Hyper V Amigos Showcast Episode 1: who we are

The very first episode of the Hyper-V Amigos Showcast has gone live. We’ll try to discuss & showcase Hyper-V and related technologies for benefit of all mankind.

In this first episode we introduce ourselves and talk a bit about on the state of our industry and how that relates to our jobs.

Carsten Rachfahl & Didier Van Hoye introduce themselves

Enjoy!

RDMA Over RoCE With DCB Requires Tagged Non Default VLANs

It’s DCB That Requires This

For those of you who are experimenting with the RoCE variant of RDMA for SMB Direct in Windows Server 2012 (R2), make sure you have a VLAN tag in your configuration if this is more than a simple RDMA over two NICs. The moment you get DBC with PFC & ETS involved you’ll need non default tagged VLANs. Do note that PFC alone is good enough, ETS is strictly speaking not a requirement, but I’d consider doing it if you can.

With Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS) the network traffic type is classified using the priority value in the VLAN tag of the Ethernet frame. The priority value is the Priority Code Point (PCP), which is described in the IEEE 802.1Q specification and uses a 3-bit field in the VLAN tag with eight possible priority values (0 to 7).

Priority-based Flow Control (PFC) allows to individually pause priorities of tagged traffic and helps to provide lossless or “no drop” behavior for a certain priority at the receiving port. As  above, each frame transmitted by a sending port is tagged with a priority value (0 to 7) in the VLAN tag. So for the traffic pause and resume functionality to work we need a VLAN tag to carry the priority value.

Does It Work Without?

But you’ll tell me that, as you may be lacking a DCB capable switch for lab purposes, you used a direct cable between your two RoCE NICs. And guess what RoCE, might have indeed worked for you without a VLAN tag. You can test & get a feel for what RoCE/RDMA can do for you with just the NICs. But as there is no switch involved you’re not using DCB for PFC/ETS and without that the need for the tagged VLAN isn’t there. Also see https://blog.workinghardinit.work/2013/05/03/smb-direct-roce-does-not-work-without-dcbpfc/.

So there you go. Design your RoCE/RDMA network based on DCB with PFC( and ETS) and not just on the tests with an direct cable or you might miss a few details that are quite important. Happy testing!

We Need Your Opinion On This Strategy, Vision, Management Issue …

Could you give us your opinion on this?

Lately people, managers, have asked me to give advice or at least my opinion on how to organize & manage IT. In the broad sense of the term. Infrastructure, software, services, support, on premise, cloud, data protection, security …  “Just think about it a bit”.

That question “Could you give us your opinion on this?” is a hard one for me.  I could say “read my blog”, the non technical posts. But my opinion is often too high level and they don’t they actually want that. They want a solution. And it’s not that I don’t think about it or don’t have an opinion. But I can’t focus on areas out of my expertise, my control and priorities.

Basically I cannot help them. Not because I’m that stupid or the matter is beyond our control. It’s because the way managers and organizations think is getting more and faster obsolete by the day.

The Issue

Our world, both privately and work related, is becoming more and more connected every day. That means there is a tremendous amount of input, leading to an ever continuing increase of permutations of ever more variables that come in to play. In short, complexity is on the rise at an enormous rate and will overwhelm us. Even worse is that this complexity only shows itself after things have gone wrong. That’s bad but, that also means there are probably many more relationships of cause and effect that haven’t even shown themselves yet. That kind of sounds like a time bomb.

How do you deal with this? Not in the way so many are asking for. And I’m not here to tell my managers or customers what they want to hear. I’m in the business of telling them what they need to hear as I deal in results, not services or studies. More often than not they are looking for processes and methodologies to keep central control over planning, execution, operations and change. All this while the rug is literally pulled away under their feet. There’s the problem.

Situations, technologies, solutions, frameworks, processes all have a time limited value that’s becoming shorter. So the idea that you can plan and control for many years ahead is obsolete in many areas in our ecosystem. There are just to many moving parts, that are changing too fast. So how do we manage this? What kind of leadership do you need? Well there is no easy answer.

How do I deal with this?

