System Center solutions help you manage your physical and virtual IT environments across datacenters, desktops, and devices. Using these integrated and automated management solutions, you can be a more productive service provider for your business. As a result of feedback we have gathered from all around the IT Pro universe, some great changes have been made to the System Center Evaluation experience.

With the release of the System Center 2012 beta evaluation in the TechNet Evaluation Center, you can now download and evaluate the most current versions of System Center 2012 products with a single registration.  This includes all of the following pre-release products:

• System Center Virtual Machine Manager RC
• System Center Configuration Manager Beta
• System Center Operations Manager Beta
• System Center Orchestrator Beta
• System Center Data Protection Manager Beta

However, if you aren’t ready to evaluate all the System Center products you can select the specific products you want to evaluate, again with only one simple registration as opposed to the multiple registrations previously required.

Head over to the System Center 2012 Evaluation Center and check it out

Source: http://blogs.technet.com/b/uktechnet/archive/2011/10/25/download-microsoft-system-center-2012-pre-release-products.aspx

Couple of days ago I installed SCVMM  in order to test it out, since we are developing our IAAS solution. Everything seemed great until I found out that SVCMM doesnt have any API which can be used to create/turn on/off  new machines.  Yes, I know everything can be scripted thru Powershell, but it sucks that we need to create separate applicatons that will give us that feature. Imagine a solution where PRTG, Nagios or any other tools monitors your server… sees that the CPU load went up ( or any other condition) and starts up a new virtual machine  using API?

Its funny how the guys at MS fails to see the basic requirements for a modern cloud solution; do I have to mention that after years of HyperV being RTM-ed, we still dont have an option to limit a machines uplink speed!? Come on guys…SERIOUSLY!?!?

I know that you already have this  little piece of software created, release it…pretty please!? I know that Microsoft sees HyperV in some giant corporation where they dont have a need to limit the uplink of a virtual machine, but IMHO, hosters are having a bigger “market” share  than big corporations, think about us, pretty please with sugar on top .

Oh, what about promiscous mode for network cards? You  have no idea how much would I like to use SNORT on my HyperV virtual switch, but…I cant

What about the limit on only 4 cores per virtual machine? This is a VERY limiting factor. I’m in a situation where i have a 2x six core, 48 GB ram server which I want to turn into ONE virtual machine ( live migrations, scaling, etc…), but I cant…I can only turn it into a 4 core, 44 GB machine, effectively, wasting other 8 cores!?

I would really love to get in touch with someone from Microsoft Virtualization team and send them a list of must-have changes Someone knows some insiders?

Let me make one thing clear, I love Microsoft, but lets face it, there is lots of work that needs to be done. Admit it or not, the guys at the “Linux Camp” have much more options and features regarding virtualization. I really, really love HyperV, but some limitations are just plain unlogical/stupid.

Sorry for a bitter post, but I had to throw out my frustrations

Fact number one: If you have a streaming server, you must install this extension!

Great, now that we’ve got this fact covered, we can move on.

IIS site says:

Bit Rate Throttling, an IIS Media Services extension, saves money on network costs by metering the download speed of media and data files. For media, Bit Rate Throttling accomplishes this by automatically detecting the encoded bit rates of 11 common media formats, such as Windows Media Video (WMV), Flash Video (FLV), and MPEG 4 (MP4), and then throttling the response to the client. For any other file or MIME type, Bit Rate Throttling allows administrators to configure custom throttling rules.

Now, lets explain the same thing in a bit simpler way.

If you have a server which streams any kind of media files, Im sure you have noticed extremely high bandwidht usage on that machine. In my experience, over 40% of the bandwidth is wasted! WAIT! WHY, HOW?

Answer is simple!

Scenario 1 ( server without Bit Rate Throttling extension ):

Lets say that you have a 100 Mbit link on your machine. A visitor with a 20 Mbit link will come to your site and click “play” on the newest promo movie you have uploaded.  What will happen, the server will send the ENTIRE video to the visitor in couple of seconds ( buffering ) and on the half of the movie, the visitor will see that he doesnt like your movie and go away.

What happened here? Half of the downloaded movie is wasted. The visitor downloaded the entire movie, but only looked at half of it. Efectively, you’ve wasted 50% of that movies bandwidth ( in a 100 Mb file, thats 50 Mb of bandwidth wasted )

This is where Bit Rate Throttling jumps in and saves the day!

Scenario2 ( Server with Bit Rate Throttling Extension installed ) :

Lets say that you have a 100 Mbit link on your machine. A visitor with a 20 Mbit link will come to your site and click “play” on the newest promo movie you have uploaded.  What will happen, the server will see that the movie is encoded at 700 kbps ( example ) and reduce the speed its sending you the movie ( buffering )  to 800 kbps or 850 kbps ( depening on what setting you choose ) so that you still have a smooth playback and some buffer in reserve ).   In this case, amount of bandwidht that could potentially be wasted is a lot smaller than the amount of bandwidth that would be wasted without this extension.

