Virtualisation

Hyper-V Server on a laptop - don't forget to check the power settings for the default power scheme

Liam Westley — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:39:39 GMT

If you install Hyper-V Server it comes without the usual Windows Server UI. On a laptop this means there is no control panel applet or system tray battery icon available to adjust the power configuration.

It's highly unlikely that the default option of Balanced is what you really want for hosting virtual machines, and you will ideally to set it to High Performance instead.

No need to worry, you need the command line tool, powercfg. Run the command line with the option list and then use the -setactive option with the long GUID to select your desired power scheme, as shown in the screen grab below. Job done.

Installing a second hard drive on my HP 6910p – one step closer to a virtual machine users dream machine

Liam Westley — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:45:08 GMT

I’ve previously described my reasoning for buying a business laptop like the HP 6910p, http://geekswithblogs.net/twickers/archive/2008/07/08/123643.aspx. I’m now feeling even better about that decision after the latest ‘upgrade’ to my main laptop; adding a second internal hard drive to simplify my use of virtual machines.

The problem

I use virtual machines quite regularly. One major client has a legacy application that requires Visual Studio 2003, which in turn requires Windows XP Professional as an operating system. My daily operating system has been Windows 7 since the beta was released in January. So I created a virtual Windows XP machine with the data (source code, SQL Server 2000 databases) on a separate virtual drive image (in a ‘neutral’ VHD format).

I have run this XP/ VS2003 image in various host software; Virtual PC, VMWare workstation and VirtualBox. Currently it is running within VMWare Workstation 7 (recently released) and to improve the performance of the virtual machine, I placed both the guest operating system virtual drive image and the data virtual drive image on a separate hard drive to the host operating system.

I used a separate drive, in an external USB 2.0/eSata enclosure from Akasa. This accepts a standard 2.5” notebook drive, allowing both power and data to be handled by a single USB to mini USB cable.

Using an external drive has it's advantages. It is very portable and you can easily take the drive with you or move it between different systems. There is, however, one downside. Using it on public transport, even a train, can be a bit awkward; where do you put that hard drive to stop it getting knocked? Even at home I have been known to drop it more than once, fortunately when it was powered down, but still not ideal.

The solution

The advantage of the business laptops, like this HP series, is they usually support removable drives. In the case of HP this is called a MultiBay. This is a simple caddy system for the optical drive, which can quickly be switched for other devices allowing easy upgrading of the optical drive, or placing the optical drive in your docking station and filling the slot with a plastic spacer to shave 150g off the overall weight of the laptop.

I have been using one of these plastic spacers for the last six months or so, so I definitely knew that for me having a DVD/CD drive was an optional extra. I have enough USB flash drives and external hard drives that I no longer use optical discs unless archiving. As long as I have access to an optical drive via the laptop docking station for the odd occasion when I need one, that will do me fine.

One of the available MultiBay items is a simple hard drive caddy, which takes a standard SATA notebook hard drive and places it in a standard MultiBay format. If you buy it from HP it arrives with a drive already in place, for what I can only describe as an extortionate amount of money. Fortunately you can pick one up on empty version on eBay for £20, as long as you are prepared to wait a week of two for delivery from Hong Kong.

Well, I received my MultiBay caddy about 10 days ago, and in less than five minutes I had a new hard drive installed in my laptop. It’s a joy to have an internal drive and no longer have to worry about accidently knocking it while it’s running. In daily use, running my VS2003 development VM, it’s worked beautifully.

No longer are my host and guest operating systems fighting over access to the hard drive, and both the host and guest are smoother in use as a result. It is a shame that the MultiBay standard is USB 2.0, so even though the drive is housed internally I don’t get full SATA transfer speeds. The only other minor niggle is that the drive activity does not cause the ‘optical drive LED’ to flash on the front of the laptop. For this you have to check the red LED on the face of the MultiBay itself, but at least you do get a drive use indicator.

Future upgrade

Of course, this has just left me wanting more. That boot drive is very likely to be replaced by an SSD drive, and with two internal drives available. Two drives means I can install a smaller (read cheaper) SSD drive for booting and running my development tools and applications. The old fashioned MultiBay can handle data storage and virtual machine images. Now all I need are 4Gb SO-DIMMs for a reasonable price so I can upgrade to 8Gb in total ....

The upgrade in images

This is the Akasa caddy I use for most of my external drives (I have four currently), the cost around £15 including the eSata, USB and ‘USB power’ cables, and can take both PATA and SATA drives.

I removed the 320Gb Western Digital drive from the caddy.

