Free Support Rant

Posted on by
3

<rant>

I blog and help out in news groups because I like to share ideas, solutions and help out when and where I can. I’m active on twitter because I enjoy the discussions, the out loud thinking and the reflection we all get of just throwing ideas, conclusions, opinions, experiences and knowledge in a pool of diverse but very skilled passionate IT Professionals and Developers.

It is not always easy to share information. The potential complexity of environments that may well have other issues and restrictions in combination with the vast amount of possible configurations and designs, both valid and ill advised, make it near to impossible to cover all eventualities. If one of my blog posts does not contain the answer to your specific problem or does not apply to your particular situation, do not complain & moan about it, let alone demand of me to come up with a solution. What is written here are bits and pieces of information which I choose to share because I think they have some value and can help other people out.  I do this in my own time. Really, I am not paid to blog, research technologies or build labs. I do this out of my own interest and because I enjoy it and it has value to me in my own work. I work a lot of hours “for a boss” and those are not always the most esoteric. When you read my “About” page you’ll read the following:

I’m still in the trenches with my boys and gals. Empty suits or hollow bunnies are neither wanted nor needed. In IT you live by the sword and you die by the sword. There is no hiding when you mess up, all our mistakes are in plain sight of everyone using what we build.

That is my reality and I live by it. Perhaps others should try this.  I’ve seen to many ICT “gods” come down from heaven for a short while pushing their latest religion or product. Loudly proclaiming it is the truth and the only way forward. Failure to achieve success is always due to a lack of faith with us subjects, our (at best) mediocre skills or because we have to wait and see the benefits,  much later in time, but we need to keep the faith. When the shit hits the fan those gods are back on the Olympus, pushing daggers into the back of us infidels who couldn’t make it work. No thank you. I think the people I work with know the  strengths and weaknesses of both my self or my solutions. I have however never ever left them out in the cold when something didn’t work out as planned or when things failed. Yes, eventually things, big and small, do fail. How you try and prevent that as much as possible and how you deal with it when it happens is what makes a huge difference. That’s where my professional responsibilities lie, not with some Microsoft bashing, impolite, wannabe who thinks insulting me is a good approach to getting me to solve their issues with a Microsoft product. You know the type, they open a pack of “M$ Sucks Quick Mix” to try and get some “Instant credibility” and fail miserably, they even fail at asking for help.

I am not your free support desk, your dedicated Microsoft technology research engineer or trouble shooter. I’m an IT Pro with a busy job. I think certain people out there need to learn that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Don’t be a “jerk”.

<rant>

Follow Up on Power Options for Performance When Virtualizing

Posted on by
4

So some people asked where they can find and configure those power settings we were talking about in a previous blog Consider CPU Power Optimization Versus Performance When Virtualizing. So in this blog entry, I’ll do a quick run-through of this. As I can get my hands on some DELL servers from two different generations (G10/G11), the screenshots are of those servers.

Let’s first look at CPUz screenshots from a DELL PE2950 III where we see to different P-States. So here we see the fluctuation between CPU Power. This CPU knows SpeedStep but not TurboBoost for example.

By default/normally SpeedStep is enabled in the BIOS and Windows 2008 R2 has the “Balanced” power plan as a default. So this shows up something like this.

This means you can play around and set the power plan in Windows. So far so good. Naturally, when your PCU doesn’t support fancy power there not much Windows can do for you on that front. Depending on the CPU you can also enable features like C-Sate (core parking), P-states (SpeedStep), and TurboBoost in the BIOS. Where exactly and what it is called depends a bit on the hardware /BIOS you’re running and the CPUs that are in there. When you disable all power saving settings in the BIOS or set the for maximum performance you can’t use it in Windows anymore. That’s when you’ll see something like this:

So on a Windows 2008 R2 Server, you’ll note that the Power Options in the GUI are disabled when BIOS options are set to maximum performance. Note that when you install the Hyper-V role it turns Standby & Hibernation off. No need for that, unless it’s you demo machine/laptop and then you can turn it back on (see Hibernate and Sleep with Hyper-V Role Enabled). But Microsoft does state that P-states (SpeedStep) are supported and can be used, but it needs to be enabled in the BIOS for this.