As I said before, improvements in bandwidth costs can be improved up to 40%! Thats not a small amount!

Features of Bit Rate Throttling:

• Seamless integration into IIS 7.x Manager
• Out-of-the box compatibility for the following media types: .asf, .avi, .flv, .m4v, .mov, .mp3, .mp4, .rm, .rmvb, .wma and .wmv
• Dynamic throttling adjustment based on:
  • The file types and their encoded bit rate
  • The available bandwidth of the connection
  • Default and maximum throttling rates
  • Concurrent connection limits
  • Target throughput rate for the site
• Throttling rules configurable at various levels including server, site and virtual directory
• Fast Start experience for optimal user experience
• Extensibility to enable other media formats and file types
• Better-together solution when combined with Web Playlists

Have a nice day! Alesandro

Since cloud hosting has become very popular today I have decided to try creating windows cluster for plain old hosting service. Since we are already using WebSitePanel as our main control panel for windows server, the goal is to leave everything running the way it is now, but with the possiblity to add new servers to the server pool without affecting current customers and “fooling” WebSitePanel that it thinks its running on a single machine, so that it isnt aware of the cluster at all.

How did it all start?

Well, to be honest, I was very interested to migrate all of our customers from WebSitePanel to Enkompass when I saw that they are offering cluster based hosting. By going a bit deeper into the scheme of their solution I saw that its basically very simple;  ARR and a big hog of a storage server which even doesnt have to run on windows!!!

Ofcourse, I would LOVE to try Windows Storage Server and give Microsoft money for it, but…since I’m not an OEM manufacturer, I can only dream about it

Since I work at a hosting company which offers linux and windows hosting, we got to an idea to serve all clients from a cluster of storage servers, rather than having 2 separate clusters of storage servers, one for each hosting type ( Windows and Linux ) .

I have the entire thing “visualized” in my head…and some paper, so  I’m hoping that in month-two I will have a WORKING solution of my idea

Im already seeing some blade servers hihihihi…

This episode requires a special blog post for it hehe..awesome!

Today, me and my collegaue managed to configure ISCSI on some backup server we had at the office. Iscsi target is based on OpenSolaris and ZFS . ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems. The features of ZFS include support for high storage capacities, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs. ZFS is implemented as open-source software, licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). The ZFS name is a trade mark of Sun.

Requirements for running any OS in HyperV that will be stored on Iscsi server are:

1. Iscsi target, obviously

2.Iscsi initiator software ( bundled in Windows 2008 Server)

3. High speed network, atleast 1Gbit.

4. Drive that you connect to the HyperV machine MUST stay in offline mode.

5. Tons of time to configure it

Will you will be able to read more details about configuring OpenSolaris and ZFS on my collegaues blog : toic.org  – linux geek blog

So, like we already know, the disk on that we want to install the OS has to be offline  ( hint: disk2 ).

Next step is the creation of the virtual machine that will use the disk.  I have recorded that process, so you can see how simple it is .

All that you have to do is to install the OS…I didnt do that to the end in the video.

Tommorow we have planned to create a failover cluster with two Windows 2008 servers and see what will happen when one server suddenly get disconnected..ups

Bye, Alesandro

Microsoft has released the latest version of its free standalone server virtualization solution.

The new release, Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, can take advantage of greater computing resources compared with the first version. With R2, Microsoft increased the number of physical and logical processors supported. As well, the product now supports physical memory of up to one terabyte (see Table).

R2 works with various Windows client and server operating systems and can be downloaded here.

Comparing Hyper-V Server V1 vs. V2

This release features Microsoft’s built-in “live migration” capability. Live migration is designed to move virtual machines (VMs) with no perceived loss of uptime by end users. It also can facilitate hardware updates (such as basic input/output system changes or memory upgrades) during planned downtimes. The VMs can be moved out before the hardware upgrade and then moved back when the work is completed.

Microsoft includes a “processor compatibility” feature in Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 that allows VMs to be moved across different processor generations provided that the processors come from the same hardware vendor. So users can move VMs across Intel chipsets or across AMD chipsets, for instance, but not across a mixture of the two.

Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 can run up to 384 VMs with up to 512 virtual processors per server, according to Microsoft’s team blog. Management can be accomplished using Microsoft’s free Remote Server Administration Tool for Windows 7, or Windows Server 2008 R2 or System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2.

Microsoft also made it easier for its original equipment manufacturer partners to ship the hypervisor. Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 includes a new feature that lets users boot it from a flash drive.

Tnx to GCN