Interested in becoming the go-to cloud person in your company?
Cloud computing is becoming more immersive in day-to-day operations of organizations as of late. As an IT Professional, it is within your best interest to stay ahead of the curve and take the lead on being your organization’s cloud connoisseur. Take the lead in providing all the benefits of public cloud to your organization such as pooled resources, self-service and usage-based elasticity, but with additional security, control and customization. Time saved on maintenance would allow for more time to be spent on strategic objectives, adding value to your organization and furthering your career.
Microsoft would like to help you reach your goal by providing:
· Free evaluations
· Microsoft Virtual Academy courses
· Guided labs
Become the Private Cloud champion for your organization and have a chance in winning your own lab computer by participating in the free Microsoft offered Virtual Academy. Complete two TechNet evaluations, and take the selected Microsoft Virtual Academy courses for your chance at a $5,000 grand prize or a chance to win anHPEliteBook Revolve and two chances to win400 Microsoft Points.
Hurry the contest is quickly running out. There’s not much time left to get your name in there. The contest runs from March 4, 2013 and ends on April 30, 2013.
During our first cross Canada tour for the Windows Server 2012 IT Camp, earlier this year and the current #CANITPRO Windows Server Camp v2, Anthony Bartolo, Mitch Garvis and Myself have been talking with IT pros to see what they needed in terms of learning resources.
They mostly told us that since they are busy keeping the “lights on” in their enterprises and that the time and budgets to get training was getting smaller and smaller. They told us that they wanted a quick recipe book that would get them started. Don’t worry, nothing will burn or catch on fire with our recipes…. Well, it shouldn’t… I think…
With that in mind we put together a series of step-by-step high level guides to allow IT pros to get acquainted with Windows Server 2012 at a high level. Those post are high level and a great way to start learning about the new or improved functionality in Windows Server 2012.
We currently have the following content, with more being added every week. So bookmark the CANITPRO blog and come back often.
Last May, Chris Di Lullo posted a great note regarding a phone scam that had been going around.
Well, they are back at it. (I’m wondering if they ever stopped).
I received 3 calls this weekend from someone posing as a Microsoft employee offering to help me fix my machine. So I thought to myself, “It’s time for a reminder”
Please tell all your friends and family about this so no one gets taken. There’s a great infographic that some of the folks here at Microsoft Canada have put together about how to avoid phone scams that you can use to educate yourself, so you can educate others. I’ve included it below.
Protect yourself and your friends. Spread the word! Like the shampoo commercials of the 80’s, let tells ours friends and have them tell their friends, and so on, and so on….
As it has been the tradition since the Roman Empire used to make promises to the god Janus, for whom the month of January is named, we too are preparing to make our new year’s resolutions.
If you’re already certified as a Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP): Enterprise Administrator or MCITP: Server Administrator, you only need to complete steps 4 and 5 above to earn your Private Cloud certification
Since the last few Windows Server 2012 IT camps a few discussions have sprouted regarding “Thin provisioning” in Storage Spaces. a new feature of Windows Server 20912. Those discussions mainly revolved around 3 things:
What is Thin provisioning?
How will that bring me value?
And, Why should I care?
Thin Provisioning and Storage Spaces?
Thin provisioning or “just-in-time allocations” is a method of optimizing the efficiency with which the available disk space is utilized and the ability to reclaim storage that is no longer needed (also known as trim).
Thin provisioning is designed to address several issues with traditional models for provisioning storage used by enterprises:
Unreliable forecasting of future storage needs makes it hard to pre-allocate storage capacity to meet changing demand.
Pre-allocated storage is often underused, which leads to inefficiencies and unnecessary expenditures.
Managing an enterprise storage system can often add considerable overhead to the overall cost of managing an IT infrastructure
It’s all part of Windows Server 2012 Storage Spaces that operates by allocating disk storage space in a flexible manner based on the space required at any given time. It means is that you can let the server/application/users think they have all the storage they needs, but only purchase disk to keeps pace with total actually consumed storage.
You can also pool together commodity storage devices so you can provision storage as you need it. Storage Spaces is a highly available storage solution that has all the power and flexibility of a SAN but is considerably cheaper and also easier to manage.
Storage Spaces can virtualize storage to create what are called storage pools. A storage pool is an aggregation of unallocated space on physical disks installed in or connected to servers (These disks could be installed inside servers on your network or within just-a-bunch-of-disks (JBOD) enclosures). Storage pools are flexible and elastic, allowing you to add or remove disks from the pool as your demand for storage grows or shrinks.
