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January 27th, 2010 by Andrew H.
Virtualization offers advantages that take many forms, but with it can come challenges because virtualization lies. The basic premise of virtualization is that the operating system running on a virtual machine is presented with hardware that doesn’t really exist. Performance monitoring on any platform can be complicated and influenced by a variety of factors, but measuring performance on a system that involves lies is even harder. Luckily, most virtualization products have special ways to gather more accurate system performance. This article will focus on Hyper-V, but similar tools are available for other platforms.
Disk
Since Hyper-V supports dynamically expanding disks, the disk capacity of the virtual machine can be misleading. When dynamically expanding disks are used, plenty of free capacity might appear to be available on the virtual machine, but the host’s free space could be very low. For this reason, it’s important to monitor the available capacity of the Hyper-V host as well as the virtual machines. Disk performance can be monitored accurately in Hyper-V virtual machines the same way as physical machines.
Network
Multiple virtual machines can share the same network adapter. Since each virtual machine can only report its own usage, it’s important to watch the usage of all virtual machines. VMs will also report that they are on a 10gbps connection; however, the bandwidth of the link will always actually equal the bandwidth of the external link.
Processor
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Tags: Hyper-V, monitoring, virtual machines, virtualization
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September 9th, 2009 by Patrick M.
Microsoft recently released their newest version in the Windows Server series. This new OS, Windows Server 2008 R2, isn’t simply a feature pack release for the current Windows Server 2008 OS, but is actually an entirely new version which that uses the same codebase as Windows 7. There are a number of new features included in this new release, and many of them are making the IT community very interested in how they can leverage them in their business. Here’s a brief run-down of some of the enhancements you can expect to see.
#1 – Hyper-V R2
The newest iteration of Microsoft’s virtualization offering includes a host of new features. The most intriguing feature we’ve seen so far is the added support for Live Migration Support through the use of Cluster Shared Volumes. This basically means that you can transfer live (read: running, powered on) virtual machines between cluster nodes without any perceived downtime. This feature, combined with improved support for up to 32 logical CPUs and dynamic memory allocation, shape up to make Hyper-V ready for prime-time. If you were considering getting your hands dirty with virtualization, now would probably be a good time to start.
What this means to you: You could run your web applications on virtual machines and be able to perform hardware maintenance without ever letting your users know. (HINT HINT, TWITTER)
#2 – Desktop Virtualization with Terminal Services…er…Remote Desktop Services?
In addition to a name change from Terminal Services to Remote Desktop Services (RDS), several real improvements have been made to Microsoft’s remote server management tools. New capabilities in the Remote Desktop Protocol suite aim to make a remote user’s experience nearly identical to that of a local user. Among these capabilities are:
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Tags: Hyper-V, IIS 7.5, RDS, virtualization, Windows Server 2008 R2
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April 9th, 2009 by Andy B.
At this year’s WinHEC 2008 event, Microsoft announced several new features coming in Hyper-V R2, promising to deliver the final pieces of an enterprise level OS virtualization to compete with VMware. New features in Windows 2008 R2, Hyper-V R2 and SCVMM 2008 include:
Live Migration
A much sought after feature in any virtualization product is live migration – the ability to move running VMs from one host to another without interruption of service. In order to achieve this, a shared file system is needed and Hyper-V R2 answers the call with a new feature called “clustered shared volumes.”
Management of live migrations is best performed under the watchful eye of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, which can provide additional features such as live migration via policy. Upgrading will also be easy, you only need to update to Hyper-V R2 – no other infrastructure updates are needed.
Logical Processor Support
This new version boasts support for 32 logical processors per host, which is twice the supported number of Hyper-V 1.0.
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Tags: Hyper-V, virtualization
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March 31st, 2009 by Jeff P.
Server virtualization is an extremely powerful tool that can help you make the most out of your server environment. But just how exactly can you benefit by going virtual? We asked our experts to come up with some of the uses that would benefit your business. If you haven’t considered what virtualization can do for you, now’s the time to think about it. Here are top seven uses for virtualization our experts came up with!
1. Multiple OS’s on one system.
Your entire infrastructure is run on Linux servers, except this one legacy ASP application that requires a small Windows box. Why dedicate separate hardware for this when you can just put a virtual Windows machine on a server that’s also running a Linux VM?
2. Go green!
You might have a few servers in your environment that aren’t being fully utilized. Condense them as virtual machines on a single physical server. This eco-friendly solution helps you “go green” by putting money in your wallet—it costs you less to use less hardware and build out virtual servers.
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Tags: Hyper-V, list, managed hosting, virtualization, vmware, xenserver
