Blog Posts

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

During last week's chat the we discussed ESXi licensing and features. In the features portion of the discussion flakrat asked if it was possible to setup two ESXi servers with shared storage to be able to do a manual fail-over of a VM between the two servers. I was able to create this setup and confirm that it works. Read on for details.

The setup that I used to test was two PowerEdge R805 servers with ESXi Update 2 refresh installed on the hard drive. This was the currently available "free" ESXi installable from VMware's web site. To install I used the Dell Remote Access Card (DRAC) virtual media capability to boot from the ESXi ISO I downloaded. I selected the local hard disk as the location to install and let it complete. Once installed, I used the ESXi configuration to set the password, IP, gateway, and hostname for each server. I then installed the Virtual Infrastructure client on a windows server and used that to manage each of the R805 servers individually.

For shared storage I used a PowerVault MD3000i iSCSI storage array. I enabled the iSCSI software initiator on each server and discovered the the MD3000i. On server A, I created a VMFS partition and created a new VM called VMTest1. I installed Windows Server 2008 64-bit Enterprise Edition. After install completed I shutdown the VM on server A. I then went to server B and rescanned the storage adapters. It found the new VMFS partition on the shared iSCSI LUN. I created a VM using the same settings as I had on Server A including the same virutal hard disk file. I then boot the VM successfully.

The most interesting part of this test was to verify that the cluster file system of VMFS was still working without Virtual Center in the picture. So with the VM still running on Server B, I tried to start it on Server A - and I got an error message that the file was in use by another server. This was great because it showed that it would not be possible to run the VM at the same time on both servers.

We will chat more about this on today's chat - ESX and ESXi.

Todd