Reading Time: 2 minutes If you are planning to backup a Microsoft Hyper-V cluster with Veeam Backup & Replication you may have some issues during the configuration of your environment. Compared to VMware vSphere backup where are defined some Veeam proxy on Windows machines (virtual or physical), in a Hyper-V backup, each Hyper-V node act also as a Veeam proxy!
Reading Time: 3 minutes The latest Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 add an interesting new features in Hyper-V: Discrete Device Assignment. This feature implement a “device passthrough” for virtual machines running on Hyper-V: users can now take some of the PCI Express devices in their systems and pass them through directly to a guest VM.
Reading Time: 3 minutes As you probably know, Windows Server 2003 has (finally) reach its end-of-life. For the Windows 2003 Server family the critical dates were the following: On July 13, 2010 Mainstream Support for Windows Server 2003 family ended. On July 14, 2015 Extended Support for Windows Server 2003 family will end. So one year after the Microsoft Windows XP (and Office 2003) retirement, now it’s the turn of the Windows Server 2003 (and of course the R2 version) operating system family, after 12 years!
Reading Time: 2 minutes Until now Microsoft simple does not support nested virtualization in its Hyper-V product. Nothing wrong with it, but it’s a case where not supported means also that it simple does not work at all. So the only way to test Hyper-V (or other hypervisor) in a lab with a single physical system (server or client) was using other hypervisors (VMware ESXi, Workstation, or also Paralles or others). Or using this trick (useful also with the new hardware requirement of the next Hyper-V) but with the big limit where the VMs cannot be powered on at […]
Reading Time: 5 minutes The next release of Windows family is really close and a technical preview (both for the client and the server OS) is already available for the download. Of course it’s one of the main theme of the TechEd Europe and will be one of the hot topics on the MVP Summit on next week. Of course the new Windows Server (actually named Windows Server 10 on some sites, but probably renamed in Windows Server 2015) has a lot of new features and improvements that are covered on a dedicated TechNet page. Note that this list may be not complete yet… […]
Reading Time: 2 minutes Veeam has released another great free tool: Veeam Task Manager for Hyper-V. Veeam Task Manager for Hyper-V is also one of the many new features in Veeam Management Pack v7 for System Center. Veeam Task Manager provides detailed Hyper-V performance monitoring metrics for CPU and memory at the individual VM level so you can identify which VMs are using the host resources. The metrics are updated every three seconds by default and can be configured to update less frequently if desired. And Veeam Task Manager for Hyper-V is not only free, but is also a portable […]
Reading Time: 2 minutes How you probably know is possible run Hyper-V role (or Hyper-V Server) in a VM using latest version of VMware virtualization products (vSphere and Workstation) because they also can “emulate” the hardware instructions (AMD-V or Intel-VT) needed of hypervisors like Microsoft Hyper-V (but also, for example, Citix XenServer). More complicated if you was to run Hyper-V in a nested VM inside Hyper-V (or some other virtualization platform that lacks of this “emulation” feature).
Reading Time: 9 minutes Now that both Microsoft and VMware have officially announced the new released of their virtualization products it’s possible make an homogenous comparison between Hyper-V 2012 R2 (the fourth generation of Hyper-V) and vSphere 5.5. VMware vSphere 5.5 introduces several news and scalability improvements, on the other side Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 R2 consolidate its features and improve what was already existing in the 2012 version, with a limited (but significant) new features. For example now, finally, some VMware old date features are mainstream also in Hyper-V, like VM hot cloning, hot disk resize (in this case […]
Reading Time: 3 minutes Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 R2 has been announced some months ago with the announce of new Microsoft OSes and will be officially available on October 2013 (actually the RTM it’s already available for OEM and people with Technet/MSDN subscription access). Scalability aspects has not been changed, so limits are just the same. But there are several other improvements.
Reading Time: 5 minutes Some months ago I’ve write about the VMware Hands on Labs and how labs are important for testing and learning about a product (also for other vendor). Events like VMworld, Microsoft TechEd, Dell Storage Forum, HP Discover, … are a good moment to have access at those kind of labs. But of course you can also build your own labs (as described in this post) but this require more effort. A good work-around is use on-line and on-demand lab. For VMware the on-line version is just in beta, but for Microsoft this kind of tools […]
Reading Time: < 1 minute After years of development, Microsoft launched the latest version of Windows (with the NT version 6.2), with a official announce of its CEO Steve Ballmer during product’s launch event in New York on October 25, 2012. It is most probably the most radical version of the Windows OS (at least in the aspect, in the design was NT 6.0) and the client OS is mainly designed for new mobile devices like tablets, but can also be used on desktop PC (but need more training on it). Windows 8 is the new client OS and the […]
Reading Time: < 1 minute Network tuning and offload Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2012 (DOC) Network Subsystem Performance Tuning Networking Adapter Performance Guidelines (on Windows Server 2008 R2, but still good) Specific technologies Registered I/O Networking Extensions (RIO): Microsoft site, alternative site Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ) IPsec Task Offload Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV): Overview of Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV), What is SR-IOV? (Scott Lowe’s Blog), PCI SIG Specifications Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V & Data Centre Bridging (DCB)
Reading Time: 2 minutes With the new Windows Server 2012 there are several improvements in the storage part, expecially when we apply to a Hyper-V enviroment. The main news on the storage part, is that now is possible build a Windows Fail-Over Cluster with a shared SMB3 share and use it for store VMs (in a similar way as NFS could be use to NAS connectivity on a VMware vSphere cluster). Also a specific function (Virtual Fibre Channel) as been added to map a FC SAN LUN directly to a VM (similar to the same function in VMware vSphere). […]
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