I removed the optical drive from the laptop. Note how the MultiBay ‘format’ is effectively based on the standard format for a laptop optical drive with a single extra circuit board on the rear to convert the connector to the ‘HP’ standardised connector.

This is the £20 hard drive caddy which will slot into the laptop in place of the optical drive ...

... and here is that caddy with the hard drive in place, before slotting back into the laptop.

How to enable PowerShell in Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

Liam Westley — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:00:47 GMT

After reading Tim Anderson’s blog article (here) on his installation of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 I glibly added a comment that R2 now includes PowerShell 2.0 for local management of virtual machines using PowerShell scripts. Of course, I hadn’t actually tried this before commenting ....

Why would you want to use scripting on Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

If you have never installed Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 you may not realise the limited options provided by the local management tool. Based on Windows Server 2008 R2 Server Core there is no Windows Explorer and none of the standard user interface components for configuration. Instead the Hyper-V team provide a simple menu which supports the configuration steps required to allow remote management of the server using the Hyper-V Manager MMC snap-in (available for Vista, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008).

The real ‘local’ management tool is that old fashioned item, the command prompt,

So, if you aim to manage Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 you should get used to command line tools and commands, which means having access to a scripting system like PowerShell provides a route for local management of virtual machines without requiring the Hyper-V Manager on a separate client machine.

No PowerShell by default

As stated above, Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is based on Windows Server 2008 R2 Server Core, and it is this update that included support for .NET framework and PowerShell scripting. Quite correctly server core locks down all functionality until it is enabled/installed. PowerShell is one of the items that are not installed by default.

First installation attempt

So I did a quick Google/Bing for Enabling PowerShell on Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 and got to this blog article (here) on the highly useful Virtual PC Guy’s blog. I followed the steps. No joy.

Hold on - doesn’t PowerShell required .NET Framework?

I did a directory search, dir c:\windows\*powershell*.exe /s, to see if the directory path had changed, but instead of finding a PowerShell installation, I found a list of files in a directory called c:\windows\winsxs. This directory appears to contain all the install packages for server core, and as well as PowerShell it included .NET framework installations.

This was the ‘lightbulb’ moment I was searching for. PowerShell probably won’t install because I the .NET Framework is not installed. A big more of Google/Bing and I found the following article on Window Server 2008 R2 Server Core, on MSDN, http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/r2core/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Home&version=8

I ran the command oclist to list all the installed options,

There, right in the middle was PowerShell being a child node of NetFx2 (.Net Framework 2.0) which suggested a dependency. So I ran the following installation commands

start /w ocsetup NetFx2-ServerCore

start /w ocsetup MicrosoftsoftWindowsPowerShell

After that, I had PowerShell installed,

To run it I just cd'd to c:\windows\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0 and typed powershell

Alternatively once you reboot the system, the PowerShell directory will be placed in the search path and you can just type powershell in any directory to access the PowerShell command prompt.

Next steps ...

In a post next week I’ll demonstrate how to use the PowerShell Management Library for Hyper-V available on codeplex (http://pshyperv.codeplex.com/) on Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 to list running virtual machines, start and stop virtual machines and do useful admin stuff like mount/dismount VHD drives.

Virtualised networking issues? Sometimes it's the most obvious thing, Doh!

Liam Westley — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 02:41:28 GMT

I just provided some help to a friend setting up a small virtualisation network on single machine, for demonstrating a new software technology at user groups and conferences.

A few tweets and e-mails went back and forth as we discussed virtual networking options, static IP configurations and using NEWSISID to enable imaging VMs from a initial 'gold' image. Getting the machines to talk to each other on an isolated virtual network was proving to be way more difficult than it should have been.

At this point I'll veer off and mention the apocryphal story regarding a Physics PhD who was visiting his parents. When he discovered that their vacuum cleaner had stopped working the day before he offered to help out. About an hour after he started his mother brought him a cup of tea in a room now strewn with vacuum cleaner parts being tested with a digital multimeter. His mother casually asked if he had tested the fuse ...

So back to the virtualisation; I had actually hit a similar scenario with my virtualisation presentations when I installed Hyper-V Server on one laptop and used a crossed network cable to connect to a second laptop running Windows Server 2008. I blamed Hyper-V Server, I blamed my static IP configuration, I blamed the crossed network cable.

I blamed all the unfamiliar things I was working with.

And the solution for me, and my friend's isolated virtual network?

The default firewall settings in Windows Server 2008 block the ping command. Yep, the thing you'll first think of to test you have the network configured correctly won't work.

I discovered this when in desperation I configured remote administration. Once a connected remotely, I knew my network configuration was definitely working, and a bit of digging later and I discovered the truth about ping under a default installation of Windows Server 2008.

