Virtualization

After 2 weeks lot of work i finish a migration of our environment from one Site to another. I face lot of difficulties  but we didn't have any downtime and i am happy for this.

Day after day with lot of troubleshooting and monitoring i learn new things in different areas simple or not that will be useful in the feature.

One of them is how can install Roles and Features in Virtual Machine that it's offline and i would like to share it with you because i believe can help lot of IT Pro.

So let's start to explain step by step how can do it.

Windows Server 2012 HYPER-V has a great feature that to be honest until few months ago i didn't know it. The feature is the Domain Controller Clone. As IT Pro you must know that to restore a Domain Controller it's not so simple. It's not only a Restore from a Backup. You must have prepare a plan with specific tests to Restore successful a failed Domain Controller.

With a simple words everything else as restore , copy , snapshot except rebuilding from scratch it has the potential to create more problems in the directory.

Port Mirroring is a method that used to monitoring network traffic. When port mirroring enable in a switch port then sends a copy of all packets hitting one specific port to another. where the packet can then picked up and analyzed.

For Network engineers this method is a tool to monitoring traffic from Servers. They can use it in Physical Switches with Physical Servers and Workstations. 

But how can monitoring and analyze network traffic from a Virtual Machine?

HYPER-V Host has a feature to Import a new Virtual Machine or Live Migration between 2 different HYPER-V Hosts.

As IT Pro i would like to know if the Virtual Machine that you want to transfer is compatible in the new HYPER-V Host. Especially if the Virtual Machine is a critical System in your Production environment or a huge File Server.

I don't want to start an Import or a Live Migration and in the middle of Migration get errors that must resolve it.

But how i know if the transfer will be done successful? 

HYPER-V has lot of free tools to manage, monitoring  or convert virtual machines. But how many hours do you spend to search for tools , test it and use it ? 

So today i would like to share in all IT Pro some of free tools that can use with HYPER-V for manage,monitoring or convert Virtual Macines. It very quick and simle to type and search in Google for hyperv tools and publish it here but i don't want it.

These tools i have use it in my day to day tasks of work or in my Lab Enviroment for tests.

Let's start.

Differencing Disk is good solution to save hard disk space in your HYPER-V Host when you must deploy multiple Virtual Machines in your environment for test purposes. Of course you can use it in your production environment but you must sure that the Parent Hard disk located in Disk with high performance like SSD because the I/O will be high. 

Differencing Disks can reduce the time and storage requirements but if you use lot of child disks can be a performance hit.  So think very carefully where and why must use Difference disks in your environment.

As IT Pro very often  create new Virtual Machines for Production Enviroment or for Testing. Create new Virtual Hard Disks for Virtual Machines. In Physical Servers Hard Disks are hardware equipment. But in HYPER-V Host the Virtual Hard disks are files with an extension vhd or vhdx.

Sometimes we need to know specific details for Virtual Hard Disk of a Server. How can find these details ? For Physical Hard Disks already we know all the details when we buy the Disk or we know where can find it after add in the Server.

Today i will continue with the Second and Last Part in HYPER-V Failover Clustering. Use these 2 technologies together to make High Available your Virtual Machines and keep downtime out of the game. In Firs Part i have describe how can enable Failover Clustering , use Validation Wizard and add the nodes that will be act as Clusters.

Today i will describe the following

One of the biggest challenge of IT today is to keep production environment healthy without downtimes. In IT world this means Replications, High Availability, Failover Clustering, Load Balancing. Today most of the Servers are Virtual Servers with Hypervisors to keep the Virtual Servers.

Today i will explain how can keep the HYPER-V Hosts without downtimes in any scenario except from Disaster Recovery. The solution is the Failover Clustering . What is Failover Clustering? 

HYPER-V in Windows Server 2012 has lot changes. One of them is Enhanced Session Mode. All we know that Virtual Machines don't provide any physical console that you can interact with like a physical computer.

From  my experience lot of times i need to copy/paste files from USB Disk in the Virtual Machibe and i must copy-paste in network location like a User folder, connect Remotely in Virtual Machine or from HYPER-V Host Console and open network location to copy/paste the file or folder.