Category Archives: MVP

Microsoft MVP Global Summit 2015

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We’re leaving Las Vegas (VEEAMON 2015) and are heading for Seattle.

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I’ll be spending a week in Bellevue/Redmond from November 1st to November 8th to attend the Microsoft MVP Global Summit 2015. As a Microsoft MVP one does not want to miss this summit. And I know quite a few MVPs who have quit their jobs the moment their boss told ‘m they could not go. Not saying we’d all do that but it’s true that skilled experts are in high demand and missing out on the MVP summit isn’t exactly making the best use of any MVP you employ.

It’s all NDA so basically I can’t tell you anything. But we’ll be sharing some tweets if joy and some lightweight blogs to share with the world how happy we MVPs are to be back at the mother ship for our annual firmware downloads and scheduled maintenance.

Until then here’s a nice Bing Maps overview of the MVP before & after hours area of operation.image

So yes, the Microsoft MVPs are descending on Bellevue / Redmond once again in large numbers. So you might hear a bit more Microsoft technology discussions in a bit more foreign languages or accents than otherwise. It’s us, no worries!

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It’s just great to an MVP Smile

Video Interview On Rolling Cluster Upgrades in Windows Server vNext

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Carsten Rachfahl from Rachfahl IT-Solutions (quite possibly  Germany’s leading Hyper-V, Storage Spaces & Private cloud consultancy) and I got together in Berlin last November at the Microsoft Technical Summit 2014. Between presenting (I delivered What’s new in Failover Clustering in Windows Server 2012 R2), workshops, interviews we found some time to do a video interview.

We discussed a very welcome new capability in Windows Server vNext: “Rolling cluster updates” or “Cluster Operating System Rolling Upgrade” in Windows Server Technical Preview as Microsoft calls it. I blogged about this rather soon after the release of the Technical Preview First experiences with a rolling cluster upgrade of a lab Hyper-V Cluster (Technical Preview).

Videointerview with Didier Van Hoye about Rolling Cluster Upgrade Thumb1

We’ve been able to do rolling updates of Windows NLB for a long time and we’ve been asking for that same capability in Windows Failover Clustering for many years and now, it’s finally coming! And yes, as you will notice we like that a lot!

You need to realize that making the transition form one version to another as smooth, easy and risk free as possible is of great value to the customer as it enables them to upgrade faster and get the benefits of their investment quicker. For Microsoft it means they can have more people move to more modern environments faster which helps with support and delivering value in a secure and modern environment.

At the end we also joke around a bit about DevOps and how this is just as set of training wheels on the road to true site resilience engineering. All fun and all good. Enjoy!

Hyper-V Technical Preview Live Migration & Changing Static Memory Size

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I have played with  Hot Add & Remove Static Memory in a Hyper-V vNext Virtual Machine before and I love it. As I’m currently testing (actually sometimes abusing) the Technical Preview a bit to see what breaks I’m sometimes testing silly things. This is one of them.

I took a Technical Preview VM with 45GB of memory, running in a Technical Preview Hyper-V cluster and live migrate it.  I then tried to change the memory size up and down during live migration to see what happens, or at least nothing goes “BOINK”. Well, not much, we get a notification that we’re being silly. So no failed migrations, crashed or messed up VMs or, even worse hosts.

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It’s early days yet but we’re getting a head start as there is a lot to test and that will only increase. The aim is to get a good understanding of the features, the capabilities and the behavior to make sure we can leverage our existing infrastructures and software assurance benefits as fast a possible. Rolling cluster upgrades should certainly help us do that faster, with more ease and less risk. What are your plans for vNext? Are you getting a feeling for it yet or waiting for a more recent test version?