To demonstrate the settings let’s look at the BIOS of a DELL R710 this looks like what you see in the picture below. You disable SpeedStep by setting the option for CPU Power and Performance Management to “Maximum Performance”. For DELL G11 hardware you can find more information on the available options in the article Best Practices in Power Management. I suggest you search for the documentation for the servers you have at hand to see what the vendors have to offer in advice on settings and how to set them.

Possible Values here are:

Static MAX Performance
DBPM Disabled ( BIOS will set P-State to MAX) Memory frequency = Maximum Performance Fan algorithm = Performance

OS Control
Enable OS DBPM Control (BIOS will expose all possible P states to OS) Memory frequency = Maximum Performance Fan algorithm = Power

Active Power Controller
Enable DellSystem DBPM (BIOS will not make all P states available to OS) Memory frequency = Maximum Performance Fan algorithm = Power

Custom
CPU Power and Performance Management: Maximum Performance | Minimum Power | OS DBPM | System DBPM Memory Power and Performance Management: Maximum Performance |1333Mhz |1067Mhz |800Mhz| Minimum Power Fan Algorithm Performance | Power

And since I’m a nice guy for all you people running a bit older hardware like a PE2950 III there it is called “Demand-Based Power Management” under the CPU Information and you actually disable it.

Now when you’re running Hyper-V and you disabled SpeedStep or “Cool’n’Quiet” you’ll see something like this in the GUI:

There is nothing to configure so it’s greyed out but it doesn’t really reflect your intentions. There can change this using the GUI if the fact the faded out options are not reflecting what you configured in the BIOS  annoys you or you can use powercfg to make them less “contradictionary”. All you need to do is run the following line from the command prompt: “powercfg -setactive 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c” …

… and immediately you’ll see the greyed out GUI reflect a bit more what you actually set in the BIOS. Mind you this is cosmetics, but hey, we’re inclined that way by evolution.

As stated above you can also use the “Change settings that are currently unavailable” to enable the radio buttons for “High performance” but do note again that if you didn’t enable the operating system to control the power it’s cosmetics.

So now when you think you have this figured out and you’re gazing at CPUz to watch the results you might still see some differences. Aha, well there is still Turbo Boost (no, not that turbo button on your 1990’s PC)  seen in the DELL R710 BIOS as Turbo Mode (AMD offers similar functionality in Turbo Core)that we left enabled under “Processor Information” in the BIOS. This means that sometimes, when the CPU can use an extra power boost, it will get it, on top of the full power it has now by default since we configured it for Maximum Performance.

So Turbo Mode will sometimes cause you to see a higher frequency than what your CPU’s specification says it has in CPUz as in the left picture below. Without Turbo Boost it looks more like the specs (right picture below)

And voila, that was a quick overview of where to see & do what. I don’t have access to more modern HP kit right now so the BIOS screenshots are from 2 different generations DELL Servers, but you’ll figure it out for your hardware I’m sure. Hope this clarifies certain things to you all. I know there is a lot more to all this, how it works, how many P-states there are but I’m not a CPU engineer or a hardcore overclocker. I’m just a systems engineer trying to get the most out of his hardware in a realistic way.

Hyper-V 3.0 Leaked Screen Shots From Windows 8 Create A Buzz

Posted on by
Reply

Well, last Monday, June 20th 2011 was quite a twitter active day about some leaked Windows 8 screen shots that lifted a tip of the veil  about Hyper-V 3.0 / Hyper-V vNext or Hyper-V 3. You can take a peak here (Windows Now by Robert McLaws) and here (WinRumors) to see for yourself.

Now Scot Lowe also blogged on this but with some more detail. The list below is the one form Scott Lowe’s blog http://blogs.virtualizationadmin.com/lowe/2011/06/20/hyper-v-30-%e2%80%93-what%e2%80%99s-coming/ but I added some musings and comments to certain items.