Once you’ve created a storage pool using Storage Spaces, you can provision storage from the pool by creating virtual disks. A virtual disk behaves exactly like a physical disk except that it can span multiple physical disks within the storage pool. Virtual disks can host simple volumes or volumes with resiliency (mirroring or parity) to increase the reliability or performance of the disk. A virtual disk is sometimes called a LUN.
Storage Spaces is fully remoteable and scriptable. This increases the Operational simplicity. Management is permitted through the Windows Storage Management API, WMI, and Windows PowerShell. And, Storage Spaces can be easily managed through the File Services role in Server Manager.
Configuring a storage pool
Configuring a storage pool using Storage Spaces requires that you have at least one unallocated physical disk available (a disk with no volumes on it). If you want to create a mirrored volume, you’ll need at least two physical disks; a parity volume requires at least three physical disks. Pools can consist of a mixture of disks of different types and sizes. Table 3-3 shows the different types of disks supported by Storage Spaces. These disks could be installed inside servers on your network or within just-a-bunch-of-disks (JBOD) enclosures.
Supported drive types
SATA – Serial Advanced Technology Attachment
SCSI – Small Computer System Interface
iSCSI – Internet Small Computer System Interface
SAS – Serial Attached SCSI
USB – Universal Serial Bus
Monitoring
It’s very important to mention that thin provisioning will not prevent storage shortages. Applications will break if storage is not added to the thinly provisioned volumes in time. After you deploy thin-provisioned volumes to application and data servers, and threshold notification and resource exhaustion settings are configured by the storage administrator. The system administrator and the storage administrator MUST monitor and respond to related events. look for the following threshold notification warning events in Event Viewer.
Event ID
General Information
144
Threshold notification without additional information
145
Threshold notification without specific information
146
Threshold notification with used LUN capacity and available LUN capacity information
147
Threshold notification with used LUN capacity and available pool capacity information
148
Threshold notification with used pool capacity and available LUN capacity information
149
Threshold notification with used pool capacity and available pool capacity information
150
Permanent resource exhaustion threshold is reached
Home lab setup
After Lab #2 We have our 2 physical machines and 2 virtual Domain controllers (one on each physical hosts)
VMhost10a and VMhost10b. We have them configured as follows:
VMhost10a – physical
IP Address: 192.168.11.5
Subnet Mask: 225.225.225.0
Gateway: none
DNS1: 192.168.11.100
DNS2: 192.168.11.110
VMHost10B – physical, 192.168.11.10
IP Address: 192.168.11.10
Subnet Mask: 225.225.225.0
Gateway: none
DNS1: 192.168.11.100
DNS2: 192.168.11.110
ITCAMP-DC1 and ITCAMP-DC2. We have them configured as follows:
ITCAMP-DC1 – Virtual
IP Address: 192.168.11.100
Subnet Mask: 225.225.225.0
Gateway: none
DNS1: 192.168.11.100
DNS2: 192.168.11.110
ITCAMP-DC2 – Virtual
IP Address: 192.168.11.110
Subnet Mask: 225.225.225.0
Gateway: none
DNS1: 192.168.11.110
DNS2: 192.168.11.100
ITCAMP-SMB and ITCAMP-SCVMM. We have them configured as follows:
ITCAMP-SMB – Virtual
IP Address: 192.168.11.150
Subnet Mask: 225.225.225.0
Gateway: none
DNS1: 192.168.11.110
DNS2: 192.168.11.100
ITCAMP-SCVMM – Virtual
IP Address: 192.168.11.130
Subnet Mask: 225.225.225.0
Gateway: none
DNS1: 192.168.11.110
DNS2: 192.168.11.100
In my home Lab I collected a few removable drives that will be configured as a storage Pool. If you have a third machine that can become a physical ITCAMP-SMB use it. It will makes the shared storage exercises and clustering labs a lot more straight forward. I also included a gateway to the internet to facilitate updating and remote access to the lab. But there is no real reason why you can’t keep it as described above.
So my Lab now looks like the following diagram:
In this lab we will achieve the following:
Create a storage pool & thin disk
Create iSCSI Disk & iSCSI target
Configure iSCSI access from hosts
Watch the following 13 minute video on configuring our Storage Space into a Pool and iSCSI disks to prepare for our next lab where we will setup a failover cluster.
If you have other scenarios you would like me to explore and post please leave me a comment.
As always, the easiest way to learn is to download the evaluation and start getting your hands dirty.
