Category Archives: Hyper-V

Windows 2008 R2 SP1 – RemoteFX Hardware To Get The Needed GPU Performance

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When the first information about RemoteFX in Windows 2008 R2 SP1 Beta became available a lot of people busy with VDI solutions found this pretty cool and good news. It’s is a very much needed addition in this arena. Now after that first happy reaction the question soon arises about how the host will provide all that GPU power to serve a rich GUI experience to those virtual machines. In VDI solutions you’re dealing with at least dozens and often hundreds of VM’s. It’s clear, when you think about it, that just the onboard GPU won’t hack it. And how many high performance GPU can you put into a server? Not many or not even none depending on the model. So where does the VDI hosts in a cluster get the GPU resources? Well there are some servers that can contain a lot of GPUs. But in most cases you just add GPU units to the rack which you attach to the supported server models. Such units exist for both rack servers and for blade servers. Dell has some info up on this over here here. The specs on the  the PowerEdge C410x, a 3U, external PCIe expansion chassis by DELL can be found following this link C410x. It’s just like with external DAS Disk bays. You can attach one or more 1U / 2U servers to a chassis with up to 16 GPUs. They also have solutions for blade servers. So that’s what building a RemoteFX enabled VDI farm will look like. Unlike some of the early pictures showing a huge server chassis in order to make room to stuff all those GPU’s cards the reality will be the use of one or more external GPU chassis, depending on the requirements.

New Spatial & High Availability Features in SQL Server Code-Named “Denali”

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The SQL Server team is hard at work on SQL Server vNext, code name “Denali”. They have a whitepaper out on their web site, “New Features in SQL Server Code-Named “Denali” Community Technology Preview 1” which you can download here.

As I do a lot of infrastructure work for people who really dig al this spatial and GIS related “stuff” I always keep an eye out for related information that can make their lives easier an enhance the use of the technology stack they own.  Another part of the new features coming in “Denali” is Availability Groups. More information will be available later this year but for now I’ll leave you with the knowledge that it will provide for Multi-Database Failover, Multiple Secondaries, Active Secondaries, Fast Client Connection Redirection, can run on Windows Server Core & supports Multisite (Geo) Clustering as shown in the Microsoft (Tech Ed Europe, Justin Erickson) illustration below.

Availability Group can provide redundancy for databases on both standalone instances and failover cluster instances using Direct Attached storage (DAS), Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Networks (SAN) which is useful for physical servers in a high availability cluster and virtualization. The latter is significant as they will support it with Hyper-V Live Migration where as Exchange 2010 Database Availability Groups do not. I confirmed this with a Microsoft PM at Tech Ed Europe 2010.  Download the CTP here and play all you want. Please pay attention to the fact that in CTP 1 a lot of stuff  isn’t quite ready for show time. Take a look at the Tech Europe 2010 Session on the high availability features here. You can also download the video and the PowerPoint presentation via that link. At first I thought MS might be going the same way with SQL as they did with Exchange, less choice in high availability but easier and covering all needs but than I don’t think they can. SQL Server Applications are beyond the realm of control of Redmond. They do control Outlook & OWA. So I think the SQL Server Team needs to provide backward compatibility and functionality way more than the Exchange team has. Brent Ozar (Twitter: @BrentO)  did a Blog on “Denali”/Hadron which you can read here http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2010/11/sql-server-denali-database-mirroring-rocks/. What he says about clustering is true. I’ use to cluster Windows 2000/2003 and suffered some kind of mental trauma. That was completely cured with Windows 2008 (R2) and I’m now clustering with Hyper-V, Exchange 2010, File Servers, etc. with a big smile on my face. I just love it!

Windows 2008 R2 SP1 Release Candidate Available (and Windows 7 SP1 RC as well)

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Good news. Microsoft just released the Windows 2008 R2 SP1 Release Candidate. See  http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/sp1.aspx for more information. I’m downloading it from here here as I type this blog. You can also get a vhd image. That the RC is here is good news because it indicates they are making good progress and are on schedule. That would be just great as I have some beefy Hyper-V cluster plans with 32 core & 256 GB memory servers on my planning for 2011.

I was already very happy with the quality of SP1 Beta. I hope RC does an even better job and works out some issues. They can’t get this one wrong. I’ve been testing Dynamic Memory for a while now in the lab and I want to start using it it in anger for various scenarios. Microsoft can’t afford to make mistakes like the ones with Exchange 2010 SP1, which seemed to be rushed out of the door, or they’ll get the entire virtual server worlds on their backs and in that arena the fight is hard and no one is showing any mercy. I think that’s why they have announced if for the first quarter of 2011, it gives them time do do all quality assurances and get tons of feedback from the early adaptors programs to make sure they catch the mistakes before they go RTM. RemoteFX looks promising for the VDI crowd. That’s something they need to get that going. I for one have always tried to meet customers needs with what’s in the box. RemoteFX will help with that.

StarWind Software V2V Image converter: a nice free tool for the toolbox

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I get some questions now and then about free tools to use for converting virtual machine files from one format to another. One of my old time favorite tools (VMDK to VHD Converter)  for converting virtual machines files from VMware to Microsoft’s VHD is getting old and can give you some performance issues & problems on x64 bit operating systems. It also doesn’t support other file format conversions. If you need to try another tool you can give StarWind Software V2V Image converter a try.

It works pretty well on all major Windows operating systems up to & including windows 7 / Windows 2008 R2 x64 bit. It supports conversions between VMDK, VHD files and  IMG files. And it doesn’t alter the source files in any way. However to prevent the software from crashing I need to run it as an administrator. I consider this to be a drawback. Make sure you have a good machine with a modern processor & fast (extra) disk and adequate space to get optimal speed  Really, replace that P4, go on!

Drawbacks are that you cannot choose the location where the converted file is saved. So you can’t get optimal speed by using two physical disks, one for reading and one for writing. Also this means that for large virtual disk files you’ll need loads of free space. It requires registration for download which you might not like that (you can grab it here: StarWind V2V Image Converter). On the whole it’s a pretty fast tool and does the job well and a nice instrument in my toolkit.