  • Virtual Fibre Channel Adapter  ==> nice, I guess the competition of iSCSI was felt. How will this turn out/means with regards to SAN/DRVIVER/HBA support is interesting and there is a mention of virtual fiber channel SAN in the screenshots …
  • Storage Resource Pools  & Network Resource Pools   ==> this could become sweet … I’m dreaming about my wish list feedback to Microsoft but without details I won’t speculate any further.
  • New .VHDX virtual hard drive format (Up to 16TB + power failure resiliency) ==> This is just plain sweet, we’re no longer bound by 2TB LUNs on our physical storage (SAN), now we can take that to the next level.
  • Support for more than 4 cores! (My machine has 12 cores) ==> I say “Bring it on!”
  • NUMA – Memory per Node, Cores per Node, Nodes per Processor Socket ==> Well, well … what will this translate into? Help deal with Dynamic Memory? Aid in virtualization of SQL Servers (i.e. better support for scaling up, for now scaling out works better here).
  • Hardware Acceleration (Virtual Machine Queue & IPsec Offload)
  • Bandwidth Management ==> Ah, that would be nice 🙂
  • DHCP Guard  ==> This is supposed to drop DHCP traffic from VM “masquerading” as DHCP servers. Could be very useful, but need details. Will a DHCP server need to be authorize?. What with non Windows VMs, do you add “good” DHCP servers to an allow list?
  • Router Guard  ==> same as above but for rogue routers.  Drops router advertisement and redirection messages from unauthorized virtual machines pretending to be others. So this sound like an allow list.
  • Monitor Port Provides for monitoring of network traffic in and out of a virtual machine. Forwards the information to a monitoring virtual machine.  ==> Do I hear some cheering network engineers?
  • Virtual Switch Extensions.So far, there appear to be two filters added: NDIS Capture LightWeight Filter and WFP vSwitch Layers LightWeight Filter.

All of this is pretty cool stuff and has many of us wanting to get our hands on the first beta 🙂 I’ve been running Windows Server tweaked as desktop since Windows 2003 so I have Hyper-V already in that role but hey bring it on. I ‘m very eager to get started with this. I have visions on System Center Virtual machine Manager 2012, Hyper-V 3.0 with very capable recent SAN technology … Open-mouthed smile

Hyper-V Team at Microsoft Rocks

Posted on by
Reply

The Hyper-V team at Microsoft and the Belgian Hyper-V contact at Microsoft are a very communicative and responsive group of people. Every time I have brought a need, a question or a problem to their attention they take it up and deliver a solution, an answer or a fix respectively. An example of this can be found in this blog post https://blog.workinghardinit.work/2010/01/29/microsoft-really-listens-enhances-nvspbind/ on functionality they added to nvspbind on our request.

More recently we ran into an issue with the Windows 2008 SP2 SKUs “Without Hyper-V” which I blogged about in KB2230887 Hotfix for Dynamic Memory with Windows 2008 Standard & Web edition does not apply to without Hyper-V editions?. I also brought this to the attention of John Howard. The reply was swift and positive. The Dynamic Memory owner Serdar was on the case and working with the Windows Sustained Engineering group to provide a re-release of the hotfix so it would support those “Without Hyper-V” SKUs. This has been fixed now as announced on the TechNet forum thread here, just scroll to the latest post. The only negative point here is that they forgot to mention it on the blog post and that you now need to call them to get the hotfix, why this is, I do not know.

UPDATE: As of 24 hours the hotfix is downloadable again http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2230887 (v2).

Over the years I’ve been impressed with what they delivered with Hyper-V out of the box. They’ve had some issues but they recognized them early and fixed ‘m fast. It has been a pleasure working with this technology for the last three years and I am now enjoying the benefits of Dynamic Memory with Windows Server 2008 SP1. All I can say that if you have a genuine interest in the technology and communicate clearly and politely with Microsoft personnel they are very engaged to help you. I’m pretty pleased Smile.