This is third one in this series and it will cover the following:
Details of the import virtual machines process in Hyper-v
Virtual Machines Dynamic memory
The import virtual machines process in Hyper-v
Importing a virtual machine from one physical host to another can expose file incompatibilities and other unforeseen complications. Administrators often think of a virtual machine as a single, stand-alone entity that they can move around to address their operational needs. In reality, a virtual machine consists of several parts:
Virtual hard disks, stored as files in the physical storage.
Virtual machine snapshots, stored as a special type of virtual hard disk file.
The saved state of the different, host-specific devices.
The memory file, or snapshot, for the virtual machine.
The virtual machine configuration file, which organizes the preceding components and arranges them into a working virtual machine.
Each virtual machine and each snapshot that is associated with it use unique identifiers. Additionally, virtual machines store and use some host-specific information, such as the path that identifies the location for virtual hard disk files. When Hyper‑V starts a virtual machine, it undergoes a series of validation checks before being started. Problems such as hardware differences that might exist when a virtual machine is imported to another host can cause these validation checks to fail. That, in turn, prevents the virtual machine from starting.
Windows Server 2012 includes an Import wizard that helps you quickly and reliably import virtual machines from one server to another.
The Import Wizard for virtualization:
Detects and fixes problems.
Hyper‑V in Windows Server 2012 introduces a new Import Wizard that is designed to detect and fix more than 40 different types of incompatibilities. You don’t have to worry ahead of time about the configuration that’s associated with physical hardware, such as memory, virtual switches, and virtual processors. The Import Wizard guides you through the steps to resolve incompatibilities when you import the virtual machine to the new host.
Doesn’t require the virtual machine to be exported.
You no longer need to export a virtual machine to be able to import it. You can simply copy a virtual machine and its associated files to the new host and then use the Import Wizard to specify the location of the files. This “registers” the virtual machine with Hyper‑V and makes it available for use.
The flowchart shows the Import Wizard process.
When you import a virtual machine, the wizard does the following:
Creates a copy of the virtual machine configuration file. This is created as a precaution in case an unexpected restart occurs on the host, such as from a power outage.
Validates hardware. Information in the virtual machine configuration file is compared to hardware on the new host.
Compiles a list of errors. This list identifies what needs to be reconfigured and determines which pages appear next in the wizard.
Displays the relevant pages, one category at a time. The wizard identifies incompatibilities to help you reconfigure the virtual machine so it’s compatible with the new host.
Removes the copy of the configuration file. After the wizard does this, the virtual machine is ready to start.
The new Import Wizard is a simpler, better way to import or copy virtual machines. The wizard detects and fixes potential problems, such as hardware or file differences that might exist when a virtual machine is imported to another host.
As an added safety feature, the wizard creates a temporary copy of a virtual machine configuration file in case an unexpected restart occurs on the host, such as from a power outage. The Windows PowerShell cmdlets for importing virtual machines let you automate the process.
Virtual Machines Dynamic memory and automatic start-up actions
In Windows Server 2012, Fast-growing organizations whose workloads are rapidly expanding often need to add more virtual machines to their host processors. These organizations want to optimize the number of virtual machines that they can place on a host server to minimize the number of expensive host servers that they need. With the Hyper-V Dynamic Memory improvements in Windows Server 2012 , IT administrators can now allocate virtual machine memory resources more efficiently and dramatically increase virtual machine consolidation ratios.
Dynamic Memory improvements in Windows Server 2012 include support for higher virtual machine consolidation with minimum memory and Hyper-V smart paging.
Minimum memory lets Hyper‑V reclaim the unused memory from virtual machines. This can result in increased virtual machine consolidation numbers, especially in VDI environments.
Although minimum memory increases virtual machine consolidation numbers, it also brings a challenge. If a virtual machine has a smaller amount of memory than its startup memory and it’s restarted, Hyper‑V needs additional memory to restart the machine. Due to host memory pressure or the states of the virtual machines, Hyper‑V may not always have additional memory available. This can cause sporadic virtual machine restart failures in customer environments. In Windows Server 2012, Hyper-V smart paging is used to bridge the memory gap between minimum and startup memory and allow virtual machines to restart reliably.
Hyper-V smart paging allows virtual machines to start reliably when the minimum memory setting has indirectly led to an insufficient amount of available physical memory during restart.
Hyper-V smart paging
As in the earlier version of Dynamic Memory, you can configure minimum memory for your virtual machines and Hyper‑V continues to help ensure that this amount is assigned to running virtual machines. To provide a reliable restart experience for the virtual machines configured with less minimum memory than startup memory, Hyper‑V Windows Server 2012 uses Hyper-V smart paging.
