When I watched the VirtualComputer NxTop video on DABCC last week, I was pretty impressed about what Doug Lane was showing us there. Especially after the release of the XenClient from Citrix the bare metal client hypervisor got a lot of attention. Now while Citrix just released it’s first public version of a client hypervisor, VirtualComputer seems to be a big step ahead, especially when we take into account the management of hypervisor based clients.

So after having watched the NxTop demonstration video I headed over to the VirtualComputer website, created an account and downloaded the software and installation guide. I quickly checked the NxTop system requirements and decided that I am going to give this a try. Is this really as good as it looks in the demo video?

I first installed a Windows Server 2008-R2 with Hype-V enabled and then installed the NxTop Center which is the Management Console from where you create and manage the NxTop virtual machines. The installation went smoothly, actually there was nothing I had to do since all required components (SQL Database, Apache Tomcat Server and Java Runtime) are automatically installed by the NxTop Center installation process. Detailed information for the NxTop installation can be found here (registration required). Some additional configuration was needed for the Hyper-V integration, but that was about it.

Now that I had the NxTop Center ready, I prepared two virtual machines, one for Windows XP and one for Windows 7. Now here comes one of the first cool things, when creating a NxTop within the NxTop Center console, it actually launches a new VM in Hyper-V, once I had the two VMs prepared I was ready to publish them to a NxTop Client. Now that I had the server side ready, I continued by installing the NxTop engine (the bare metal client hypervisor) on a notebook. This is a simple process, just burn the provided NxTop Engine ISO file to a CD, boot from it and follow the installation instructions. Once the NxTop client was ready I logged on with my previously created user and connected to the NxTop Center server.

The above picture shows the NxTop Center. Although the NxTop Center console is a web based application, it does very much look like an Microsoft Management Console Snap-in, and in fact the Console follows many of the design principals of an MMC. Configuration items on the left, content description in the middle and an action pane on the right. But now lets go back to the NxTop Engine client. So once i logged in for the first time, the NxTop client registered itself automatically with the NxTop Center.

As a next step I assigned the two prepared NxTop VMs to my test user.

I then headed over to the NxTop Engine client, initiated a refresh, and after having contacted the NxTop Center two NxTop OS logo’s appeared on the desktop and the download of the VMs to the NxTop engine started. The download of the VMs over a local LAN went pretty fast, once downloaded some additional local configuration tasks were executed, but after a few minutes I was ready to go. Of course I bumped into an issue once or twice but that was all a matter of not having read the documentation properly. (i talk about those in another post).

Conclusion, this is as good as it looked like in the video, if not even better! Easy to install, simple to manage and NxTop Engine performance is great. A special thanks to Sandrijn Stead from VirtualComputer for providing me with a demo license on a Saturday afternoon.

When talking about Hyper-V with customers or colleagues, I notice that there is quite some confusion around the definition of Hyper-V Server and Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V.

Hyper-V Server 2008 / 2008-R2
The Hyper-V Server is a stand-alone product, which contains only the Windows Hypervisor, Windows Server driver model and virtualization components.  What’s important to know, the Hyper-V Server comes for FREE!.

No, Hyper-V Server is not just Windows Server Core + Hyper-V, the only thing this server is designed for is virtualization and therefore does not contain any other server roles.

Windows Server 2008 / 2008-R2 with Hyper-V
Here Hyper-V is an enabled server role running on Windows Server 2008 (64 bit) or Windows Server 2008 R2 (note that Server 2008 R2 only comes in 64 bit).

The below table provides an overview of the Hyper-V Server and Windows Server products.

Source: Microsoft

Other Sources:

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Preview (Paul Thurrot)

Microsoft TechNet – Hyper-V

First Look: Hyper-V Server

If you are running a Hyper-V server, this is something you want to look at. The VHDShellExt.VBS extends the explorer context menu for VHD files with the following functions.

Download the script from MSDN Code Gallery and run cscript.exe VHDShellExt.vbs /action:setup for installation. More documentation can be found on Ravikanth’s site.

