IT Core Blog

As you may know until now only 64 VM’s were supported on a clustered Hyper-V host. Microsoft changed the support limits of virtual machines running in a clustered environment to 1000 VM’s per cluster with a maximum of 384 VM’s per node. This means that clusters with 2 nodes will be able to run a maximum of 2 x 384 = 768 VMs. With a cluster with 3 Nodes you should be able to run 333 VMs per node. In a cluster with the maximum nodes allowed (16 physical nodes), you should be able to run 62 VMs per node…

Requirements and Limits for Virtual Machines and Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2

Here’s some interesting sessions for virtualization from TechEd.

Networking and Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V: Deployment Considerations

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2: Advanced Virtualization Management

The Microsoft System Center Operations Manager Top 20 Must-Have Customizations

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager and Virtual Machine Manager: Monitoring the Service Stack

See the Largest Mission Critical Deployment of Microsoft SQL Server around the World

Check the Latest Videos from TechEd North America

Have Fun

From TechNet’s Channel 9

One of the very cool new features coming in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 is dynamic memory provisioning for virtual machines. In this interview, Vijay Tewari explains how this model works, and gave me a demo of it in action.

Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 helps IT enable users to collaborate across organizational boundaries and easily access applications on-premises and in the cloud, while maintaining application security. Through a claims-based infrastructure, IT can enable a single sign-on experience for end-users to applications without requiring a separate account or password, whether applications are located in partner organizations or hosted in the cloud.

Get it Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 RTW
Read more about Federation Services

Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 is to point out both
the new and the improved in the latest version of SQL Server. Because this
version is Release 2 (R2) of SQL Server 2008, you might think the changes are
relatively minor—more than a service pack, but not enough to justify an entirely
new version. However, as you read this book, we think you will find that there are a
lot of exciting enhancements and new capabilities engineered into SQL Server 2008 R2
that will have a positive impact on your applications, ranging from improvements
in operation to those in management. It is definitely not a minor release!

Read/Get it here

The day has come; Hyper-V Dynamic Memory will be added in W2008 R2 SP1. This is a new feature that many Hyper-V Admins were screaming about, thank you Microsoft

But that’s not the end of the good news…:)
According with Microsoft press release issued today, a bunch of new statements, including features, licensing and requirements changes are available. Here are some of them:

• New VDI promotions
• Improved licensing model for virtual Windows desktop
• Windows XP Mode no longer requires hardware virtualization technology
• Hyper-V Dynamic Memory
• Microsoft RemoteFX
• New technology agreement with Citrix Systems

“In today’s webcast, Microsoft and Citrix executives, analysts, and customers will discuss today’s news and Microsoft’s desktop-to-datacenter virtualization strategy. Today’s webcast also marks the beginning of a 100-city, worldwide series of events to educate customers on the comprehensive portfolio of desktop and datacenter virtualization solutions provided by Microsoft and its partners, including Citrix. To join the dialogue, Twitter users can tweet their comments and questions to #MSVirt.”

MS Press – Microsoft Accelerates Desktop Virtualization
Virtualization Team – Dynamic Memory Coming To Hyper-V

AdExplorer v1.3: This update to AdExplorer, an Active Directory editor, has major node expansion performance improvements and a number of minor bug fixes.

VMMap v2.6: VMMap, a powerful process virtual and physical memory analysis tool, now shows both graphical and numeric breakdowns of private virtual memory, as well as heap configuration flags.

Disk2vhd v1.5: Disk2Vhd v1.5 works with Hyper-V SCSI direct-attached volumes and reports an error when a snapshot includes offline volumes.

LiveKd v3.14: This version of LiveKd has better detection of the Debugging Tools package installation and launches the debugger in a mode that skips the unnecessary root-cause analysis of the virtual dump file.

Sigcheck v1.66: This update to Sigcheck, a file version and signature checking utility, fixes a bug in the certificate revocation check logic.

From Sysinternals

From Windows Virtualization Product Group; 

Hyper-V customers are running both SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as guests. We have provided Linux integration components for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, but customers did not have the same level of performance with Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a guest since the IC’s were not supported for RHEL.

 We are excited to announce the availability of Linux integration components for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL 5.2, 5.3, and 5.4) which provides synthetic network and storage drivers enabling RHEL to work with the optimized devices provided by Hyper-V.  We’ve already submitted these drivers to the upstream Linux kernel in July 2009 (read here for more information) and are looking forward to these being integrated with a future version of RHEL.  In the meantime, Microsoft will provide full support for these drivers.  Red Hat provides best effort support for these components. Customers interested in understanding how these are supported by Red Hat prior to their inclusion natively into to their distribution can read the details at the Red Hat Knowledge Base article.

 To download this new version of the Linux Integration Components, visit this link on the Microsoft Download Center.

Finally!!!
This was something that I was waiting for With DPM 2010 most Administrators will see many “old” problems and incompatibilities solved, especially at Virtualization level. With DPM 2010, IT Admins will have the ability to backup VM’s at the host level when the VM’s are stored on a Cluster Shared Volume (CSV).

You can download the DPM 2010 release candidate from Connect and watch the webcast video here.

Many people have asked to Microsoft a tool/update like this one. The reason for that is simple, they need to restore backups from Windows XP/2003 to the new Windows7/2008 R2. As usual, Microsoft gave them what they asked for. Now it’s even simpler to do the migration from XP/2003 to the Windows7/2008 R2.

“Utility for restoring backups made on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 to computers that are running Windows 7 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2.“

- Download the 32Bit version of KB974674
- Check the 64Bit version of KB974674

Go for it…