Skills measured by Exam 70-652
Installing Hyper-V (14 percent)

Select and configure hardware to meet Hyper-V prerequisites.
This objective may include but is not limited to: evaluate the existing environment, disk/logical unit number (LUN), memory requirements, correct CPU/BIOS, networking/Network Interface Card (NIC)

Configure Windows Server 2008 for Hyper-V.
This objective may include but is not limited to: identify requirements, deploy Hyper-V with Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), Microsoft Assessment and Planning tool, install on Full, install on Core

Configure Hyper-V to be highly available.
This objective may include but is not limited to: failover clustering, disk structure (RAID, quorum, shared storage), network
Configuring and Optimizing Hyper-V (20 percent)

Manage and optimize the Hyper-V server.
This objective may include but is not limited to: VHD (virtual hard disk) location, snapshot location, Systems Center, Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), Authorization Manager, release key, performance monitoring of 2k8

Configure virtual networking.
This objective may include but is not limited to: Virtual Network Manager tool, SCVMM, virtual switches, VLAN tagging, external/private/internal switches

Configure remote administration.
This objective may include but is not limited to: install Hyper-V manager on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista; WMI, WinRM, firewall settings, RDP
Deploying Virtual Machines (30 percent)

Migrate a computer to Hyper-V.
This objective may include but is not limited to: from Virtual Server 2005, from third-party (Acronis), from VPC (virtual PC), from Hyper-V (import/export), Intel to AMD virtual machine state, by using SCVMM vNext (P2V and V2V), Integration Services/Virtual Machine additions, Assessment and Planning tool

Create or clone a virtual machine.
This objective may include but is not limited to: prepare guest operating system for duplication (sysprep), differencing disks, copying Virtual Hard Drive (VHD), SCVMM vNext, PXE Boot (legacy network adapter), manage the Self Service portal, Windows Deployment Services (WDS)

Create a virtual disk.
This objective may include but is not limited to: pass-through disks, fixed vs. dynamic, differencing disks, IDE vs SCSI, Virtual Hard Disk Wizard

Manage templates, profiles, and the image library by using SCVMM vNext.
This objective may include but is not limited to: ISOs, VHDs, deployment from library
Managing and Monitoring Virtual Machines (36 percent)

Monitor and optimize virtual machines.
This objective may include but is not limited to: Tool: Reliability and performance monitor, Tool: SCVMM, processor, optimize memory, network, disks

Manage virtual machine settings.
This objective may include but is not limited to: DVD/ISO, NIC, Integration Services, state of virtual machines, Hypercall adapter availability requirements, reboot/start options, BIOS, memory, Processor (Windows NT 4.0)

Manage snapshots and backups.
This objective may include but is not limited to: live backups of a VM by using VSS Data Protection Manager (DPM), backup within a virtual machine, snapshots

Configure a virtual machine for high availability.
This objective may include but is not limited to: quick migration, storage redundancy, perform a manual failover, live migration if available, networking redundancy

Interested? Check here for more information.

Personally, I’m using VMware ESX 3 and VMware ESX 3.5 and I have evaluated Microsoft Hyper-V. But I have never try Citrix XenServer yet and I found VMware blog said why VMware is better here.

“The architecture for Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V puts standard device drivers in their management partitions. Those vendors claim this structure simplifies their designs compared to the VMware architecture, which locates device drivers in the hypervisor. However, because Xen and Hyper-V virtual machine operations rely on the management partition as well as the hypervisor, any crash or exploit of the management partition affects both the physical machine and all its virtual machines.”

“The Xen and Microsoft architectures rely on routing all virtual machine I/O to generic drivers installed in the Linux or Windows OS in the hypervisor’s management partition. These generic drivers can be overtaxed easily by the activity of multiple virtual machines – exactly the situation a true bare-metal hypervisor, such as ESXi, can avoid.
Hyper-V and Xen both use generic drivers that are not optimized for multiple virtual machine workloads.”

“Products like Xen and Microsoft Hyper-V lack an integrated cluster file system. As a result, storage provisioning is much more complex. For example, to enable independent migration and failover of virtual machines with Microsoft Hyper-V, one storage LUN must be dedicated to each virtual machine. That quickly becomes a storage administration nightmare when new VMs are provisioned. VMware Infrastructure 3 and VMFS enable the storage of multiple virtual machines on a single LUN while preserving the ability to independently migrate or failover any VM.”