This morning i had an issue with a fileserver that is running as a guest on a Hyper-V server, far away from my location, in fact I did not even know what Hyper-V system is hosting that Fileserver. I wanted to see within Hyper-V manager how the system is doing, but without knowing the Hyper-V server host name, you can’t connect (kind of logic)

So what’s the name of the underlying server that is hosting my virtual server ? A friend within my team found the answer.

To my surprise this information is stored within the guest windows registry under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Virtual Machine\Guest\Parameters as shown in the picture below.

Today I took a closer look at the Windows Services running on Windows7. A lot of the performance improvements with Windows7 are related to the way how and when services are being loaded so i thought it’s worth to see what’s happening there.

I first installed a Windows 7 build 7077 and a Windows Vista SP1 client on my Hyper-V server. Because I am primarily interested in what’s happening in an enterprise environment, both clients were joined to a domain.

To obtain the services data from each system, i executed the following PowerShell command:

gwmi win32_service | select Displayname, Started, StartMode, State  | format-table | out-file c:\data\services.txt

I then imported the data in excel and then the painful work actually started… , comparing…. I compared the services that were installed including the start mode and current state. I will talk more about the start mode in Part2.

New Services / New Default Services

• Application Identity
• ActiveX Installer (AxInstSV)
• BitLocker Drive Encryption…
• Bluetooth Support Service
• Disk Defragmenter
• Encrypting File System (EFS)
• Windows Media Center Recei…
• Windows Media Center Sched…
• Fax
• HomeGroup Provider
• Media Center Extender Service
• BranchCache
• Power
• RPC Endpoint Mapper
• Adaptive Brightness
• Software Protection
• SPP Notification Service
• Storage Service
• Credential Manager
• Windows Biometric Service
• Parental Controls
• WWAN AutoConfig

Some of the above services are available in Vista as well, but aren’t installed by default.

Renamed

It looks like all “Terminal Service…” type Services  are now called Remote Desktop…..”

Removed*

The below Services exist on Vista, but I haven’t seen them on Windows7.

• removed
• DFS Replication
• ReadyBoost
• Software Licensing
• SL UI Notification Service
• Microsoft Software Shadow …

* well possible that some of the above “removed” services have been renamed or integrated within the above “new” services.

Read Part 2

Talking to people about virtualization almost every day, I notice that many aren’t that familiar yet with all the terminologies. Ben Armstrong has written two good articles on his blog, describing all the terminologies used around Hyper-V.

Hyper-V Terminology

Hyper-V Terminology Update

One of the things that seems to confuse people a lot is understanding the difference between Hyper-V Server and Hyper-V on Server 2008. I take the freedom of copying Ben’s explanation (below).

Microsoft Hyper-V Server
When you see people talk about “Microsoft Hyper-V Server” they are talking about the stand alone version of Hyper-V.  The simple rule here is the “Microsoft” means that you are not talking about a full Windows installation.  From a Microsoft lexicon point of view software is either part of Windows – and gets the Windows naming (e.g. Windows Powershell) or is not part of Windows and gets the Microsoft naming (e.g. Microsoft Office).

Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 / Windows Server 2008 with the Hyper-V role enabled
The part is a little clumsy.  While we have the “Windows Server 2008 without Hyper-V” SKU, its alternative is just “Windows Server 2008”.  But in order to avoid confusing people into thinking there is another SKU you will never see Microsoft say “Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V” as that sounds to close to the aforementioned SKU name.  As a result you will see the above terms used to refer to a Windows Server 2008 system that has Hyper-V enabled (as compared to a Windows Server 2008 system that does not have Hyper-V enabled).

Brian and Gabe review the big events, trends, and themes of the desktop and application virtualization space from 2008.

Watch Brian Madden TV  Episode 1 – 2008 year in review

Today I’ve tested the WIM2VHD script provided by Mike Kolitz a Software Design Engineer from the Hyper-V Team at Microsoft.

In short, the script allows you to create a bootable VHD file directly from Windows 7 installation media, so you don’t need to go through the whole Windows Installation process. Once the VHD is completed, you can move it directly into your Hyper-V System and boot the operating system.

