Windows Server 2012 Supports Data Center TCP (DCTCP)

In the grand effort to make Windows Server 2012 scale above and beyond the call of duty Microsoft has been addressing (potential) bottle necks all over the stack. CPU, NUMA, Memory, storage and networking.

Data Center TCP (DCTCP) is one of the many improvements by which Microsoft aims to deliver a lot better network throughput with affordable switches. Switches that can mange large amounts of network traffic tend to have large buffers and those push up the prices a lot. The idea here is that a large buffer creates the ability to deal with burst and prevents congestions. Call it over provisioning if you want.  While this helps it is far from ideal. Let’s say it a blunt instrument.

To mitigate this issue Windows Server 2012 is now capable dealing with network congestion in  a more intelligent way. It does so by reacting to the degree & not merely the presence of congestion using DCTCP. The goals are:

• Achieve low latency, high burst tolerance, and high throughput, with small buffer switches (read cheaper).
• Requires Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN, RFC 3168) capable switches. This is no showstopper, it’s pretty common on most data center / rack switches).
• Algorithm enables when it makes sense to do so (low round trip times, i.e. it will be used inside the data center where it makes sense, not over a world wide WAN or internet).

When I was prepping a slide deck for a presentation on what this is, does and means I compared it to the green wave traffic light control. The space between consecutive traffic lights is the buffer and the red light are stops the traffic has to deal with due congestion. This leaves room for a lot of improvement and the way to achieve this is traffic control that intelligently manages the incoming flow so that at every hop there is a green light and the buffer isn’t saturated.

Windows Server 2012 in combination with Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) provides the intelligent traffic control to realize the green wave.

The result is very smooth low latency traffic with high burst tolerance and high throughput with cheaper small buffer switches. To see the difference look at the picture   below (from Microsoft BUILD)of what this achieves. Pretty impressive. Here’s a paper by Microsoft Research on the subject

TRIM/UNMAP Support in Windows Server 2012 & Hyper-V/VHDX

Introduction

I’m very exited about the TRIM/UNMAP support in Windows Server 2012 & Hyper-V with the VHDX file. Thin provisioning is a great technology. It’s there is more to it than just proactive provisioning ahead of time. It also provides a way to make sure storage allocation stays thin by reclaiming freed up space form a LUN. Until now this required either the use of sdelete on windows or dd for the Linux crowd, or some disk defrag product like Raxco’s PerfectDisk. It’s interesting to note here that sdelete relies on the defrag APIs in Windows and you can see how a defragmentation tool can pull off the same stunt. Take a look at Zero-fill Free Space and Thin-Provisioned Disks & Thin-Provisioned Environments for more information on this. Sometimes an agent is provided by the SAN vendor that takes care of this for you (Compellent) and I think NetApp even has plans to support it via a future ONTAP PowerShell toolkit for NTFS partitions inside the VHD (https://communities.netapp.com/community/netapp-blogs/msenviro/blog/2011/09/22/getting-ready-for-windows-server-8-part-i).  Some cluster file system vendors like Veritas (symantec) also offer this functionality.

A common “issue” people have with sdelete or the like is that is rather slow, rather resource intensive and it’s not automated unless you have scheduled tasks running on all your hosts to take care of that. Sdelete has some other issue when you have mount points, sdelete can’t handle that. A trick is to use the now somewhat ancient SUBST command to assign a drive letter to the path of the mount point you can use sdelete. Another trick would be to script it yourself see. Mind you can’t just create a big file in a script and delete it. That’s the same as deleting “normal” data and won’t do a thing for thing provisioning space reclamation. You really have to zero the space out. See (A PowerShell Alternative to SDelete) for more information on this. The script also deals with another annoying thing of sdelete is that is doesn’t leave any free space and thereby potentially endangers your operations or at least sets off all alarms on the monitoring tools. With a home grown script you can force a free percentage to remain untouched.