In fact, I do agreed with VMware. I like simplicity of VMware Infrastructure Client, I like Virtual Center Centralized management, I like Update Manager and etc.

Look at the screen about the comparison!

Comparative Hypervisor Sizes (including management OS)

As the numbers show, ESXi has a far smaller footprint than competing hypervisors from vendors that like to label ESX as “monolithic.”

Wow! 1461 days uptime! So far, My running VMware guest does not have more than 365 days yet.

Check here for more information.

How about you? What do you think?

Microsoft, which eats its own dog food since the Virtual Server 2005 era, just announced the complete migration of both MSDN and TechNet, two of the most popular web sites in the world, on virtual machines.

Microsoft kept the back-end database on physical boxes, but moved 100% of its IIS7 frond-ends on Hyper-V RC0 VMs with 4 virtual CPUs and 10GB RAM. The virtualization hosts (no mention of the brand obviously) are powered by 2 Intel quad-core CPUs and 32GB RAM (2GB are reserved for the Windows Server 2008 parent partition).

The performance report after this migration is very interesting:

• Hyper-V CPU overhead (as measured by the parent partition utilization) was 5% to 6% with linear progression as the number of requests increased.
• CPU over subscription (three four-processor VMs on an eight-processor physical server) resulted in 3% lower overall performance per physical server based on overall requests per second per 1 percent CPU.
• Requests per second per 1% CPU performance of MSDN over the previous physical server platform improved. This demonstrates to us the viability of efficient consolidation from dedicated older physical servers to shared virtualized platforms.
• Physical MSDN handled 21% more requests per second per 1% CPU than virtualized MSDN.

Since this data would be much more meaningful knowing some details about the guest OS workloads (which are not published), virtualization.info reached Microsoft and received the following numbers:

• the MSDN front-end serves more than 3 million page views per day
• the TechNet front-end serves more than 1 million page views per day

Read the whole report here.

Go to AMD website, download the AMD Processor Utilities and Updates.

AMD Opteron™ Cpufreq Driver for Linux 2.10.00 – Allows the system to automatically adjust the CPU frequency, voltage and power combination that match the instantaneous user performance need. Supports all AMD Turion™ 64 Mobile Technology, AMD Opteron™ Processors, and Athlon™ 64 Processors released through 2007. Provides support for AMD PowerNow!™ technology and, where appropriate, AMD’s Cool-n-Quiet™ technology for Linux systems. Works with all kernels, version 2.6.10 or later. Requires the ondemand kernel module or the cpufreq-1.20, cpuspeed-1.20.1, or powersaved-0.8.19 or later user programs to support SMP and multi-core systems. This driver is already included in the 2.6.18 or later kernels and does not need to be downloaded again.

AMD Virtualization™ Technology and Microsoft® Hyper-V™ System Compatibility Check Utility – This utility checks your system’s capabilities to facilitate testing of Microsoft Hyper-V on platforms with AMD microprocessors. To use this utility: Download and unzip AMD-V_Hyper-V_Compatibility_Check_Utility.zip. Change to the directory where the files were extracted to and click on amdhyperv.exe. On Windows Vista™ or Windows Server® 2008, you need to run the application with elevated privilege, so right click the .exe and select run as administrator. Note: the .sys files must be in the same directory as the .exe file.

Machine Check Analysis Tool (MCAT) – Machine Check Analysis Tool (MCAT) is a command line utility that takes a Windows System Event Log (.evt) file as an argument and decodes the MCA Error logs into human readable format. MCAT can alternatively take as an argument the raw register hexadecimal values from an MCE Error.

AMD Clock Version 2.0.1 – AMDClock shows the current speed of each core of each AMD processor in a system. The user has the ability to choose to run the application on top of all other applications and to select the refresh rate for reporting the speeds.

AMD Power Monitor Version 1.2.0 – AMD Power Monitor displays the current frequency, voltage, utilization, and power savings of each core on each processor in a system. This version of AMD Power Monitor supports systems with Athlon™ FX, mobile AMD Athlon™, AMD Athlon™ X2, AMD Turion™ 64, AMD Turion™ 64 X2, AMD Sempron™, mobile AMD Sempron™, AMD Phenom™, AMD Opteron™, and AMD Opteron™ Third-Generation processors.