Personally I deal with this by working, collaborating & cooperating in a network, in “the community”. My insights, knowledge, help and support come from my network. Some of my colleagues, the contractors and consultants we hire are in that network. A lot of colleagues are not. Most managers are not. Why is that? They are stuck in a hierarchal world of centralized command and control that is failing them fast. At best they achieve good results, but very slow and at a very high expense. We can only hope that the results also don’t turn out bad. They want procedures & processes. Predictability & consistency but I deal with complexity in wide area of expertise that cannot readily be put into manuals and documentation. Not in a timely fashion. I’m in a dog fight (insert “Top Gun” theme). The processes & logistics provide the platform. Learn where procedures & methodologies work and where they’ll kill you. The knowledge and the skills we need are a living thing that feeds on a networked collective and are very much in flux.  I’m so much more better skilled and effective at my job through participating my global community than I can be tied into the confines of my current workplace they’d be mad not to leverage that, let alone prevent me from doing so. You can’t do it alone or in isolation.

An example

Yesterday was an extreme example in a busy week. I started work at 05:30 AM yesterday to set up a testing environment for questions I needed answered by a vendor who leverages the community at large. That’s required some extra work in the datacenter that I could have done by a colleague that was there today because I found out in time. I went to the office at 08:30. I worked all day on an important piece of work I mentioned in my network and was alerted to a potential issue. That led to knowledge sharing & testing. Meaning we could prevent that very potential issue and meanwhile we’re both learning. I went home at 18:30, dinner & testing. I was attending an MVP web cast at 20:00 PM till 21:00 PM learning new & better ways to trouble shoot clusters. I got a call at 19:10PM of a mate in Switzerland who’s running into SAN issues and I helped him out with the two most possible causes of this through my experience with SANs and that brand of HP SAN.  We did some more testing & research until 22:00 after which I wrote this blog up.

We don’t get paid for this. This is true mutual beneficial cooperation. We don’t benefit directly and it’s not “our problem” or job goal. But oh boy do we learn and grow together and in such help each other and our employers/customers. It’s a true long term investment that pays of day by day the longer you are active in the community and network. But the thing is, I can’t put that into a process or manual. Any methodology that has to serve centralized command and control structure while dealing with agile subjects is bound to fail. Hence you see agile & scrum being abused to the level it’s just doing stuff without the benefits.

Conclusion

This is just one small and personal example. Management and leadership will have to find ways of nurturing collaboration and cooperation beyond the boundaries of their control. The skillset and knowledge needed are not to be found in a corporate manual or in never ending in house meetings & committees. Knowledge gained has to flow to grow As such it flows both in an out of your organization. You’re delusional if you think you can stop that today and it’s not the same a leaking corporate secrets. Hierarchies & management based on rank and pay grades are going to fail. And if those managers in higher pay grades can’t make the organization thrive in this ever more connected, faster moving world, they might not be worth that pay grade.

I assure you that employees and consultants who live in the networked global community will quickly figure out if an organization can handle this. They will not and should not do their managers job. In fact they are already doing managers areal big favor by working and operating the way they do. They are leading at their level, they are leveraging their networks and getting the job done. They are taking responsibilities, they solve problems creatively and get results. It just doesn’t fit easily in an obsolete model of neatly documented procedures in a centralized command and control structure. They don’t need a manager for that, they need one that will make it possible to thrive in that ultra-connected ever changing fast paced world. Facilitate, stimulate and reward learning and taking responsibilities, not hierarchies. That way all people in your organization will lead or at least contribute to the best of their ability. You’ll need to trust them for that to work. If you don’t trust them, fine, but act upon it. Letting people you don’t trust work for and with you doesn’t work.

How to do this is a managers & leaders challenge. Not mine. I know when I’m out of my depth or when not to engage. The grand visions, the strategic play of a company is their responsibility. Getting results & moving forward will come from your perpetually learning, and engaged workforce, if you don’t mess it up. And yes, that is your responsibility. Cultures are cultivated by definition. So if the culture of the company is to blame for things going south, realize you’re the ones supposed to make it a good one. People don’t leave organizations, they leave managers 😉 And to paraphrase the words of Walt Disney … you’re in a world of hurt if they leave you but stay at their desk and on the pay roll. It’s called mediocrity, which also serves a purpose, providing commodities & cookie template services whilst letting others shine. But if you want to be a thriving, highly skilled, expertise driven center of excellence … it’s going to take lot of hard and sustained work and it’s not a one way street.

Migrating A Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Cluster To Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Cluster In Another Active Directory Domain – PART 2

Introduction

In this blog series we’ll walk you through the process of migrating a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Cluster to a Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Cluster in another Active Directory domain. You are now reading part 2.

  1. Migrating A Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Cluster To Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Cluster In Another Active Directory Domain – PART 1
  2. Migrating A Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Cluster To Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Cluster In Another Active Directory Domain – PART 2

The source W2K8R2 Hyper-V cluster is a production environment. To test the procedure for the migration we created a new CSV on the source cluster with some highly available test virtual machines with production like network configurations (multi homed virtual machined). This allows us to demonstrate the soundness of the process on one CSV before we tackle the 4 production CSVs.