TRIM/UNMAP

With Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V VHDX we get what is described in the documentation  “’Efficiency in representing data (also known as “trim”), which results in smaller file size and allows the underlying physical storage device to reclaim unused space. (Trim requires physical disks directly attached to a virtual machine or SCSI disks in the VM, and trim-compatible hardware.)  It also requires Windows 2012 on hosts & guests.

I was confused as to whether VHDX supports TRIM or UNMAP. TRIM is the specification for this functionality by Technical Committee T13, that handles all standards for ATA interfaces. UNMAP is the Technical Committee T10 specification for this and is the full equivalent of TRIM but for SCSI disks. UNMAP is used to remove physical blocks from the storage allocation in thinly provisioned Storage Area Networks. My understanding is that is what is used on the physical storage depends on what storage it is (SSD/SAS/SATA/NL-SAS or SAN with one or all or the above) and for a VHDX it’s UNMAP (SCSI standard)

Basically VHDX disks report themselves as being “thin provision capable”. That means that any deletes as well as defrag operation in the guests will send down “unmaps” to the VHDX file, which will be used to ensure that block allocations within the VHDX file is freed up for subsequent allocations as well as the same requests are forwarded to the physical hardware which can reuse it for it’s thin provisioning purpose. Also see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh848053(v=vs.85).aspx

So unmap makes it way down the stack from the guest Windows Server 2012 Operating system, the VHDX , the hyper visor and the storage array.This means that an VHDX will only consume storage for really stored data & not for the entire size of the VHDX, even when it is a fixed one. You can see that not just the operating system but also the application/hypervisor that owns the file systems on which the VHDX lives needs to be TRIM/UNMAP aware to pull this off.

The good news here is that there is no more sdelete to run, scripts to write, or agents to install. It happens “automagically” and as ease of use is very important I for one welcome this!  By the way some SANs also provide the means to shrink LUNs which can be useful if you want the space used by a volume is so much lower than what is visible/available in windows and you don’t want people to think you’re wasting space or all that extra space is freely available to them.

To conclude I’ll be looking forward to playing around with this and I hope to blog on our experiences with this later in the year. Until Windows Server 2012 & VHDX specifications are RTM and fully public we are working on some assumptions. If you want to read up on the VHDX format you can download the specs here. It looks pretty feature complete.

Experience Days by TechNet BeLux

As a Microsoft MEET member and MVP, I’d like to invite you all to attend the Microsoft “Experience Days”.

There are several tracks at the Experience Days from which you can choose. The complete track information can be found at here.

There are two tracks that are especially of interest to IP Pros: The Best of Microsoft Management Summit (MMS 2012) and Experience Windows Server 2012.

The Best of Microsoft Management Summit (MMS 2012)

During The Best of Microsoft Management Summit (MMS 2012), we will provide you with the best possible opportunity to learn about what’s new in System Center 2012. Led by experts who attended MMS 2012 in Las Vegas, you can expect in-depth sessions on infrastructure management, service delivery & automation, application management, desktop & device management.
Discover the full program

Experience Windows Server 2012

At Experience Windows Server 2012 day you will discover how Windows Server is going beyond virtualization by scaling and securing workload, how it will enable the modern work style by giving people access to information and data regardless of the infrastructure, network, device or application they use to access it. And you will discover the power of many servers with the simplicity of one by efficiently managing infrastructure while maximizing uptime and minimizing failures and downtime.

Join us and learn more about:

New Hyper-V Virtualization Platform

What’s new in Active Directory

Storage and Management Improvements

Clustering Improvements

Plus much more…   

Discover the full program

Hyper-V

I’ll be talking on June 7^th at 15:00 – 16:00 about Windows Server 2012 Storage Evolved For Hyper-V in the Experience Windows Server 2012 track:

Windows Server 2012 is a very storage centric version. We’ll cover the changes, improvements and additions to Windows Server 2012 storage capabilities and their impact on Hyper-V. We talk about the enhancements with the new virtual disk format (VHDX), offloaded data transfer (ODX), TRIM/UNMAP, large sector disks and the new storage options for Hyper-V including Storage Spaces, ReFS, Bitlocker, CSV 2.0, NTFS online scan/repair and SMB 3.0 file storage and what the latter means for Live Migration & Storage Options for Hyper-V

