japan, India, New Zealand. Data for this Preview feature will be stored only in the Azure datacenters located in the United States.

Before I close this blog post, let me highlight something interesting in the VMM console, that you can use to keep track on your VMs that is configured in a recovery group:

These columns in the view will be very helpful.

-kn