Nuclear Weasels

Yesterday I wrote about Hyper-V and how we plan to trail it, for those of you who haven’t read that entry yet you can find it here.

We pick up today with a base Server 2008 install, we’re running 64 Bit Enterprise level Server 2008 to which we have applied all available updates (Especially the Hyper-V update KB950050!). Next task is to install the Hyper-V role to the server, in my case this required a reboot of the system (Not that it should matter, you shouldn’t be running other roles on your Hyper-V server).

Once the server was running I fired up the Hyper-V console and took a look around, the basics were all there. The ability to create and modify VM’s and the ability to connect to them.

Rather than jumping straight in and creating a new VM from scratch I chose to migrate one of our existing Virtual Servers, Amy. This server used to be our main Exchange server for our perimeter network it was replaced by a hardware server a little over a month ago. As Amy has not yet been removed from Active Directory I thought it would be a good test box to move over, especially considering the other candidates were our main Database Server and our SharePoint 2003 server!

After detaching the VHD from the old server I copied it accross to the Hyper-V box, the size of the disk meant it took about 30 minutes to complete so I disappeared off to grab a coffee. Once the hard drive was on the Hyper-V server I created a new Hyper-V VM with some fairly basic specs and attached it to the existing VHD file. I was surprised to find the VM booted first time (With warnings about mouse capturing not working, you really need to know your keyboard shortcuts for a VHD upgrade).

Once it was up and running a spent a few minutes familiarising myself with the remote access feature of Hyper-V. In Virtual Server 2005 we were forced to use a VMRC server to connect to the server if RDP wasn’t running which was a somewhat clunky thing which had a habbit of locking up on our Virtual Server 2005 box. In Hyper-V that has changed, it now appears that there is a souped up version of Remote Desktop running to give you console access to the server. Its a welcome change to the old way of doing things and a major thumbs up to the use of Hyper-V in our environment.

Installing the Hyper-V Integration components to the VM took a few minutes, it required a reboot in order to upgrade the HAL on the Virtual Machine something that was automatic under Windows Server 2003 but apparently needs to be done manually on Vista or earlier clients.

One final reboot later I set the IP address of the virtual machine and everything was back to normal, more importantly it was it was about a bazillion times faster* than it was previously.

Given the success of the initial migration I will be looking at Migrating some of our lower importance VM’s over from VM-Ware.

More on that later.

~Dan

* Please note, no scientific tests were carried out to reach this number. Instead I used the pull numbers from thin air randomiser routine instead.

The company I work for has spent a year trying to use Virtuozzo for its server Virtualisation, after a year of poor service and several interesting issues we have made the decision to move away from Virtuozzo as a virtualisation platform.

In the time we spent on Virtuozzo Microsoft released Hyper-V, if they had released it before we started looking at Virtuozzo we would probably have been an early adopter (despite the fact we are corporately standardised on Server 2003). Our previous foray in to the world of Virtualisation was conducted using Micrsoft Virtual Server 2005 which was pretty bland feature wise which was one reason for trying out Virtuozzo. The benefit of hindsight now shows me that Virtual Server 2005 would have done as a platform for the past year.

Now that Hyper-V has been released we are once again looking at the possibility of using Microsoft Virtualisation Products as our Virtualisation Platform, I plan to release a couple of blog entries about how we’re going about doing this and highlighting anything interesting I come accross for you folks to read.

We’re installing Hyper-V on a Dell Power Edge PE1950 rack mount server, the basic spec of the machine is

• Quad Core Xeon running 2.33 Ghz
• 4 Gigabytes of RAM
• Dual 73 Gigabyte 15K RPM SAS drives
• 1 Terabyte SAN storage
• Dual NICs

Already I can see room for improvement on that specification, sadly the box wasn’t originally purchased to be a Virtualisation work horse. So I’ll be looking up the cost of a RAM upgrade (12 / 16 gig) plus perhaps a second processor to add a little more computation power.

As I type this the server is booting up in to Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, the 64 Bit version obviously as Hyper-V doesn’t run on the 32 Bit version. My initial impression of Server 2008 is that it is much slicker than previous versions, as yet I’ve not found any new features which would cause me to make the jump to Server 2008 as the corporate server OS choice however its early days yet.

Next task – Installing Hyper-V.