Virtualization with Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V is simply the best, bar none. If you watched Brad Anderson’s MMS 2012 Keynotes you know what’s coming and that he encouraged you to take the lead in all this. Well here’s you chance. If you agree that there is war on for talent, you also know and understand that knowledge will give you opportunities and choices. Invest in your future and as such in addressing and solving the business needs of your both clients and businesses. We all know it takes a serious effort in combination with a sustained commitment to become and stay competent in ICT. The TechNet BeLux team & the community is there to help you cultivate your talent and gain the knowledge you need.

 

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Here’s a quick overview of my speaking engagements in the next two months. I encourage everyone to attend the smaller and often les expensive or even free events as they provide a fast way to get up to speed with new technologies. Don’t be shy. Everyone is welcome and we’re all there to learn. It will not surprise you that all the sessions I’ll be presenting are on Windows Server 2012 & Hyper-V.

Experts2Experts Virtualization Conference (E2EVC) –Vienna 2012

I’ll be doing a session on Saturday 26th on the advanced networking features in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. At this small scale conference interactive “chalk & talk” sessions never stop. They just go on and on at breakfast, lunch, dinner, the bar until we need to get some sleep to repeat this process the day after. If you’re very lucky there might still be an spot open for which you can register.

Continued Education Day for IT Coordinators & Teachers in Education

At the end of May I’ll be presenting a session on what’s new in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V targeted at this audience. I’m convinced that the combination of the tremendous licensing efforts Microsoft does in education and simply the best virtualization & cloud platform in existence, will provide them with the right solution to get the job done.

TechNet BeLux - Experience Days

On June 7th I’ll be presenting a session at the “Experience Days”. That session is called “Windows Server 2012 Storage Evolved For Hyper-V” in the Experience Windows Server 2012 track. You can register here for this track or, if you think another track is more of interest to you go to the links above to register for those. All tracks are free and open to all.

More to come

During the summer I’ll be doing a large storage migration project. That means I’ll be getting my hands on SMI-S support for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 and ODX to use with Windows Sever 2012 & Hyper-V.  So I’ll be putting my money where my mouth is so to speak.  I’m looking forward to that for the learning experience alone and it’s time to find me my “No, I will not fix your computer” T-shirt as I won’t have time for that . But rest assured, I will share my experiences through blogging, tweets, presentations & with my fellow community members for all man kind.

Experts2Experts Virtualization Conference – Vienna May 25th-27th 2012

I’m attending and speaking at one the of the best  small scale virtualization conferences out there. I’m talking about the Experts2Experts Virtualization Conference (E2EVC) organized by Alex Juschin for many years now. I’ll be speaking at the conference on “Making Sense of  RSS, DMVQ, SR-IOV, RDMA and other advanced networking features”. We’ll see where Windows Server 2012 & the new generation of Hyper-V is at in regards to these technologies, how it stacks up against some other solutions and what looks promising. In other words what we are looking at to use in real live once Windows Server 2012 goes RTM.

I have the good fortune to attend some pretty big, impressive & high quality industry events. These are excellent places for networking and getting up to speed with the latest of the greatest form the big vendors and the ecosystem around it. But they are pretty expensive and large scale, so most people are so crazy busy at those you often miss out on some of the interaction, there is just to much going on.

E2EVC is special and adds a different kind if value that goes beyond its low cost. For one, nobody is trying to sell you anything. All attendees and all speakers are IT Pro’s that design, build, work with and support the technologies that are discussed. Hence the name, Expert 2 Expert. It’s a reality check on what are people really using, trying, evaluating. You’ll see what is really hurting us and what really works.  An event like this isn’t driven by marketing. It’s driven by interests, passion for technology and even more important from a business perspective the solutions they can and do deliver in real live. This proves that you don’t need to charge premium prices to keep the riff raff out. The fact that 2 days of this conference are in a weekend tells you the attendees are going there with intend and purpose.

