Hyper-V Install Video for Free

ToddMuirhead — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:06:00 GMT

Microsoft released Hyper-V Server as a FREE download from their website on Wednesday. Like lots of other server geeks out there, I downloaded it immediately and installed it to see what it was like. It took me about an hour and a half to complete the whole install process. I recorded the whole session as a video file and then edited it down to 5 minutes by speeding up all of the sections where it is loading files or rebooting.

I have decided to also give away for FREE my video of the Hyper-V Server install. Yes that's right. You can view my video for FREE, just like you can download Hyper-V Server or ESXi and install them for FREE.

I did the entire install remotely from my desk - our servers are in another room. In order to do the install I connected via remote desktop into a "gateway" system in the lab and then used a browser from that system to connect to the Dell Remote Access Card (DRAC) in the target server. Then using the remote console redirection and virtual media features of the DRAC I did the install from the Hyper-V Server ISO that was on our file server.

Hyper-V Server is basically Windows Server 2008 Core with only the Hyper-V role included. Did I mention that it is free? Which is a really big deal - I don't remember Microsoft ever giving away something like this before. Because it is based on Windows Server Core it does not have a GUI. It does include a text based configuration tool that enables you to set the hostname, IP, subnet, etc (This is included in the FREE video). Once a Hyper-V Server is on the network you can then use the Hyper-V Manager MMC from a Windows Server 2008 or Vista system to manage it.

Todd

Cool Trick with Excel and MD3000i Video

ToddMuirhead — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:57:00 GMT

In response to a few questions that came up, I put together a video that shows how to do a cool trick with Microsoft Excel to create graphs of MD3000i array level performance data. I posted an entry here last week and also put up a wiki page about how you can use the smCLI command line tool to get array level performance data (Individual storage processors, array totals, and individual virtual disks) from an MD3000i. The output of this command is a csv (comma separated values) text file. I included on the wiki page a nice graph of the performance based on the data from this output file. What I didn't go into was how to create such a graph.

So now you have this great little video that will show you one way that you can use Excel to create a graph based on the data in the file. I don't claim to be a know-it-all when it comes to Excel, but the way that I do it in the video works. I would love to hear from anybody who knows of other (possibly better) ways to do it.

Todd

Virtualization Frontier

Hyper-V Install Video for Free

Cool Trick with Excel and MD3000i Video