VirtualPro

I read an interesting blog post on Mike De Petrillo’s blog entitled Microsoft Lies to their customers again.  The article details a discussion with a customer regarding licensing on virtual platforms such as ESX and Hyper-V. 

Customer: I would love to use VMware but the cost savings in Windows licenses from Microsoft with Hyper-V makes it a deal I can’t pass up.

Me: What do you mean by that? Licenses cost you the same for Windows no matter what virtualization solution you’re using.

Customer: That’s not what my Microsoft rep told me. They said I could get unlimited virtual machines with Datacenter Edition of Windows only if I used Hyper-V.

Me: Ah. I see. You know, they’re lying to you, right?

Customer: No. They never lie to me. Where’s the proof.

Now I’ve done a lot of work with company reps from all sorts of companies in the past.  The thing to remember is these guys are sales guys pure and simple,  they are interested in getting your business for their company, bottom line.  If you say “I need to consolidate my server pool and keep the cost down”,  the Microsoft Rep is obviously going to tell you that Microsoft Hyper-V is going to be the best and cheapest way to achieve this.  Fair enough that’s his opinion,  but as an IT Professional it is your job to see through the smoke and mirrors and substantiate any claims made.  I take everything I hear with a pinch of salt (even from VMware) and I will always try to validate any claim made, either through existing customer reference sites, product forums or blog sites. 

I’m still reeling from the fact that Mike is seeing this across a number of customers,  how hard can it be to do a little research.  I did a very quick google search on “licensing for virtualization“ and the top result was the press release relating to Microsoft’s change of licensing to incorporate virtualisation.  The second result was the Microsoft page that details licensing for specific products such as Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

Within that page is a link to the white paper I used to clarify the correct approach to be taken by my current employer.  The first paragraph answers the question this guy in New York should have been asking, don’t you think?

 The purpose of this white paper is to give an overview of Microsoft® licensing models for the server operating system and server applications under virtual environments. It can help you understand how to use Microsoft server products with virtualization technologies, such as Microsoft Hyper-V™ technology, Microsoft® Virtual Server 2005 R2, or third-party virtualization solutions provided by VMWare and Parallels.

ESX, ESX 3.5i, Hyper-V, Microsoft, VMware, Windows 2008 esx, hyper-v, licensing, VMware, windows 2008

Mark Wilson over at Markwilson.it has posted a great post on free Microsoft virtualisation training and a discount for the exam.

Go to the following page on the eLearning website and enter the code 9350-Y2W6-3676. This will give you access to 10 hours of free training worth approximately £100. 

I used this as part of my studying for the 70-652 exam,  what I didn’t get though was a discount when i booked the exam.  When booking the 70-652 exam you can use the promotional code USHYPERV to recieve a discount (apologies I don’t know what the discount percentage rate actually is)

See my previous post on 70-652 study tips,  which will give you some other pointers and resources to look at when studying for the exam. 

Certifications, Hyper-V, Microsoft Certification, hyper-v

I’ve just this afternoon passed the Microsoft 70-652 exam, making me an MCTS for Windows Server Virtualisation.

I didn’t get a lot of time to study and basically spent the best part of yesterday and this morning using the exam preperation guide, technet and google to piece together everything I needed to know. There is not a lot of published material out there at the moment,  most of the books on amazon, etc appear to be due out later this month, so it was a bit of a struggle.

With this in mind I thought it would beneficial to publish some of the websites that I used for studying and clarifying specific points.

• As mentioned above the MS 70-652 Exam Preperation Guide was a great starting point.
• The Microsoft free E-Learning course 5935 - Introducing Hyper-V in Windows 2008.
• The Microsoft free E-Learning course 6334 - Exploring SCVMM 2008.
• The Technet page for Hyper-V , Work through each section it doesn’t take to long.
• The Technet page for SCVMM 2008, again work through each section.
• The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit, read the server consolodation scenarios.
• Robert Larson’s building a host cluster with Hyper-V, essential reading.
• Scott Lowe’s article on SCVMM 2008,  insight into SCOM and SCVMM integration.
• Ben Armstrong’s article on Allowing non-administrators to control Hyper-V.
• MS Server Team article on configuring pass-through disks in Hyper-V.
• The Technet how to Videos on SCVMM 2007 great material if you have no lab.
• This article on Emulated and Synthetic drivers,  now your IDE and SCSI VM Controller.

