Monthly Archives: June 2011

Microsoft Offers Operations Manager Community Evaluation Program (2012 CEP)

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At TechEd 2011 Microsoft announced the OpsMgr 2012 Community Evaluation Program (CEP) and are now inviting everyone to apply to take part in this in the public Beta time frame. They position a CEP as follows:

Many of you are likely familiar with Microsoft TAP’s, Technology Adoption Programs, where a small pool of customers partner with our engineering teams to preview and provide feedback on pre-beta software. TAP participants provide our engineers with some early guidance and validation of next generation software, prior to us releasing publicly-available beta software. TAP is a great program, but it starts very, very early on and usually fills up quick (and waay before beta). The OpsMgr 2012 TAP has been very active in helping us with early builds, but it is unfortunately full.

The Community Evaluation Program (CEP) has recently been created to provide a broader range of customers with an in-depth experience with our upcoming beta software.

Essentially, a CEP is an organized way of bringing our subject matter experts (SMEs) from our product teams, our community (like MVPs and experienced users) and those interested in taking a deep look at our v.Next software for evaluation and preparation for deployment purposes.

This is good news, we’ got SCVMM2012 Beta running in the lab, it will be nice to get our ands on SCOM 2012 Beta as well. For an overview of the Operations Manager 2012 CEP, take a look at TechNet blog post http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2011/06/02/now-enrolling-for-the-operations-manager-2012-cep.aspx and the OM12 CEP overview datasheet.

If this is to your liking you can get all the information you need here and follow this link to apply for the CEP Apply for the OpsMgr 2012 CEP. Somewhere in June the accepted participants will get the SCOM2012 topic schedule & access to the CEP discussion forums. If you have questions on all this you can send them to [email protected].

Some Feedback On How to defrag a Hyper-V R2 Cluster Shared Volume

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Hans Vredevoort posted a nice blog entry recently on the defragmentation of Clustered Shared Volumes and asked for some feedback & experiences on this subject. He describes the process used and steps taken to defrag your CSV storage and notes that there may be third party products that can handle this automatically. Well yes, there are. Two of the most know defragmentation products support Cluster Shared Volumes and automate the process described by Hans in his blog.  Calvin made a very useful suggestion to use Redirected Access instead of Maintenance mode. This is what the commercial tools like Raxco PerfectDisk and Diskeeper also do.

As the defragmentation of Cluster Shared Volumes requires them to be put into Redirected Access you should not have “always on” defragmentation running in a clustered Hyper-V node. Sure the software will take care of it all for you but the performance hit is there and is considerable. I might just use this point here as yet another plug for 10 Gbps networks for CSV. Also note that the defragmentation has to run on the current owner or coordinator node. Intelligent defragmentation software should know what node to run the defrag on, move the ownership to the desired node that is running the defragmentation or just runs it on all nodes and skips the CSVs storage it isn’t the coordinator for. The latter isn’t that intelligent. John Savill did a great blog post on this before Windows 2008 R2 went RTM for Windows IT Pro Magazine where he also uses PowerShell scripts to move the ownership of the storage to the node where he’ll perform the defragmentation and retrieves the GUID of the disk to use with the  defrag command. You can read his blog post here and see how our lives have improved with the commands he mentions would be available in the RTM version of W2K8R2 (Repair-ClusterSharedVolume  with –defrag option).

For more information on Raxco PerfectDisk you can take a look at the Raxco support article, but the information is rather limited. You can also find some more information from Diskeeper on this subject here.  I would like to add that you should use defragmentation intelligently and not blindly. Do it with a purpose and in a well thought out manner to reap the benefits. Don’t just do it out of habit because you used to do it in DOS back in the day.

To conclude I’ll leave you with some screenshots from my lab, take during the defragmentation of a Hyper-V cluster node.

As you can see the CSV storage is put into redirected access:

And our machines remain online and available:

This is because we started to defrag it on the Hyper-V cluster node:

Here you can see that the guest files are indeed being defragmented, in this case, the VHD for the guest server Columbia (red circle at the bottom):