Hyper-V smart paging is a memory management technique that uses disk resources as additional, temporary memory when more memory is required to restart a virtual machine. This approach has advantages and drawbacks. It provides a reliable way to keep the virtual machines running when no physical memory is available. However, it can degrade virtual machine performance because disk access speeds are much slower than memory access speeds.
To minimize the performance impact of Hyper-V smart paging, Hyper‑V uses it only when all of the following occur:
The virtual machine is being restarted.
No physical memory is available.
No memory can be reclaimed from other virtual machines running on the host.
Hyper-V smart paging isn’t used when:
A virtual machine is being started from an off state (instead of a restart).
Oversubscribing memory for a running virtual machine would result.
A virtual machine is failing over in Hyper‑V clusters.
Internal guest paging
Hyper‑V continues to rely on internal guest paging when host memory is oversubscribed because it’s more effective than Hyper-V smart paging. With internal guest paging, the paging operation inside virtual machines is performed by Windows Memory Manager. Windows Memory Manager has more information than the Hyper‑V host about memory usage within the virtual machine, which means it can provide Hyper‑V with better information to use when choosing the memory to be paged. Because of this, internal guest paging incurs less overhead to the system when compared to Hyper-V smart paging.
Memory ballooning
To further reduce the impact of Hyper-V smart paging, after a virtual machine completes the startup process, Hyper‑V removes memory from the virtual machine, coordinating with Dynamic Memory components inside the guest (a process sometimes referred to as “ballooning”), so that the virtual machine stops using Hyper-V smart paging. With this technique, the use of Hyper-V smart paging is temporary and is not expected to be longer than 10 minutes.
Runtime configuration
Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V enables you to make the following configuration changes to Dynamic Memory when the virtual machine is running:
Increase the maximum memory.
Decrease the minimum memory.
Home lab setup Part 3
After Lab #1 We have our 2 physical machines and 2 virtual Domain controllers (one on each physical hosts)
VMhost10a and VMhost10b. We have them configured as follows:
VMhost10a – physical
IP Address: 192.168.11.5
Subnet Mask: 225.225.225.0
Gateway: none
DNS1: 192.168.11.100
DNS2: 192.168.11.110
VMHost10B – physical, 192.168.11.10
IP Address: 192.168.11.10
Subnet Mask: 225.225.225.0
Gateway: none
DNS1: 192.168.11.100
DNS2: 192.168.11.110
ITCAMP-DC1 and ITCAMP-DC2. We have them configured as follows:
ITCAMP-DC1 – Virtual
IP Address: 192.168.11.100
Subnet Mask: 225.225.225.0
Gateway: none
DNS1: 192.168.11.100
DNS2: 192.168.11.110
ITCAMP-DC2 – Virtual
IP Address: 192.168.11.110
Subnet Mask: 225.225.225.0
Gateway: none
DNS1: 192.168.11.110
DNS2: 192.168.11.100
In this lab we will get our hands on a couple more machines that we will build and use in our scenarios.
Build our ITCAMP-SMB server
Using the VHD downloaded here (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/evalcenter/hh670538.aspx) after extracting it to a temporary location, I copied it to the location I want my ITCAMP-SMB machine to be located and renamed it to ITCAMP-SMB. Once that’s done I created a new Virtual machine on VMHost10A with the following settings:
Name: ITCAMP-SMB
Startup Memory: 1024MB
Network Connection : Use the same Virtual Network as the one configured for ITCAMP-DC1 and ITCAMP-DC2. In our case it’s “CorpNet”
Use an Existing Disk: Use the disk and location we copied at the beginning of this exercise.
everything else is default
Once the machine is created, open the settings for ITCAMP-SMB and under the “SCSI Controller” add 4 disks as shown in the exhibit below:
Once it’s started, there are a few things to do for setup before we can continue with the labs.
Rename to ITCAMP-SMB
Join it to the ITCAMP domain.
Set the IP address to :
IP Address: 192.168.11.150
Subnet Mask: 225.225.225.0
Gateway: none
DNS1: 192.168.11.110
DNS2: 192.168.11.100
Ensure that the following roles (and supporting features) are installed
Build ITCAMP-SCVMM
That one is a little easier. Since System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 is not out yet, you still have to download a pre-baked machine to be used as a System Center 2012 Virtual Machine manager. you can get the SCVMM machine here (http://aka.ms/SCVMM2012SP1)
Once you’ve downloaded and expanded it on VMHost10B just follow the directions included with the virtual machine.