Detailed information about the script can found on the MSDN Code Gallery – Windows(R) Image to Virtual Hard Disk (WIM2VHD) Converter.
Note that you must have the Windows 7 AIK installed to run this script. The script provides a lot of optional command line options, the shortest with using all default settings is as following:

cscript wim2vhd.wsf /wim:d:\sources\install.wim /sku:ULTIMATE

If you don’t feel like trying it out yourself but want to see how things are working, watch the video below.

With the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V will also support “Live Migration”. Today Hyper-V provides “Quick Migration” which still means a short downtime, with Live Migration a move from one to another Hyper-V system can be performed without any system downtime.

A feature overview document can be found here. And a step by step guide can be found on TechNet here.

Confused about all the different solutions around Virtualization ? then get the “Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions” eBook. The document gives you all the information you need to better understand the various Virtualization offerings Microsoft has available today and will release in the near future.

Great article i just finished reading about automating virtual machine host deployment on Hyper-V.

Download the complete Technet Magazine January 2009 edition here. When having trouble reading the CHM file, read this.

First let me avoid confusion here, I’m not talking about “dynamically expanding” discs but about the disc type e.g. Basic and Dynamic.

In the past weeks we have been migrating some of our physical servers into Hyper-V. Just before X-mas my colleague had prepared a plain Windows 2003 system for me so that i could continue with installing the necessary applications that were planned to run on that system. Two discs were created, the primary disc that contains the boot partition is connected to an IDE controller and the second disc to a SCSI controller.  Note that the OS boot disc must always be connected to an IDE controller. So the disk layout looks as following:

Here comes the issue we ran in….. Upon every system reboot Windows lost the second DATA disc. and it would only come back after manually reactivating the disc within the disc management console. After some web searches i came across the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article that explains this behaviour: SCSI disks are disconnected in the child partition of Hyper-V.

The problem was related to the fact that the DATA disc was configured as a “dynamic” disc ^so we had to change that to a basic disc. Since you can’t convert a dynamic disc to a basic disc without data loss (unless you follow this non-supported hardcore method) a second BASIC disc had to be created and the data needed to be copied from the old DATA disc to the new one. Once completed the dynamic disc can be deleted. In the end the disc layout looks as following.

All works fine now, and discs don’t get disconnected after a system reboot. Leasson learned: Don’t use dynamic discs in Hyper-V.

It’s about 48 hours ago , that i started with setting up a System Center Virtual Machine Manager environment, No worries, i have been doinng otherthings in between, although today , uhm yesterday I spend most of the time with it. Also the hardware I have available , isn’t realy that powerfull, so it all takes a bit time, but that’s okay, while waiting I’ve just continued reading.

So for all those that plan to give SCVMM a try as well but don’t have big powerfull servers available let me encourage you, my setup is as following:

• Windows 2008 x64 with Hyper-V runs on a HP 8710p notebook with a 150 GB disk and 2 GB RAM
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager runs on Windows 2008 x64 that runs in a WMWare Workstation session that runs on a HP dc7800 desktop with 2 GB RAM, the session has 1024 GB RAM assigned
• The System Center Virtual Machine Manager Console is installed on Windows Vista SP1 that runs in a VMWare Workstation Session that runs on another desktop with 3 GB RAM.
• An Active Directory is required, not for the guest systems you run in SCVMM but for SCVMM itself. I run the AD on a Windows 2003 Server within VMWare as well, as i was slowly running out of RAM on my physical machine, i just gave it a 256 MB RAM, works well so far.

In general i do strongly recommend that before you start installing the various component, you make sure you are working with a most resent installation, e.g. Vista must be SP1 and for Windows Server 2008, there are a couple of important updates to be applied, espeically to update the Hyper-V Server. Read Warning on Hyper-V hosts under SCVMM for more details.

The first page to start is the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager site. More VM related links can be found on the Virtual PC Guy blog.

To be continued….

Just recently Microsoft launched the System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Watch a demo here.  For those that have a subscription to the Windows IT Pro Magazine, read the article “What You Need to Know About Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008“.

Tomorrow there are plans to move some VMWare slices into Hyper-V. In preparation of that i have found the following article on TechNet

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverhyperv/thread/ef8c12f7-c45d-442e-9a30-c43cd87df3b3/

and on vmToolkit there is a the tool VMDK to VHD converter that should help doing the job, so far for the theory, hope it works out.