The guys & gals attending & presenting are top notch. They don’t look  like slick advisers and analysts. It’s all very informal and relaxed. But make no mistake, these people are sharp and at the top of their game. Discussion and interaction is stimulated and lively. The aim is not to breed or create rock star speakers but to get people to share their experiences and knowledge. And here in lies the value. I really commend Alex Juschin for having succeeded in this.

Fixing Hiccups in The SCVMM2008R2 GUI & Database

As you might very well know by experience sometimes the System Center Virtual Machine Manager GUI and database get out of sync with reality about what’s going on for real on the cluster. I’ve blogged about this before in SCVMM 2008 R2 Phantom VM guests after Blue Screen and in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 Error 12711 & The cluster group could not be found (0×1395)

The Issue

Recently I had to trouble shoot the “Missing” status of some virtual machines on a Hyper-V cluster in SCVMM2008R2. Rebooting the hosts, guests, restarting agents, … none of the usual tricks for this behavior seemed to do the trick. The SCVMM2008R2 installation was also fully up to date with service packs & patches so there the issue dot originate.

Repair was greyed out and was no use. We could have removed the host from SCVMM en add it again. That resets the database entries for that host en can help fix the issues but still is not guaranteed to work and you don’t learn what the root cause or solution is. But none of our usual tricks worked.We could have deleted the VMs from the database as in  but we didn’t have duplicates. Sure, this doesn’t delete any files or VM so it should show up again afterwards but why risk it not showing up again and having to go through fixing that.

The Cause

The VMs were in a “Missing” state after an attempted live migration during a manual patching cycle where the host was restarted the before the “start maintenance mode” had completed. A couple of those VMs where also Live Migrated at the same time with the Failover Cluster GUI. A bit of confusion al around so to speak nut luckily all VMs are fully operational an servicing applications & users so no crisis there.

The Fix

DISCLAIMER

I’m not telling you to use this method to fix this issue but you can at your own risk. As always please make sure you have good and verified backups of anything that’s of value to you

We hade to investigate. The good news was that all VMs are up an running, there is no downtime at the moment and the cluster seems perfectly happy .

But there we see the first clue. The Virtual machines on the cluster are not running on the node SCVMM thinks they are running, hence the “Missing” status.

First of all let’s find out what host the VM is really running on in the cluster and see what SCVMM thinks on what host the VM  is running. We run this little query against the VMM database. That gives us all hosts known to SCVMM.

SELECT [HostID],[ComputerName] FROM [VMM].[dbo].[tbl_ADHC_Host]

HostID                                                                        ComputerName

559D0C84-59C3-4A0A-8446-3A6C43ABF618          node1.test.lab

540C2477-00C3-4388-9F1B-31DBADAD1D8C        node2.test.lab

40B109A2-9E6B-47BC-8FB5-748688BFC0DF         node3.test.lab

C2DA03CE-011D-45E3-A389-200A3E3ED62E        node4.test.lab

6FA4ABBA-6599-4C7A-B632-80449DB3C54C         node5.test.lab

C0CF479F-F742-4851-B340-ED33C25E2013          node6.test.lab

D2639875-603F-4F49-B498-F7183444120A             node7.test.lab

CE119AAC-CF7E-4207-BE0B-03AAE0371165         node8.test.lab

AB07E1C2-B123-4AF5-922B-82F77C5885A2           node9.test.lab

(9 row(s) affected)

Voila en now the fun starts. SCVMM GUI tells us “MissingVM” is missing on node4.

We check this in the database to confirm:

SELECT Name, ObjectState, HostId
FROM VMM.dbo.tbl_WLC_VObject
WHERE Name = 'MissingVM'
GO

Which is indeed node4

Name                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             ObjectState HostId

———  —  ————————————

node4  220  C2DA03CE-011D-45E3-A389-200A3E3ED62E

(1 row(s) affected)

In SCVMM we see that the moving of the VM failed. Between node 4 and node 6.

Now let’s take a look at what the cluster thinks … yes there it is running happily on node 6 and not on node 4. There’s the mismatch causing the issue.

So we need to fix this. We can Live Migrate the VM with the Failover Cluster GUI to the node SCVMM thinks the VM still resides on and see if that fixes it. If it does, great! You have to give SCVMM some time to detect all things and update its records.

But what to do if it doesn’t work out?  We can get the HostId from the node where the VM is really running in the cluster, which we can see in the Failover Cluster GUI, from the query we ran above and than update the record:

UPDATE VMM.dbo.tbl_WLC_VObject
SET HostId  = 'C0CF479F-F742-4851-B340-ED33C25E2013'
WHERE Name = 'MissingVM'
GO

We then reset the ObjectState to 0 to get rid of the Missing status. It would do this automatically but it takes a while.

UPDATE VMM.dbo.tbl_WLC_VObject
SET ObjectState = '0'
WHERE Name = 'MissingVM'
GO

After some patience & Refreshing all is well again and test with live migrations proves that all works again.

As I said before people get creative in how to achieve things due to inconsistencies, differences in functionality between Hyper-V Manager, Failover Cluster Manager and SCVMM 2008R2 can lead to some confusing situations. I’m happy to see that in Windows 8 the action you should perform using the Failover Cluster GUI or PowerShell are blocked in Hyper-V Manager. But SCVMM really needs a “reset” button that makes it check & validate that what it thinks is reality.

Failover Cluster Node Names in Upper & Lower Case In Window 2012 with Cluster.exe, PowerShell & GUI

 

Cluster Node Names Can Be Inconsistently Named

A lot of us who build failover clusters are bound to run into the fact that the node names as shown the Failover Cluster Management GUI is not always consistent in the names format  it gives to the nodes. Sometimes they are lower case, sometimes they are upper case. See the example below of a Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 cluster.

2

Many a system administrator has some slight neurotic tendencies. And he or she can’t stand this. I’ve seen people do crazy things like trying to fix this up to renaming a node in the registry. Do NOT do that. You’ll break that host. People check whether the computer object in AD is lower or upper case, whether the host name is lower or upper case, check how the node are registered in DNS etc. They try to keep ‘m all in sync at sometimes high cost But in the end you can never be sure that all nodes will have the same case using the GUI.

So what can you do?

1. Use cluster.exe to add the node to the cluster. That enforces the case you type in the name!  An example of this is when you’d like upper case node names:

   cluster.exe /cluster:CLUSTER-NAME /add /node:UPPERCASENODE1

2. Some claim that when you add all nodes at the same time and they will all be the same. But ‘m not to sure this will always work.

Windows 2012

In Windows 2012 PowerShell replaces cluster.exe (it is still there, for backward compatibility but for how long?) and they don’t seem to enforce the case of the names of the node. For more info on Failover Clustering PowerShell look at Failover Clusters Cmdlets in Windows PowerShell, it’s a good starting point.

Don’t despair my fellow IT Pros. Learn to accept that fail over clustering is case insensitive and you’ll never run into any issue. Let it go …. Well unless you get a GUI bug like we had with Exchange 2010 SP1 or any other kind of bug that has issues with the case of the nodes .

If you want to use cluster.exe (or MSClus) for that matter you’ll need to add it via the Add Roles and Features Wizard / Remote Administration Tools /Feature Administration Tools / Failover Clustering Tools. Note that there are not present by default.

On an upgraded node I needed to uninstall failover clustering and reinstall it to get it to works, so even in that scenario they are gone and I needed to add them again.

MSClus and Cluster.EXE support Windows Server 2012, Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 2008 clusters. The Windows Server 2012 PowerShell module for clustering supports Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2008 R2, not Windows Server 2008.

For more information see the relevant section at Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) for Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Server “8″ Beta (dsforum2wiki). You’ll have to live with the fact that a lot of documentation still refers to Windows Server 8. As of his post, it’s only been a week that the final name of Windows Server 2012 was announced.

 

 

Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows Server 2012 (Beta) – Part 3

This is a multipart series based on some lab test & work I did.

1. Part 1 Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows Server 2012 (Beta) – Part 1
2. Part 2 Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows Server 2012 (Beta) – Part 2
3. Part 3 Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows Server 2012 (Beta) – Part 3

And we have arrived at part three of my adventures while “transitioning” my Hyper-V cluster nodes to Windows Server 2012. I prefer the term transition as is more correct. We can still not do a rolling upgrade a cluster cluster. We still need to create a new cluster and recuperate the evicted nodes.

I’ll repeat myself here (again) by stating I did not reinstall the evicted nodes but upgraded them. Why, because I can and I wanted to try it out and see what happens. For production purposes I do advise you to rebuild nodes from scratch using a well defined and automated plan if possible. I already mentioned this in Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows Server 2012 (Beta) – Part 1

Moving the Storage & Hyper-V Guests

So we stopped Part 2 at a newly created cluster without any storage. That’s what we’ll be taking care of in this part.  Let’s recap what we already mentioned at the end of Part 2.

We have several options for storage here. We could assign new storage but we cannot do a Quick Storage Migration between cluster using SCVMM2008R2 but that doesn’t fly as SCVMM2008R2 can’t manage Windows 2012 clusters and I don’t know if it ever will. We can do a good old manual or scripted export to and import from the new storage of the VMs what takes a considerable amount of time. You also need to have the extra storage available.

We can also recuperate the old storage with the VMs still on there. This could get tricky as no two cluster should be able to see & use the storage at the same time. The benefit could be that we can just use the import type in Windows Server 2012 “Register the virtual machine in-place” (use the existing unique ID) and be done with it. We’ll try that one. We’ll still have some down time but it should be pretty fast. It’s only from Windows Server 2012 on that we’ll be able to do Shared Nothing Live Migrations between clusters and live will be good. If you have a SAN you could also use clones to get this job done without less risk. You work on cloned data and keep the original around instead of using that for the process described below.

So how do we approach this?

Since Windows Server 2008 storage & clustering isn’t the pain it could be in earlier version. It’s the disk manager handling all that and it makes live a lot easier. All disks presented to a cluster node are off line to the operating system until you bring it online. Even if it contains data or is presented to another host, whether that is a member of another cluster or a stand alone host. Pretty cool. It also means you can have all your nodes on line during the process. The process of bringing the disk online and, if needed formatting it with NTFS and then adding it to the cluster as storage can be done on just one of the nodes.

As you recall I unplugged the evicted node from the iSCSI storage (you could also disable the ports) before I upgraded it. The entire iSCSI configuration got upgraded perfectly so all I needed to do was plug the iSCSI cables in and the storage appeared offline. My old cluster node was up and running still accessing it. Pretty slick! And great as a demo but you can play it safer. That was fun but perhaps we won’t be that brave in a production environment.

Options

You could decide to bring all LUNS over at once or one at the time. The process is the same. If you do it one by one you’ll have to rely on the above behavior to protect the LUNs against corruption or you can un-present the LUNS remaining on the old cluster from the new cluster so you’ll never have an issue. We’ve done both and it works out rather fine in testing. Windows clustering is really doing it’s best to prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot

Let’s say I go LUN by LUN. Now I can just remove the VMs from the old cluster using the Failover cluster GUI so they are no longer highly available on that node. When I have no more clustered VMs on a CSV LUN I can shut down all the guests in Hyper-V Manager and stop right there.

On the old cluster I remove that LUN from the CSV storage and from the cluster storage. At that moment that LUN is already taken offline for you!

Pardon the silly size but I didn’t have space left to make a realistic screenshot

Great, Windows is protecting us against any possible data corruption! So now I can than un-present the LUN form the old cluster nodes. The next step is to enable the ISCI ports, present that LUN to the new cluster node or nodes (depends on where in the x number of node process you are) or just plug in the cable .