AMD Power Monitor Linux Version – RHEL 4 32 bits – This application is used to monitor the current frequency, voltage, utilization, and power savings of each core of each processor in a system. This application also has a system tray icon that can be used to view and select power schemes on the system. The system tray icon will show the average utilization of every core on the system.

AMD Power Monitor Linux Version – RHEL 4 64 bits – This application is used to monitor the current frequency, voltage, utilization, and power savings of each core of each processor in a system. This application also has a system tray icon that can be used to view and select power schemes on the system. The system tray icon will show the average utilization of every core on the system.

AMD Power Monitor Linux Version – SLES 9 32 bits – This application is used to monitor the current frequency, voltage, utilization, and power savings of each core of each processor in a system. This application also has a system tray icon that can be used to view and select power schemes on the system. The system tray icon will show the average utilization of every core on the system.

AMD Power Monitor Linux Version – SLES 9 64 bits – This application is used to monitor the current frequency, voltage, utilization, and power savings of each core of each processor in a system. This application also has a system tray icon that can be used to view and select power schemes on the system. The system tray icon will show the average utilization of every core on the system.

AMD Power Monitor Linux Version – SuSE Linux 10 64 bits (32 not supported due to a kernel bug) – This application is used to monitor the current frequency, voltage, utilization, and power savings of each core of each processor in a system. This application also has a system tray icon that can be used to view and select power schemes on the system. The system tray icon will show the average utilization of every core on the system.

AMD Processor Driver Version 1.3.2.0053 for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 (x86 and x64) – Allows the system to automatically adjust the CPU speed, voltage and power combination to match the instantaneous user performance need. This package is a user friendly localized software installation of the driver designed for end-users. This driver supports AMD processors on Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP2 x86 and x64 Editions.

AMD CPUID – This utility displays the processor signature, approximate speed, L1/L2 cache sizes, processor revision, and instruction extensions supported.

AMD CPUInfo Version 2.1.1 – This Windows® application executes and displays the return data from the CPUID instruction set and displays HyperTransport™ technology information if the processor supports it. This application also shows the maximum speed of the processor.

Download here.

This update package installs the Hyper-V remote management tools on a computer that is running Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1). This package includes the following:

• The Hyper-V Manager. The Hyper-V Manager is a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in that provides management access to a Windows Server 2008-based server that uses the Hyper-V role.
• The Virtual Machine Connection. The Virtual Machine Connection is a remote connection tool that you can use to establish an interactive session on a virtual machine.

Hyper-V provides customers with efficient and cost-effective virtualization infrastructure software. It enables customers to reduce operating costs by increasing hardware utilization, optimizing infrastructure and improving server availability. Customers and partners can download the release candidate at http://www.microsoft.com/Hyper-V by 10 a.m. PDT today.

Source: VMBlog

This page discusses the Hyper-V Release Candidate (RC). The information in this article is provided as is and is subject to change without notice. No formal product support is available from Microsoft for this beta release of this feature.

• Prerequisites
• Pre-installation Steps for Migrating from the Beta
• Enabling the Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V role
• Migrating from Hyper-V Beta to RC
• Managing Hyper-V via MMC
• Recommended Configuration for Guest OS
• Operating System Availability
• Recommended Hardware Devices
• Partner Tested Hardware
• Removing Hyper-V

PrerequisitesThe Release Candidate for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is only available for x64 editions of Windows Server 2008 RTM. If you are using a version of Windows Server 2008 that is pre-RTM, you will need to perform a clean install of Windows Server 2008 RTM x64 edition on your host system. Hyper-V cannot be enabled on systems running inside virtual machines or on x86 versions of Windows Server 2008.

The full set of prerequisites for installing Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 will be published separately closer to RTM. The RC release of Hyper-V is available with Windows Server 2008 x64 editions. Hyper-V requires an x64-based processor, hardware-assisted virtualization, and hardware data execution protection. For the RC release, a maximum of sixteen logical processors are tested.