Here is what we have at the end of the build process:
Lab #2
Lab #2 will consist in the following:
Configure dynamic memory for ITCAMP-SMB
Configure to auto start w/ 60 sec delay
Add File and iSCSI Services – File Server Role to VMhost10A,
On VMHOST10A, create share to F:\VMMLibrary
Here is the 7 minutes video on this lab.
If you have other scenarios you would like me to explore and post please leave me a comment.
As always, the easiest way to learn is to download the evaluation and start getting your hands dirty.
Following an IT camp a few weeks back, I was discussing tuning options in Windows Server 2012. After our discussion I started looking for some documented tuning parameters. A little like the documents I had found in 2011 for Windows 2008 R2 (Make Windows 2008 R2 roar like a performance machine…).
so I found one I think will benefit information technology (IT) professionals and system administrators who need to tune the performance of a server that is running Windows Server 2012.
This guide describes important tuning parameters and settings that you can adjust to improve the performance and energy efficiency of the Windows Server 2012.
This guide covers the following:
Included in this white paper:
Choosing and Tuning Server Hardware
Performance Tuning for the Networking Subsystem
Performance Tools for Network Workloads
Performance Tuning for the Storage Subsystem
Performance Tuning for Web Servers
Performance Tuning for File Servers
Performance Tuning for a File Server Workload (FSCT)
Performance Counters for SMB 3.0
Performance Tuning for File Server Workload (SPECsfs2008)
Performance Tuning for Active Directory Servers
Performance Tuning for Remote Desktop Session Host (Formerly Terminal Server)
Performance Tuning for Remote Desktop Virtualization Host
Performance Tuning for Remote Desktop Gateway
Performance Tuning Remote Desktop Services Workload for Knowledge Workers
Performance Tuning for Virtualization Servers
Performance Tuning for SAP Sales and Distribution
Performance Tuning for OLTP Workloads
If you are running a Windows Server 2012 or if you are wondering how much performance you can squeeze out of your environment. This is a guide for you. I suggest you download the evaluation version of Windows Server 2012 here and use the guide available here to expand your knowledge and experience.
While we’re on the subject of expending our knowledge and experience, Here are 2 free books that you should get and keep handy.
Last night… OK, early this morning after my hockey game, I’m at the bar with my teammates and the subject of social network comes up. The guys are mostly dismissing the whole subject as a purely useless timewaster. I try to tell them that it’s a great way to stay connected and to share life experience with your friends.
As usual when hockey players get to the bar some ridiculous prank/dare is bound to happen…
BOOM…. Here it is…
“I bet’cha cant reach 5000 people in 2 weeks!” say one of them… “Yeah!” chimes in the other… “It’s on” i say without spending too much time thinking about it.
So here it is. People! i need your help. to track this bet I created a URL (http://aka.ms/socialexperiment ) I can track. Please download the eval and get your friends to do the same and to tell their friends…
You know, tell two friends and they tell two friends and they…. you get the drift…
Please hit the link and download the eval. I can track those numbers and show these guys the power of being social. and get a few free beers in the process.
This post was taken from a TechNet Flash Editorial that i wrote.
I picked up my Microsoft Surface last week and it is awesome! My only problem is that now I can’t use it anymore. My daughters have adopted it. Which means I need to order another one. As a Microsoft employee I could have worse problems than the kids liking our products…
But looking around my family room the diversity of devices is amazing. I’m checking my mail on my Lumia 920 Windows Phone 8, my wife is planning her lessons in the kitchen on a Dell Inspiron One 2320 All-In-One (I upgraded it to windows 8 so we now have a 23 inch touch screen in the kitchen). My youngest is playing Jet Pack Joyride on the Microsoft Surface and my oldest is doing her homework in her room on her Acer Aspire ultra-book. We use a multitude of devices and Windows 8 makes it so simple to switch between them by synchronizing our settings, by leveraging SkyDrive to Store photos and docs online and access them from any PC, Mac or phone.
It’s liberating.
In a very small geography we have a great range of devices. That translates very well to any enterprise. I’m sure users are bringing and using all kinds of devices into their place of work. We can try to fight it, but they always find ways. We need to embrace it. Support it. Manage it in order to tap the potential for improving collaboration and productivity. Of course, this introduces challenges too. It means companies must now balance user demands with their own security needs as never before. At Microsoft we can help you:
Manage all machines including non-traditional “consumer” devices using System Center 2012
Enable employees to work productively from anywhere on any screen with technologies like VDI and DirectAccess
Welcome new devices while maintaining security with Windows Intune, and Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) for security and policy management for mobile devices
It’s up to you build the environment that will embrace the new way of doing business. You can start by taking the advantage of the free evaluation downloads for these products:
