Get your free NFR license for Veeam Backup & Replication v6 for Hyper-V

http://platform.twitter.com/widgets/hub.1326407570.html

Veeam is offering an NFR license for MVP/MCP/MCTS:

http://www.veeam.com/nfr/free-nfr-license-hyper-v

Get your free NFR license for
Veeam Backup & Replication v6 for Hyper-V

If you are a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP), Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) or a Most Valuable Professional (MVP), you can get a FREE 2-socket NFR* license for Veeam Backup & Replication v6 for your home or work lab.

Register NOW! Get your FREE NFR license from Veeam

*An NFR (Not for Resale) license can only be used for evaluation or demonstration purposes. Read EULA for more details.

 

 

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1 wins gold medal!

Searchdatacenter’s 2011 product of the year award for System Management is SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1!

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/guide/SearchDataCenter-Products-of-the-Year-Systems-Management-winners-2011

Linux Integration Services 3.2 released for Hyper-V

New version of the IC was released yesterday (1-Dec-2011).

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28188

Overview

When installed in a supported Linux virtual machine running on Hyper-V, the Linux Integration Components provide.

Driver support: Linux Integration Services supports the network controller and the IDE and SCSI storage controllers that were developed specifically for Hyper-V.

Fastpath Boot Support for Hyper-V: Boot devices now take advantage of the block Virtualization Service Client (VSC) to provide enhanced performance.

Timesync: The clock inside the virtual machine will remain synchronized with the clock on the virtualization server with the help of the pluggable time source device.

Integrated Shutdown: Virtual machines running Linux can be shut down from either Hyper-V Manager or System Center Virtual Machine Manager by using the “Shut Down” command.

Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) Support: Supported Linux distributions can use up to 4 virtual processors (VP) per virtual machine.

Heartbeat: Allows the virtualization server to detect whether the virtual machine is running and responsive.

KVP (Key Value Pair) Exchange: Information about the running Linux virtual machine can be obtained by using the Key Value Pair exchange functionality on the Windows Server 2008 virtualization server.

Integrated Mouse Support: The cursor is no longer bound to the VMConnect window when used with the Linux Graphical User Interface.

====

New/updated from 3.1 release:

• Synthetic Mouse Support: The virtualized mouse device is no longer bound to the VMConnect window, and can now be used with a RDP session.
• Merged Device Drivers: We now present a single device driver for both IDE and SCSI devices (hv_storvsc).
• Windows 8 Fix: The synthetic network device (hv_netvsc) can now be used with a Windows 8 host, eliminating the hang on boot that was previously seen.
• SCVMM Fix: This release fixes the issue as described in KB2586286.
• Improved Setup Experience: Users now only need to run install.sh (as root) to automatically detect the correct architecture and install the appropriate drivers.

 

Does your CPU have what it needs to run Hyper-V 3.0 with Windows 8?

Mark Russinovich does it again with a sweet little tool, CoreInfo.

Coreinfo is a command-line utility that shows you the mapping between logical processors and the physical processor, NUMA node, and socket on which they reside, as well as the cache’s assigned to each logical processor.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/cc835722

You will need to download, extract and run as an administrator with the -v option.

-v	Dump only virtualization-related features including support for second level address translation. (requires administrative rights on Intel systems).

here’s my i7-2620m: ( the “-” means not present, the “*” means present/supported)

Also:
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU       M 560 @ 2.67GHz
x86 Family 6 Model 37 Stepping 5, GenuineIntel
HYPERVISOR      –       Hypervisor is present
VMX             *       Supports Intel hardware-assisted virtualization
EPT             *       Supports Intel extended page tables (SLAT)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU       X 980  @ 3.33GHz
Intel64 Family 6 Model 44 Stepping 2, GenuineIntel
HYPERVISOR      -       Hypervisor is present
VMX             *       Supports Intel hardware-assisted virtualization
EPT             *       Supports Intel extended page tables (SLAT)

Updated: Hyper-V survival guide

This is a list of Hyper-V resources you can add too, and feel free to rearrange. Just click the “Edit” button above the article.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/125.aspx

SCVMM 2012 public beta available

Download available here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=e0fbb298-8f02-47e7-88be-0614bc44ee32

From the link: 

Feature Summary

• Fabric Management
  • Hyper-V and Cluster Lifecycle Management – Deploy Hyper-V to bare metal server, create Hyper-V clusters, orchestrate patching of a Hyper-V Cluster
  • Third Party Virtualization Platforms – Add and Manage Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX Hosts and Clusters
  • Network Management – Manage IP Address Pools, MAC Address Pools and Load Balancers
  • Storage Management – Classify storage, Manage Storage Pools and LUNs
• Resource Optimization
  • Dynamic Optimization – proactively balance the load of VMs across a cluster
  • Power Optimization – schedule power savings to use the right number of hosts to run your workloads – power the rest off until they are needed
  • PRO – integrate with System Center Operations Manager to respond to application-level performance monitors
• Cloud Management
  • Abstract server, network and storage resources into private clouds
  • Delegate access to private clouds with control of capacity, capabilities and user quotas
  • Enable self-service usage for application administrator to author, deploy, manage and decommission applications in the private cloud
• Service Lifecycle Management
  • Define service templates to create sets of connected virtual machines, os images and applica tion packages
  • Compose operating system images and applications during service deployment
  • Scale out the number of virtual machines in a service
  • Service performance and health monitoring integrated with System Center Operations Manager
  • Decouple OS image and application updates through image-based servicing
  • Leverage powerful application virtualization technologies such as Server App-V

CentOS 5.2-5.6 Hyper-V support announced

http://blogs.technet.com/b/openness/archive/2011/05/15/expanding-interoperability-to-community-linux.aspx

“Specifically, effective immediately, Microsoft will support Windows Server2008 R2 Hyper-V to run CentOS. CentOS is a popular Linux distribution for Hosters, and this was the number one requirement for interoperability that we heard from that community. “

Hyper-V: just use 2 or more NICs!

Add a NIC for management.  This is a Microsoft best practice and there are plenty of threads in the Hyper-V technet forums with users having various issues with one NIC.  Add a NIC, make your IT life easier!

note: IE9 and wordpress don’t seem to get a long.  I wrote this post 4 times, 3 in IE9 that never showed up, once in FF4.

Hyper-V configuration with hvremote.wsf

I wanted to set up a Hyper-V server for testing and keep if off the local domain.  My first attempt with a standard Windows 2008 R2 installation failed miserably.  I started down the manual configuration road from John Howard’s website and came to a dead end.  I then tried his hvremote.wsf script to finish, but apparently I really messed things up when I was manually changing stuff around.

I wiped the install and installed the free Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 and started out with the hvremote.wsf script.  This time I was able to get things up and running pretty quickly.

The hvremote.wsf script should be included with the Hyper-V server.

More Hyper-V and Linux info from Matthew Mattoon

Matthew has posted a bunch of new info on using various Linux distros for Hyper-V: Debian and Ubuntu

Including Ubuntu 10 Alpha