Pre-installation Steps for Migrating from the Beta

If you had previously installed the Beta of Hyper-V  on Windows Server 2008 RTM, the following steps are recommended for moving to the RC version of Hyper-V:

• Take a backup of all your Virtual Hard Disks (VHDs) once you have shutdown the virtual machines.
• Take a note of all of the Virtual Machine (VM) configuration settings such as storage configuration, memory allocations, etc. You will need to re-create the virtual machine settings as these are not compatible with the RC version.
• Take a backup of all your data on the system.
• Install the updates from Download Center or Windows Update (available post March 25, 2008) for the RC version. As mentioned above the RC update package will only install on RTM version Windows Server 2008. Reboot as requested.

Enabling the Hyper V role in Windows Server 2008

To enable Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V on a full installation of Windows Server 2008, follow these steps.

1. If you are updating your existing server that is running a pre-RTM version of Windows Server 2008, you must back up necessary files from the existing Windows Server before proceeding and perform a clean install of Windows Server 2008 RTM x64 edition. All steps in the pre-installation section must be completed before continuing.
2. Ensure that you have hardware-assisted virtualization and No-Execute Bit enabled prior to installation. If BIOS reconfiguration changes were made to enable hardware features, you must complete a full power-cycle before proceeding. A warm-reboot is not sufficient.
   1. Download and install the update package for Hyper-V RC version.
   2. There are two update packages for Hyper-V RC – Update for Windows Server 2008 x64 editions (KB 949219) and Update for Windows Server 2008 (KB949219). You will need to install the Updates for Windows Server 2008 x64 editions on the parent partition for upgrading to Hyper-V RC.
   3. If you had not previously enabled the Hyper-V Beta role, you will need to follow the instructions in Steps 4-7.
3. Start Server Manager. To do this, click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Server Manager. To add roles to a server, you must be logged on with an account with administrative rights.
4. In Server Manager, add the Hyper-V role. To do this, click Add Roles under Roles Summary, and then select Hyper-V in the Add Roles wizard.
5. Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the Add Roles wizard.
   Note: It is optional to allow Virtual Machines access to network resources; at least one network adapter must be selected to bind a Virtual Network Switch to. If there is a single network adapter in the computer, a warning popup will appear. It is recommended that at least two network adapters are available.
6. At the end of the Add Roles wizard, you must restart the system for the Hyper-V role to be enabled.
   Note: It is recommended that no other Windows Server 2008 role be enabled on the host system if the Hyper-V role is enabled on the system.
   Important: Upon restart, log on with the same account used to install the Hyper-V role above.

Enabling Hyper-V in a Server Core deployment

The following steps will replace steps 4-7 above for a Server Core installation.

1. Type “start /w ocsetup Microsoft-Hyper-V” to enable Hyper-V role.
2. Restart when prompted.
   Note: To Manage Hyper-V, you can remotely connect to the server from an existing Hyper-V Manager MMC on a different system.

For more information, please check here.

Microsoft is on track to deliver Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtualization by August 2008. Hyper-V RC is a feature-complete version and has three main enhancements from the beta release:

• An expanded list of tested and qualified guest operating systems including: Windows Server 2003 SP2, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1, Windows Vista SP1, and Windows XP SP3. (How about other Linux Distro?)

• Host server and language support has been expanded to include the 64-bit (x64) versions of Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter – with English, partial German, and partial Japanese language options now available and the ability to enable the English version of Hyper-V on other locales.

• Improved performance & stability for scalability and throughput workloads.

“Delivering the high-quality Hyper-V beta earlier than expected allows our customers and partners to begin evaluating this feature of Windows Server 2008 and provide us with valuable feedback as we march toward final release”, said Bill Laing, general manager of the Windows Server Division at Microsoft. “Along with Hyper-V, Windows Server 2008 offers cost-effective and flexible licensing for virtualization so that customers and partners can extend the savings realized through server consolidation and deliver on the vision of Dynamic IT.”

Overview Of Windows Server 2008 Hyper V Beta

The Release Candidate 0 (RC0) update to the Hyper-V role provides improvements to security, stability, performance, user experience, forward compatibility of configurations, and the programming model. All users of the Hyper-V role are encouraged to apply this upgrade. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.

System Requirements

Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2008; Windows Server 2008 Datacenter; Windows Server 2008 Datacenter without Hyper-V; Windows Server 2008 Enterprise; Windows Server 2008 Enterprise without Hyper-V; Windows Server 2008 Standard; Windows Server 2008 Standard without Hyper-V.

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