The lesson learnt; it is completely natural to blame the unfamiliar first, a very human reaction. It's also more often than not the wrong attitude, especially with new computer technologies.

Liam

P.S. Disabling the ping command follows the Microsoft goal of locking down server operating systems to be secure out of the box, and letting administrators enable services and firewall items when they are required. This is a good thing, and I definitely don't want this post to suggest otherwise. We just need to remember, no ping by default and get over it.

Hyper-V for Developers - presentation from Edge UG 16 September 2009

Liam Westley — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:29:04 GMT

Thanks to Ray and Gavin for organising another top EdgeUG meeting in Microsoft Cardinal Place and for everyone who attended my talk on Hyper-V for Developers. The audience had to deal with a huge amount of technical information that I crammed into the hour - hopefully it didn't put them off their pizza.

Fortunately the Stack Overflow master and author of C# in Depth, Jon Skeet, was on hand after the break for a interesting glimpse into code contracts coming with VS2010 and C# 4.0.

For those who weren't there last night, the presentation provides an overview of Hyper-V Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 running Hyper-V, tools that you can install to help you out, how Snapshots work and finally automation of Hyper-V using the PowerShell library for Hyper-V as might be used in CI (continous integration) server.

I've got two version of the slidedeck, one in PowerPoint, hyperv4dev-ppt.zip, and a PDF version complete with speaker notes that contains all the interesting stuff including the PowerShell script, hyperv4dev-pdf.zip.

Thanks again to the guys from EdgeUG and all those who joined us down the pub afterwards for a beer and a chat.

Liam

P.S. Jon mentioned that Microsoft has decided that static checking of Code Contracts should be limited to the Team System versions of Visual Studio 2010. Here is a link to the Microsoft Connect request to reverse this blinkered approach and place static checking into Visual Studio Professional edition;

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=481327

Do please vote on t his topic and let Microsoft know what you think, hopefully it 's not too late to reverse this marketing decision.

Hyper-V for Developers - presentation from DevEvening 13 August 2009

Liam Westley — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:01:13 GMT

Thanks to Alex and Matt for organising another top DevEvening user group in Woking and for everyone who attended my talk on Hyper-V for Developers. Apologies for over running and hope it didn't stop you from enjoying your meals. I think I achieved a good warm up for Sebastien Lambla's talk on best practices in MVC.

For those who weren't there last night, the presentation provides an overview of Hyper-V Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 running Hyper-V, tools that you can install to help you out, how Snapshots work and finally automation of Hyper-V using the PowerShell library for Hyper-V.

I've got two version of the slidedeck, one in PowerPoint, hyperv4dev-ppt.zip, and a PDF version complete with speaker notes that contains all the interesting stuff including the PowerShell script, hyperv4dev-pdf.zip.

Thanks again to the guys in Woking, and for Sebastien Lambla for helping me polish off a bottle of nice wine on the way back to London.

BSI Role of Virtualisation in Green IT - presentation now available

Liam Westley — Wed, 20 May 2009 03:18:24 GMT

For all who were at the BSI Green IT conference on 19th May, here is my presentation for download, in PowerPoint PPT format

http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/bsi/virtGreenIt.zip

DDD Scotland - Virtualisation for Developers presentation

Liam Westley — Sun, 03 May 2009 02:55:23 GMT

Thanks to all the guys who turned out to the first presentation of the day at DDD Scotland where I gave my presentation, Virtualisation for Developers. As promised you can download the PowerPoint slide deck using the link below. Check out the speaker notes for all the resources and URLs I mentioned along the way.

http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/dddscot/virt4dev-DDDScot.zip

Thanks again for inviting me up to speak at DDD Scotland and creating a fantastic event.

UPDATE

And a video of an earlier version of this present, given at DDD7, is now live at, http://www.craigmurphy.com/blog/?p=1591

2nd May 2009 - Liam bringing Virtualisation for Developers to DDD Scotland

Liam Westley — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:46:12 GMT

The voting is over, and my session 'Virtualisation for Developers' has been voted in for DDD Scotland. You can find out about the other proposed sessions, register to attend and sign up for the geek dinner at http://www.developerdayscotland.com/.

Definitely looking forward to Glasgow and seeing you all there.

Citrix XenServer Enterprise now free

Liam Westley — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:49:40 GMT

Citrix has just released it's XenServer Enterprise product free. This isn't just a barebones hypervisor product, it's the full deal with all the management tools that you'd expect from paid for product. This throws down the gaunlet to the free VMWare ESXi, and provides a 64 bit, 8 virtual CPU product that you can professionally manage.

Get the info here; http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/feature.asp?contentID=1686939