Join the Private Cloud Roadshow in Brussels (25 April) and Ghent (26 April)

You will have heard of the Private Cloud concept by now. But a lot of us are still struggling with what it means to us and how we can leverage this concept. Microsoft is aware of this and wants to help us understand Private Cloud better. On top of that I can tell you from personal experience that Redmond also really wants to understand our needs in that regard better.

Recently they announced a free event (1/2 day) to achieve exactly that. Yes, they are proud to present “The Private Cloud Roadshow”. And I’m proud to say that two fellow MVPs and MEET members are delivering the content Smile I included the agenda for you as well as the links to register.


Join experts Kurt Roggen (MVP) and Mike Resseler (MVP) for the Private Cloud Roadshow.

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In this half day you will learn more about private cloud infrastructure setup and how you can monitor this. Learn how to create your private clouds and how to deploy standardized applications or services into these clouds. And as a final session you will learn how you can provide automation in your private cloud.

There are 2 options to attend (same content, different location):

25 April 2012 in Brussels
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26 April 2012 in Ghent
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This TechNet event is free of charge and Microsoft will be giving away one Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone in each location.

Detailed agenda:
13:00 : 13:30 Welcome & Coffee
13:30 : 14:30 Building your Private Cloud Infrastructure
Learn how to build your Private Cloud infrastructure, by dealing with Fabric Management (Compute/ Hypervisors, Storage, Network), which will serve as the basis for the Private Cloud that you will be creating. We will discuss how to deploy, configure and manage each of these different elements in your datacenter.
14:30 : 14:50 Break
14:50 : 16:30 Creating, Monitoring & Operating your Private Cloud
Learn how to create your private clouds and how to deploy standardized applications or services into these clouds. Learn how to monitor your clouds and how to can handle change requests. All this key area’s will be addressed to give you an idea of what is happening in a private cloud after it is up, running, and into production.
16:30 : 16:50 Break
16:50 : 18:00 Automating & Delivering Services in your Private Cloud
Learn how you can provide automation in your private cloud. Discover also how your cloud services can be offered and consumed using different self-service portals and what their differences are.
18:00 : 19:00 Networking & Drinks

Enhanced (Failover) Placement of Virtual Machines on Windows 8 Hyper-V Cluster

One of the nice features in Windows 8 Hyper-V clustering are the “drain node” capability and the virtual machine priorities. You can see this in action in a video by Aidan Finn here.

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For more details on draining a node see Draining Nodes for Planned Maintenance with Windows Server "8" for a detailed explanation.

Now another very important feature is the fact that the cluster is intelligent enough to determine what node is the best suited as a target during failover or live migration. Not only CPU and memory load of the hosts are taking into consideration but also the resource needs of the VM and the priority you have given those. This entire process is NUMA aware and as such with windows 8 can be evaluated on a per virtual machine basis. This means that you that the cluster will always try to get the best possible placement and thus performance for your virtual machines.

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Now we also have affinity and anti affinity rules. Anti Affinity ensures that the nodes of a virtualized NLB farm will be placed on separate hosts to minimize risk. You don’t want one host to house all the nodes of you NLB farm!

On the other hand sometime you want virtual machines to stick together lets say you have an NLB farm but the virtual machines with the front end and middle tier need  to stay together. In that case you use affinity rules to achieve this. On top of this the anti affinity rules will ensure that the NLB farm virtual machines are on different nodes.

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Do note that when the cluster has to choose to break these rules versus bot being able to run the virtual machines it will choose to keep them running. It knows its priorities! Now if in such a situation there are not enough resource the priority will also come into play and the low priority machine may be shut down to ensure the higher priority ones can be up and running.

As you can imagine there are potentially a lot of factors/permutations at play here and I’m looking into doing some more test of these features and the intelligence in the process to see if we make the same decisions and how to best configure this for maximal performance & availability.

Learning Resources for Windows 8 Clustering, WNLB & Hyper-V 3.0

I know a lot of you are, just like me, actively investigating Windows 8 & Hyper-V. You’re downloading the Beta, reading blog post, discussing scenarios and use cases and that’s great. You’re investing in a bright future Smile

Here are some blog post that contain gems of information and that I’d like to bring to your attention:

Enjoy!

No Hyper-V Module for Windows PowerShell After Upgrading to Windows Server 8?

When I upgraded some of my Hyper-V hosts from Windows 2008 R2 to Windows 8 I noticed I wanted to do some experiments using the Hyper-v Module for Windows PowerShell. So the first thing I did was install the Windows PowerShell integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) via the Add Roles and Features Wizard on my client. You don’t usually install this on your servers.

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We opted to restart automatically if required, so we get a warning this server might restart.

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Windows PowerShell ISE is installing

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We are informed of our successful installation.installISE3

That was easy and no reboot required. So we launch ISE and start testing some commands of our new Hyper-V Module. But that doesn’t do much for us. Nothing happens.get-command 1

 

So I try some more commands. But no luck, just some errors that the commands are not recognized or Get-Help can’t find anything of that command.  I also not that for non of the Hyper-V commands I have any IntelliSense support.

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No jio

So it seams the Hyper-V Module for Windows PowerShell is not installed. But I can’t make that out from the Roles Wizard.

I needed to get this going fast so I uninstalled the Hyper-V role and than added it again. That did the trick as now the Hyper-V Module for Windows PowerShell is also installed because I can execute commands

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Just install the Hyper-V Module for Windows PowerShell via Features

But after discussing this with Microsoft it turns out that uninstalling and reinstalling the Hyper-V role is not necessary at all. You see when you upgrade a Window 2008 R2 node to Windows 8 it does not install Hyper-V by default as this would change the original install base and they try not to install features you didn’t have before during an upgrade. On a clean install where you add the Hyper-V role you won’t have this issue as the Hyper-V Module for Windows PowerShell is installed by default. What confused me is that I didn’t see an option under Roles to add Role Services to roles as I was used to do in Windows 2008 R2. There is no sub tree or anything.

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I was thinking along the same path in Windows 8 but here we can find it in the in “Add Roles and Features Wizard” under Features / Remote Server Administration Tools sub tree. That has two entries. One for Feature Administration Tools and one for Role Administration tools and und the latter we find the Hyper-V Management Tools with Hyper-V Module for Windows PowerShell. Just a tip Smile

You can add it your self after the upgrade by going to Server Manager and starting the Add Roles & Features Wizard.

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You go through the normal steps and select to install Hyper-V Module for Windows PowerShell.

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We are asked for confirmation of our request actions.

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The Hyper-V Module for Windows PowerShell is being installed.

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And we have a successful install. We can start scripting on that node right way Smile

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Happy scripting!