We have just launched our DailyHypervisor Forum located at http://www.dailyhypervisor.com/forum. Stop by, contribute and be a part of our community. The DH Forum is intended to be for all things cloud. Currently we have forums created for vCAC, vCD, vCO, Cloud General, and Openstack. More forum categories will be coming based on demand. If you have a category you would like to see shoot us a note and let us know.
Our goal is to create a common place where anyone can come to learn, get help, share ideas, or just about anything that will help foster knowledge regarding cloud computing. Considering this very blog is the announcement of our forum you could image there isn’t a whole lot happening yet so what are you waiting for, be the first. Go ask a question, post an issue, share a thought and let’s get things rolling.
A few months ago I set out to build a home lab that I could use to run vSphere, vCD, View, vCAC, vCO, vCops, and all other grat management tools that VMware has as well as Hyper-V, XenServer, KVM, OpenStack, Citrix XenDesktop, XenPVS and just about anything else I could think of running. Initially I built a server with the following specs:
After finally setting up a SLES 10 server on Hyper-V I thought I write a little how to on getting the Linux Integration components working. Microsoft includes an install doc that doesn’t really tell the whole story.
I had already installed SLES before I read the manual and found out that XEN Virtualization support needed to be installed as well and Microsoft documentation also states that you need the C++ compiler. What they really mean is the gcc compiler. What they fail to mention is that you also need he kernel-sources installed as well.
The Infrastructure Planning and Design team has released a new guide: Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization.
This guide outlines the critical infrastructure design elements that are crucial to a successful implementation of Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V). The reader is guided through the four-step process of designing components, layout, and connectivity in a logical, sequential order. Identification of the MED-V server instances required is presented in simple, easy-to-follow steps, helping the reader to deliver managed virtual machines to end users. Following the steps in this guide will result in a design that is sized, configured, and appropriately placed to deliver the stated business benefits, while also considering the performance, capacity, and fault tolerance of the system.
Download the guide by visiting http://www.microsoft.com/ipd and selecting “Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization” under the IPD One-click Downloads, listed on the bottom right of the page.
Infrastructure Planning and Design streamlines the planning process by:
Defining the technical decision flow through the planning process.
Listing the decisions to be made and the commonly available options and considerations.
Relating the decisions and options to the business in terms of cost, complexity, and other characteristics.
Are you running Hyper-V? Have you used up all the available drive letters deploying LUN’s for VM’s in your Failover Cluster? Running out of drive letters? It is fairly easy to get around the 26 drive letter limit in windows when deploying VM’s in a Hyper-V failover cluster configuration. It is possible to deploy 2000 LUN’s to your Hyper-V cluster environment allowing you to grow your cluster and take advantage of your hardware.
In order to grow beyond the 26 drive letters you will need to install HotFix KB951308. Once this hot fix is installed you can create shared storage using the drives GUID rather than drive letter or mount point. Using the drives GUID you can create up to 2000 shared volumes without worrying about running out of identifyers.
What you need to do:
Install hotfix KB951308 on all hosts in the Hyper-V Failover Cluster
Reboot your Hyper-V hosts
Present storage to the server
Bring the new storage on-line
Initialize the new storage
partition and Format the storage, but don’t assign a drive letter or mount point
Using he command mountvol.exe from the command line you can view the GUID for all storage devices attached to your system. NOTE: You need to run this command form the server that currently owns the storage resource that you want to locate the GUID for. Alternatively you can locate the GUID by right clicking the storage device in Failover Cluster Manager and selecting properties.
Once you have the GUID for the volume you would like to deploy your new Virtual Machine to do the following:
Launch the new virtual machine wizard using Hyper-V manager
On the “Specify Name and Location” step check the box next to “Store Virtual Machine in a different location” and paste the volume GUID in the location box.
On the “Connect Virtual Hard Disk” step choose “Create a Virtual Hard Disk” and in “Location” box paste the GUID for the volume.
Complete the creation of your Virtual Machine
Once your Virtual Machine is created you need to launch “Failover Cluster Manager” and create a new “Virtual Machine” Service. When you create the new Virtual Machine service the disk will automatically be added as a resource for the Virtual Machine”
You can also acheive this using SCVMM 2008. Make sure to deploy the new VM on the server that currently owns the disk resource.