You’ll see the new LUN off line than on the new cluster. We can than make the LUN on line so it will be available to add to the cluster. Just right click that disk and select “Online”.

 

Right click on storage

 

Select an disk that’s available to add to the cluster.

 

Things has gotten a lot simpler with CSV in Windows Server 2012. No more enabling it with a funky warning message that’s well meant but is rather confusing an annoying. You just right click the disk and choose “Add to Cluster Shared Volumes” and that’s it.

 

And there it is. That disk in our new cluster is ready to use as a CSV.

 

So we can now us a nifty new capability in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V: “Register the virtual machine in-place” (use the existing unique ID)

 

The wizard starts.

 

Select the folder where your VM or VMs live. yes you can do multiple given that your folder structure allows for this.

 

It’s found one VM in our folder

 

We click Next

 

We select “Register the virtual machine in-place” (use the existing unique ID) and click next.

If something is not right like some forgotten “saved” states you’ll get a change to dump those or cancel the process to deal with it properly before trying it again.

 

If virtual network names do not match you’ll get the opportunity to set correct that by specifying what virtual switch to use.

 

If all was well in the first place or after you’ve fixed any issues like the ones demonstrated above you’re good to go. Click finish and enjoy your Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Guest.

 

At this point you can already start your VMs. I know that the next step is to make all these VMs highly available but here we have some good news as well. You can now make running VMs highly available. Yeah! They no longer need to be shut down. All this is done via the well know process so I’m not going to walk trough the entire process here. But the screen shot of a making a running VM highly available is worth posting

My Best of MMS 2012 Series: Private Cloud 2012 Lessons Learned from Our Early Adopters

An open discussion on people who have built private clouds at customers.

Elasticity

In real live things don’t shrink that often.  Free or real cheap back charge rates are not doing anything to help.

My take on this is that you should look at elasticity as a flexibility feature. Even if a cloud is no that elastic in both ways. You can shrink a cloud v1 to zero as you migrate the VMs to private cloud v2. Than dump the resources back into another pool, step by step or in one go. I’ll use whatever works to make my live easier.

Standardizing & Customer Centric Operations = Planning is Key!

These two can be hard to combine. It takes serious planning and as such an upfront investment.

Than you need to build it to optimize operations (cost & excellent service). This sounds nice but how good are we at this and what is the shelf life of a solution versus the investment?

There is a lot of preparation to do. There is a lot of things to consider. Databases, Storage, the network, security boundaries, disaster recovery planning. They advise not to do it cross domain. Hmmm … we need to address this. Seriously..

Testing => build decent scripts with variables & config files. This will help to deploy in test, acceptance & production without to many changes/work.

Make sure you define all service accounts, groups and permissions you need.

It’s all about planning and what’s being told are best practices that exist already, private cloud or not.

Self Service

• Service Catalog is a prerequisite.
• Self Service is key to the private cloud.
• If people can they will do things differently. You’ll have to learn to deal with this.
• Billing for services should be clear. Not to much detail. VMs & Storage are two good ones. Keep it simple and don’t go into memory & vCPU. Just set boundaries.

Demos

We dive into the System Center products and look at it from both the IT Pro and the consumer side of things.

Requests => Approval & Deployment

Approval process should be dynamic based on what is requested & who’s making is. You’ll also need SLAs & chargeback on these. Be careful not over complicating it or you encourage rogue IT.

RANT: IT should make things as easy as possible. And in this discussion I’m not won over for charge back. It often turns into an excel exercise. Internal IT becomes more and more like an external service provider or integrator in this model. The inherent strength of being part of the business and being in the best position to help that business move ahead is lost. Is this a complot of the integrators? It fits their model but basically a lot of that is broken very badly. The last thing internal IT should do is become like them. That will do nothing for “Business-IT alignment”. We need to leverage the possibilities of the private cloud for our business or we have no unique selling point. Not that the service providers do a better job, but at least they are not on the pay roll so the bean counters like that. And as long as they can use public cloud to get their needs served hey couldn’t care less about who does the private cloud thingy for them. So a functional IT is first and foremost what we need. That is customer centered. Alignment of business & IT is worthless without that. The latter happens ay to much.