Other pointers I can give you,  well brush up on the following especially

• Disks - know the different types and how they work, IDE and SCSI controllers
• Snapshots - really know this, even snapshots for deployment?
• Networking - know the different types and how they work.
• Larger Networks - Think of ISCSI host connections and cluster heartbeats.
• Failover Clustering - It’s key to Hyper-V availability so make sure you know it.
• SVCMM - SCOM integration and migrating VMs between hosts.
• Hyper-V - know how to install both full and server core versions.

I’m glad I took the time and did the exam, unfortunately I won’t get much of a chance to use the skills in the day job as we currently utilise VMWare.  However I have seen enough during my revision and lab testing to see that Microsoft have got themselves a very good base product.  With the Windows 2008 R2 release being worked on I can only imagine it will get better.  Enjoy studying…. (if that’s possible!!)

Certifications, Hyper-V, Microsoft, Windows 2008 70-652, Certification, hyper-v, MCTS

I attended a Microsoft roadshow the other day at Microsoft’s new offices in Edinburgh, absolutely stunning views I’m sure you will agree.

So the roadshow was advertised as being presented by James O’Neil but for some reason he wasn’t there and we got Andy Malone who is an MCT and MVP based in Scotland. The event was based around “what’s new in Windows Server 2008″ and covered a number of subjects, including Active Directory, Server Core and of course virtualisation. One of the areas that caught my eye at James O’Neil’s last roadshow in Edinburgh was the new terminal services role in Windows Server 2008.  Now the company I work for use Citrix and I worked on implementing a brand new Xenapp 4.5 farm last year,  I’ve since sat my Citrix Certified Administrator exam and think I know a thing or two about presentation virtualisation. So I was very keen to hear the Terminal Services presentation again to see if I missed anything the last time,  because last time I was convinced that this was a valid alternative to Citrix XenApp.

Microsoft have provided Terminal Services as part of windows for many years, capabilities have always been basic, with Citrix adding a lot of the nice features that made TS attractive to enterprise companies. However in Windows 2008 I think Microsoft have done a lot of work on TS which makes it less entry level and a lot more enterprise friendly everytime I see it. Some of the key features are detailed below.

RemoteApp - This is the equivalent of published applications on Citrix,  applications are delivered seamlessly onto a users desktop through the RDP client but run on the terminal server.  The icons for running RemoteApps can be delivered as an .rdp file or can be packaged up into an MSI for delivery to the desktop via group policy or the deployment tool of your choice.

Terminal Services Web Access - Now this is a very similar service to the Citrix Web Interface whereby users can access TS RemoteApps and connect to the terminal server desktop from a web browser front end.  Users can visit a Web site (either from the Internet or from an intranet) to access a list of available RemoteApp programs. When they start a RemoteApp program, a Terminal Services session is started on the Windows Server® 2008-based terminal server that hosts the RemoteApp program.  The one thing that distinguishes it from Citrix is that the Web Access portal is not customisable and that all users see all RemoteApps, although permissions are applied to control the execution of RemoteApps.

Terminal Services Gateway - utilises RDP over HTTPS to establish a point to point RDP connection allowing access to the resources of a terminal server without the need for a VPN.  That’s not to say that you should not have some other form of security in place such as ISA Server but it does allow you to operate across port 443 which is generally open on most corporate firewalls.  This makes the TS Gateway very easy to deploy without large amounts of change to firewall rule sets, the same cannot be said of Citrix Secure Gateway.

Terminal Services Session Broker - This is a new role wich is designed to provide load balancing when multiple terminal servers are grouped together in a farm.  Before Windows 2008 TS load balancing across terminal servers was not very intuative,  this new role brings it into line with the functionality we see in Citrix farms.