We left off in part 1 with the virtual machines on the CSV LUN we are going to migrate shutdown. We’ll now continue the process of moving the CSV LUN from the old Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 cluster to the new Windows Server 2012 R2 cluster. After that we can import them and, start them up, test that all is well and finally make them highly available in the cluster. Don’t forget the upgrade the integration components when all is done.

Removing the CSV LUN from the the source W2K8R2 Hyper-V Cluster

Just leave the VMs where they are on the LUN, un-present that LUN from the old source W2K8R2 Hyper-V cluster and present it to the new W2K12R2 Hyper-V Cluster. In our case, with a dealing with a cluster so we use a CSV. So when the LUN is presented and added to the cluster don’t forget to add it to the CSVs. Well

In Failover Cluster Manager bring the CSV that you are migrating off line. Make sure you have the correct one (green circles/arrow) to avoid down time in production.

imageWhen asked if you’re sure, confirm this

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The CSV will be brought of line, which you can verify in Disk Management

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We’re going to do our clean up already. You could wait until after the migration but we want the old cluster to look as clean and healthy for the operations people as possible so they don’t worry. So we go and remove this LUN from Cluster Shared Volumes.

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Which you’ll need to confirm

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after which your disk will be move to available storage

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Do note that if you do this it brings the LUN back on line. As it’s still a clustered diskand  there is no IO (all VMS are shut down) that’s OK. We’ll remove it form available cluster storage (“Delete” isn’t a bad as it sounds in this context)

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The storage will be gone form the cluster and off line in disk manager.

On the SAN / Shared Storage

We create a SAN snapshot for fall back purposes (we throw it away after all has gone well). If you have this option I highly advise you to do so. It’s not easy to move back form Windows Server 2012 R2 to W2K8R2 in the unlikely event you would need to do so. It also protects the VM against any errors & mishaps that might occur, if you understand how to use the snapshot to recover.

On the SAN we un map the CSV LUN from the old cluster. We could wait but this is an extra protection against two clusters seeing the same storage.

On the SAN we map that CSV LUN to the new cluster. It will appear in disk manager.

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We add this disk to the new cluster

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We add it to the CSV on the new cluster, which brings it on line.

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It uses the default naming convention of clustered disks. So this is the moment to change the name if you need or want to do so.

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So now it’s time to go Hyper-V Manager and do the actual import.

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Navigate to the folder where you Hyper-V Virtual Machine Configuration lives. This location can be central for all VM or individual per VM, depending on how the virtual machines were organized on the old source cluster. In our example it is the latter. Also note that we only have one CSV involved per VM here, so it easy. Otherwise you will need to move multiple CSVs across together, all the ones the VM or VMs depend on.

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It has found a virtual machine to import.

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This is important, select “Register the virtual machine in-place (use the existing unique ID)”

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Click “Next” to confirm the your actions

If anything about your virtual machine is not compatible with your host, the GUI allows you to make fix this. Here we have to change the correct virtual switch as they are different from the source host.

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When done, just click next and in a blink of the eye your machine will be imported. You can start it up right now to see if all went well.

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As in Windows Server 2012 (R2) we can add running virtual machines to the cluster for high availability that’s the final step.

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We can import all virtual machines on the demo CSV in the same manner. Congrats, if you set up network connectivity right and done this manual migration procedure correctly you have now migrated a first CSV with VMs to the new cluster in another AD domain that can talk to to VMs that are still on the old cluster.  Cool huh! What scenarios? Well, a hoster that has clusters in a management domain that runs different workloads for different customers (multiple ADs) or a company consolidating multiple environments on a common Hyper-V Cluster or clusters in a management domain, etc.

You need to update the integration components of the virtual machines now running but other than that, you’re all set. Just move along with the next CSVs / Virtual machines until you’re done.

Closing comments

Note, what to do if you don’t have shared storage. Move the disks to the new host/cluster, copy the data over (do NOT export the VMs, as that will not work in this scenario, see part 1) or … use VEEAM Replica. It will do the heavy lifting for you and help minimize down time.. Read this blog post by our fellow MVP Silvio Di Benedetto  and for more information Veeam Backup & Replication: Migrate VM from Hyper-V 2008 R2 to 2012 R2.

Good luck. And remember if you need any assistance, there are many highly experienced Hyper-V MVPs /consultants out there. They can always help you with your migration plans if you need it.