May 2008 - Posts
A few days back I gave the strongest hint that I could without breaking any NDAs that Microsoft's Windows virtualization product group were about to release something special . I couldn't say what at the time but it's no longer a secret - RC1 of Hyper-V is available for download.
This second release candidate is expected to be the last before the final product ships although, as for when that will be, the only public commitment that Microsoft has made is that it will ship within 180 days of Windows Server 2008 RTM (I think that works out as 2 August 2008). Personally, I don't think we'll have to wait that long, although it should be said that I have no information to back this up.
Unfortunately, the current beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 is not compatible with Hyper-V RC1 although I understand that the product team are working on a fix and, to be fair, that's one of the perils of running pre-release software. As is the fact that I need to collapse all my virtual machine snapshots before upgrading my Hyper-V hosts - it seems that Microsoft's previous statement that "With RC, Hyper-V is now feature complete and provides a seamless upgrade path to RTM of Hyper-V." doesn't include snapshots (at least the VMs themselves no longer need to be recreated as part of the upgrade).
For those who used earlier versions of Hyper-V, there is one more thing to watch out for - in RC0, Windows Server 2008 guests needed to have an update applied to support the integration components but that changes in RC1 - just use the integration services setup disk as for other operating system versions.
Those who thought (as I did until a few weeks back) that there would be no more Virtual Server development as Microsoft focuses its efforts on Hyper-V may be interested to hear that they have just announced an update for Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, providing host and guest support for Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows XP Service Pack 3. Further details can be found in Microsoft knowledge base article 948515.
In addition, Microsoft has shipped service pack 1 for Virtual PC 2007, providing guest support for Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows XP Service Pack 3 as well as host support for Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows XP Service Pack 3. Further details can be found in the accompanying release notes.
Both of these products take the VM Additions version to 13.820.
This information has been floating around for a few weeks but was under NDA until yesterday. Watch out for more news from the virtualisation labs in Redmond soon...
PowerShell evangelist (and Microsoft deployment guru) David Saxon dropped me a note this morning to let me know that Quest Software's Dmitry Sotnikov has got PowerShell running on Server Core.
Nice work Dmitry. It's not a supported configuration (as Jeffrey Snover notes in his post on the PowerShell Team blog) but something that people have been wanting to see for a while now.
The trouble with running Microsoft Hyper-V on a notebook PC is that notebook PCs typically don't have large hard disks. Add a few snapshots and a virtual machine (VM) can quickly run into tens or even hundreds of gigabytes and that meant that I needed to move my VMs onto an external hard disk.
In theory at last, there should also be a performance increase by moving the VMs off the system disk and onto a separate spindle; however that's not straightforward on a notebook PC as second disks will (normally) be external (and therefore using a slower USB 2.0 interface, rather than the internal SATA controller) - anyway, in my case, disk space was a more important than any potential performance hit.
Moving VMs around under Hyper-V is not as straightforward as in Virtual Server; however there is an export function in Hyper-V Manager that allowed me to export a VM to my external hard disk, complete with snapshots (Ken Schaefer describes the equivalent manual process for moving a Hyper-V VM on his blog).
The exported VM is still not ready to run though - it needs to be imported again but the import operation is faster as it doesn't involve copying the .VHD file (and any associated snapshots) to a new location. After checking that the newly imported VM (with disk and snapshot storage on the external drive) would fire up, I deleted the original version. Or, more accurately, I would have done if I hadn't run out of disk space in the meantime (Windows Server 2008 doesn't like it when you leave it with only a few MB of free space).
Deleting VMs is normally straightforward, but my machine got stuck half way through the "destroy" process (due to the lack of hard disk space upsetting my system's stability) and I failed to recover from this, so I manually deleted the files and restarted. At this point, Hyper-V manager thought that the original VM was still present but any attempt to modify VM settings resulted in an error (not surprising as I'd deleted the virtual machine's configuration file and the virtual hard disks). What I hadn't removed though was the shortcut (symbolic link) from the to my external hard disk. Deleting this file from %systemdrive%\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V\Virtual Machines and refreshing Hyper-V Manager left me with a clean management console again.
In my recent article about the realities of managing a virtualised infrastructure, I mentioned the need to patch offline virtual machine images. Whilst many offline images will be templates, they may still require operating system, security or application updates to ensure that they are not vulnerable when started (or when a cloned VM is created from a template).
Now Microsoft has a beta for a tool that will allow this - imaginatively named the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool. Built on the Windows Workflow Foundation and PowerShell, it works with System Center Virtual Machine Manager and either System Center Configuration Manager or Windows Server Update Services to automate the process of applying operating system updates through the definition of servicing jobs. Each job will:
- "Wake" the VM (deploy and start it).
- Trigger the appropriate update cycle.
- Shut down the VM and return it to the library.
Although I haven't tried this yet, it does strike me that there is one potential pitfall to be aware of - sysprepped images for VM deployment templates will start into the Windows mini-setup wizard. I guess the workaround in such a scenario is to use tools from the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) to inject updates into the associated .WIM file and deploy VMs from image, rather than by cloning sysprepped VMs.
Further details of the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool beta may be found on the Microsoft Connect site.