One thing that wasn’t covered in any of the demonstrations I’ve seen is printing,  now coming from a Citrix background I know what a pain printing can be in a TS environemnt.  There is a good reason that it makes up about 30% of the CCA examination and that’s because there’s lots to think about in it’s configuration.

Terminal Services Printing - Windows Server 2008 comes with the Terminal Services Easy Print driver,  allowing users to print from their RemoteApp or TS Desktop to a printer on their local client device.  Where it differs from Citrix is that when you log on to a TS session the server will attempt to install the Easy Print driver first and if for some reason it can’t it will then use a matching native driver.  if this step then fails and it can’t find a native driver then the printer will not be availble in the TS session. Citrix will usually search for the native driver first (unless told otherwise via policy) before reverting to the Citrix Universal Print Driver or as a last resort, not allowing the printer in the TS session at all.  This is an interesting approach from Microsoft as it means that they do not have to add in additional management features to control driver exclusion lists or driver mapping functionality,  thus making it easier than Citrix in the printing arena.  I’d be interested to see how the easy print driver performs when you put a slow link or transatlantic WAN connection in the way.

All in all the Windows 2008 Terminal Server offering is very impressive,  especially considering it is free straight out of the box.  It looks to be a worthy advisory to Citrix for small to medium businesses looking to centralise applications without the usual associated costs.  Where it may struggle to gain a foothold is in the enterprise market where all to often they require the extra features that a Citrix solution provides.  It’s an interesting move by Microsoft who have a close partnership with Citrix,  it’s almost like they didn’t want to take it any further for fear of upsetting them.  Maybe in the next incarnation of Windows Server?!

Microsoft, Terminal Services, Windows 2008 Citrix, Presentation virtualisation, Terminal Servers, windows 2008

I came across the following video a few days ago when I was looking at some Hyper-V content. It’s a video by VMware and It shows a side by side install of the new Hyper-V role in Windows Server 2008 and ESX 3.5i.  Now the idea here is to show how long it takes to install both, it should be noted though that this video was done before the release of the bare metal Hyper-V server 2008. Having installed both I’d have to say that the ESX 3.5i install was still by far the easiest and quickest to complete.  Though Hyper-V Server 2008 (bare metal version) is a lot quicker than the windows representation in the video it is still fiddly and involved amending / shutting down the windows firewall from the command line Urrrghhh!!!

ESX3i Vs Hyper-V Installation - Battle of the Hypervisors

ESX 3.5i, Hyper-V, Microsoft, VMware ESX 3.5i, esxi, hyper-v, hypervisor

I booked myself the MCTS exam 70-652 for Windows 2008 virtualisation configuration and have been looking around for some decent training material.  There’s some good stuff on Microsoft’s website which is free and can be found here. Some other e-learning that’s not to expensive but nothing beats actually using the software and playing with it to understand what’s going on.

So I built myself a Windows Hyper-V Server (The bare metal version) and then went looking for the Management Console add-in.  Now you think it would be quite easy to find,  I followed the link in the getting started guide for it and it lead me back to downloading Hyper-V Server.  After about 10 minutes of searching and a number of broken links from various Microsoft blogs I eventually found what I was looking for.  You can download it from the link below,  I hope that saved someone else 10 minutes of their life.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952627

Hyper-V, Microsoft hyper-v, hyper-v server 2008, management tools, windows 2008

Microsoft have announced the release of their free bare metal hypervisor called “Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008″.  I thought they might have marketed it with a different name as I can see some confusion arising there.

On first look at the features table it looks a little limited but to be honest it’s no more so than ESX 3i is on it’s own, Hoping to get a look at this sometime today at which point I should be in a better position to comment.

It’s available for download at the following location

http://www.microsoft.com/servers/hyper-v-server/default.mspx 

To compliment the flurry of release activity at  Microsoft they have announced their virtualisation exams which you can find out about at the following address.

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/virtualization/default.mspx

Hyper-V, Microsoft bare metal hypervisor, hyper-v, hyper-v server 2008, Microsoft virtualization