Category Archives: Hyper-V

First Windows Server 2012 Cluster/Hyper-V related Patches

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With November 2012 Patch Tuesday having come and gone, the first hotfixes (it’s a cumulative update) related to Windows Server 2012 are available. These are relevant to both Hyper-V & Failover clustering (Scale Out File Server)  There is also an older hotfix that has been brought to our attention that related to certain versions Windows Server 2008/R2 domain controllers,which is also important for Windows Server 2012 Clustering. None of these are urgent/critical and only apply in specific circumstances but it’s good to keep up with these and protect your environment..

Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 cumulative update: November 2012

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2770917: A collection of small changes – for HA VMs (Hyper-V on Cluster) there are three minor CSV file system fixes in this Hotfix : Improves clustered server performance and reliability in Hyper-V and Scale-Out File Server scenarios. Improves SMB service and client reliability under certain stress conditions.

Error code when the kpasswd protocol fails after you perform an authoritative restore: “KDC_ERROR_S_PRINCIPAL_UNKNOWN”

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/976424: Install on every domain controller running Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2  or Windows Server 2008 R2 in order to add a Windows Server 2012 failover cluster. This is included in Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1. So just see if you need this fix in your environment or not.

I’m happy to see Microsoft acting fast on these issues,, even if not critical, to serve & protect their customers deployments.

The Microsoft Management Summit 2013

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MMS 2013 is in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

Time flies fast and it’s time to look ahead to 2013. My continuing investment in myself is part of that.  Despite a lot of rumors about big changes to MMS (its future, location, timing etc.) things will go forward as they’ve been in the past years. That includes the location. As you probably already heard it’s back in Las Vegas, state of Nevada, USA. So after the, for many people, somewhat disconcerting announcement at MMS 2012 indicating the above mentioned changes, MMS 2013 will once again be held in Las Vegas again. As before it will be focused on the entire System Center Suite. That was confirmed by a mail form the MSS conference team recently and a TechNet blog post

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Recently is was announced that the MMS 2013 content survey is now open. So they’re planning for the Microsoft Management Summit 2013 content and they’d like to hear from us. Why? Well, the better they align the content of the conference to our needs, the better it will be as an experience. This means our return on investment will be bigger which is always a good thing. So if you’re going or thinking of going this is the place, MMS 2013 Content Survey, to voice your opinions on what it should look like content wise. You have two more weeks to fill it out and than it’s scheduled to close down.

Why Attend?

It’s great to have an event focused on managing, deploying and protecting the infrastructure we’ve spent so much time, effort and money building. This conference is dedicated to exactly that. Smaller in scale but very focused. All together in the same hotel/conference center for 5 long days living in System Center and nothing else. As the world’s top operators in this space are there, the networking opportunities are also excellent. I can still remember the amount of talking and discussing I did with my colleagues in 2012, that was stimulating.

It’s also the place to provide feedback to Microsoft about System Center. Things you like, don’t like, things that are missing etc. I most certainly have some feedback for them.

Will I attend?

I’ll most certainly try to attend, that’s for sure. So it’s time to fill out the request form and start cutting through the red tape. Let’s hope the economy doesn’t tank completely and that we can go. The chips might be down right now but let’s not cost cut ourselves out of skills, education, opportunities and a future. Remember, keep moving forward and don’t quit yet, you can always give up later Winking smile.

Hyper-V Guest Storage Performance: Above & Beyond 1 Million IOPS

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Making a million IOPS possible in a Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V VM

A lot of you will have seen the demos of a Hyper-V guest with VHDX disks running on Windows Server 2012 doing a million apps, if you haven’t yet, take a look here. While some quickly dismissed this as “irrelevant boasting” without real life relevance, I respectfully disagree. This is smart future proofing by Microsoft and provides a hypervisor ready for the future hardware capabilities and capable to handle the most demanding workloads today & in the years to come. Sure such a demo is under lab/ideal conditions and does not reflect the majority of real life environments but it’s nice to see what a hypervisor is capable of if and when you might need it. Remember there was a day that 4GB was a lot of RAM and 2TB sounded gigantic. Also remember that some people have larger needs than others.  Until Windows Server 2008 R2 you had some limitations in storage IO performance that would not allow for a million IOPS. These had to be addressed or all the efforts with regards to capabilities and performance in regard to storage, CPU, networking and memory would just hit those particular bottlenecks. So it is addressing real needs and indeed also smart future proofing.

Capabilities of virtual machine storage IO throughput in Windows 2008 R2

The capabilities listed below dictate the IO capabilities in virtual machines running on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V:

  1. Limited to one IO channel per virtual SCSI Controller
  2. 256 queue depth/SCSI for all devices attached to that SCSI adapter.
  3. There was one fixed vCPU (0) dedicated to handling IO.

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The picture above illustrates these limits. You see two virtual SCSI Controllers each having 2 VHD virtual disks attached. Each disk shares the one channel the controller it is attached to has.

These limits could become a bottle neck but that was never was too big of a problem with a maximum of 4 vCPUs in Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V. If needed for performance we might have attached VHDs to different virtual SCSI controllers for the best possible performance in Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V .

With 64 vCPUs and ever more demanding workloads these limitations would become a (serious) issue so this needed to be addressed. If not, despite all other efforts in regards to the 4 big resources (memory, storage and network) in Windows 2012, this would remain the limiting factor of IOPS inside a virtual machine on Windows 2012.

Windows Server 2012 improvements to virtual machine storage IO scaling

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The picture above illustrates the improvements in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V IO Scaling:

  1. There is now 1 channel per 16 vCPUs, per virtual SCSI device, per controller. So that means you have 4 channels, per VHDX attached to a virtual SCSI Controller when you have 64 vCPUs in the virtual machine. Compared to before, this is a significant improvement and a much needed one with the 64 vCPUs capability there is now.
  2. IO interrupt handling is now distributed amongst all vCPUs and this process is NUMA aware. This is a huge improvement!
  3. There is now a 256 queue depth/device attached to a specific SCSI adapter. That’s another big improvement.

That people, is how you get a virtual machine to handle a million IOPS. Nice! The questions or doubts whether Hyper-V can deliver the capacity, throughput & performance have been wiped of the table, yes also for virtual storage IOPS. You can now go straight to how it will address your business needs. From my experience it does so brilliantly and very cost effectively. Life might not be perfect but it is very good Smile

Quest Technical Experts Conference 2012 Europe Podcast

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As the readers of my blog know I was in Barcelona this week to attend the Technical Experts Conference Europe 2012 organized by Quest (now a part of DELL).  Together with my fellow MVPs, friends and colleagues  Aidan Finn (@joe_elway), Carsten Rachfahl (@hypervserver) and Hans Vredevoort (@hvredevoort) we presented 8 sessions at the Virtualization Track and did a Hyper-V Experts panel to share what we have learned and help answer questions attendees on the new capabilities of Hyper-V in Windows Sever 2012. It was both fun and interesting to do. We learned some more from each other and also from the questions of an alert audience whom we enjoyed presenting to.

Mattias Sundling, a Technical evangelist at Quest and the owner of the Virtualization Track at TEC 2012 Europe did an audio podcast all 4 of us MVPs in the “Virtual Machine” expertise presenting in that track . You can find that podcast here on the vKernel/DELL web site http://www.vkernel.com/podreader/items/tec-europe-2012-mvps-with-mattias-sundling or on YouTube by clicking on the screenshot below. Enjoy.

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