Management

Well yes this is important. We need reports, reviews, Service Improvement Plans, look for opportunities for automation.

Personal Best of MMS 2012 Series “Why We Fail–An Architect’s Journey to the Private Cloud”

Introduction

The speaker (Alex Jauch) addresses cloud terminology confusion and points out that yet everyone wants it. So the pressure is on to deliver cloud.

But as an architect you can’t build with such vague notions of what it is. That just doesn’t work. 78% of enterprise IT Shops will deploy a private cloud by 2014 (Gartner) 62% of all IT Projects fail. For the record, building a private cloud is not an easy project.

For one, what are you building? What is it, way to may definitions. NIST seems to be one of the better definitions around. Specific, direct and actionable. We can work with that. I suggest you visit the NIST site for more information on:

• Deployment Models:Private Cloud, Hybrid, Public.
• Service models SAAS, PAAS, IAAS
• The Essential Characteristics
  The Common Characteristics

Why We Fail

What happens:

• Install Hyper-V
• Deploy System Center
• Build a solution

The essential element of cloud is that  “The cloud is a customer centric business model, not technology”.It’s approached to much as a technology problem and that’s why we fail.

The architect should not allow this to happen so he is to blame. The architectural practice is to marry business needs and wants to technology as a solution. This really hits home but there are more people involved and than there is the entire business / IT alignment fiasco as you can read in my blog The shortage of skilled employees, are we making it worse? , but the bucks ends with the architect..

How do we add value to the business? Commodities do not add value, they are necessities. So we need to decide what business we are in. Meeting standards is not a goal. Enabling business is the goal. So they think you’re doing a great job empowering them. After all they are paying for it.

The Take Away

Traditional IT needs to evolve (fast) to customer centric IT.  End user departments define the goals. Our operational proficiency used to be our pride but what does it mean to the customer? Problems that do not affect the business don’t matter. So talk to customers to find out about what they want and need. They don’t care about your skill set or certifications. You’ll need t extract the need from their wants.

The ability to take pain points away from customers. Small & medium sized projects do very well at this. But in a lot of companies they don’t promote you for those “smaller” projects. So the business also has to evolve.

I’d like to add that Old style IT is also promoted by  a lot of misguided security officers and business lawyers. Strict rules as a guidance and instrument are their instruments and no those are also not always in the business best interest.

This relates to IT Portfolio Management: Strategic, High Potential, Key Operational & Support. We need to realize that whatever we work on might be strategic or high potential will move to key operational and support. They all need different approaches and types of management. So choose your methodologies wisely. Don’t just pick one and force that square peg in the round hole. This is my advice to both business and IT. I’ve seen business decisions change support level products turned into high cost  high maintenance because due to bad decisions. So we might not have to be our brothers keeper towards the business but than again do we really need those bridging functions and those guys or gals need to be at the top of their game as I stated in The shortage of skilled employees, are we making it worse?

So keep things a simple and as effective as possible. Do it fast, ride and repeat. You’ll learn a lot and improve along the way. So here comes the build or buy decision and the link to the NetApp plug by the speaker. This is very dependent on the situation of the organization at hand. So the fast track has it’s place here. Is speed of delivery of key importance or absolute flexibility and adaptability? So it will depend. Yes the consultants answer. But being a real consultant is a very respectable job. I can’t hell it that the word has become meaningless due to missuses and inflationary titles for temps for hire.  The System Center stack and how NetApp improves and leverages all this is briefly discussed. He ties the fast track into the discussion of portfolio management and working in a customer centric way.

Conclusion

Why are we doing what we do? Think about it. There is a nice book on this subject  “Why we fail? by Alex Jauch.