Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper V

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

My proposal for IT Portfolio examines Microsoft Hyper-V R2 in Windows Server 2008 R2. One of nowadays’ trend in the IT industry is the concepts of server and storage virtualization. All around the world, from small business to large corporations and from server rooms to data centers, virtualization is in the center of the debates. I have a 10th grader son who came home with a project about virtualization. He asks me the real meaning of this new technology. Many ordinary people ask the same question, but the main audience in this project is IT Network Administrators and IT Managers.

Virtualization: What is it?

In reality, today’s data center is a sophisticated system composed of many powerful servers, operation systems and applications that interact together. To run this system 24/24, you need a huge amount of electricity, air conditioning, powerful UPS and others. As result, it is a tremendous capital investment and great harm for the ecosystem. Indeed, IT departments are always under pressure to maintain this mission critical system by deploying and moving servers around, assuring reliability and security. It is increasingly day-to-day challenge to Administrators. In the recent years, virtualization technology came in rescues to alleviate the tasks for the Administrators, reduce considerably IT cost and foot print on the environment. Now, Administrators can build plenty virtual servers in one physical server.

How it changes my day-to-day tasks as IT Network Administrator?

This paradigm shift is often referred to as the most important trend in the industry of information technology (Leyden, 2009). The big picture behind includes IT costs saving and data reliability. To ease the tasks for Network Administrators, Microsoft released in 2008 "Hyper-V R2" integrated to Windows Server 2008 R2. Hyper–V is the core subject of this project. This new version assists Information Technology (IT) managers and administrators performing and improving many of their tasks and challenges essentially in Virtual Server Live Migration, hardware and software consolidation, development and testing environment, Cluster Shared Volumes, Network Performance and Virtual Disk hot-add and more. All those features play big parts of deploying and maintaining servers, workstations, data storages and applications. Recently, Microsoft came with a new version of Hyper- V named Hyper-V 3.0 in Windows Sever 2012 with more flexibility and more features in virtualization, but I limit the scope of this particular project to Hyper- V R2 in Windows Server 2008 R2. The main goal I assign to this project in the contest of this scope is to outline how Hyper-V overcomes to ease administrators’ tasks and increase productivity in the businesses. The following four areas retain my attention:

Infrastructure Consolidation - Live Migration

Cluster Shared Volumes

Software Test and Development Consolidation

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

The first exhibit focuses on Live Migration, one of the biggest improvements in Hyper V that eliminates the downtime during virtual servers ‘migration. The next exhibit is Cluster Share Volumes, a feature that fails over individual virtual machines as necessary without affecting the entire disk resource. Another important feature- Software Testing and Development Consolidation creates a safe and independent environment for software development and testing. My last exhibit is Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. This feature dramatically reduces the number of physical hardware inherit to be compromised. There are two steps to accomplish this project:

Installation and configuration of Hyper-V R2 Role on a Windows Server 2008 R2

Hyper-V management and monitoring

This was not a formal project, but my interesting in virtualization pushed me to dig more in Hyper-V released in Windows server 2008 R2.

Hyper- V Installation and Configuration

Before working on the four exhibits referred above, it seems important to me to talk little about the Installation and configuration of Hyper-V R2 Role on a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine. This said I set my home lab. The system requirements are x64 support, Hardware-Assisted Virtualization enabled on AMD-V or Intel VT, AMD BIOS set to enable "No Execute" or Intel BIOS set to Execute Disable. An Adequate space for VHDs is required. Hyper- V runs only on Windows server 2008 64 bits editions. My home lab is an x64 server 2008 R2 computer (500GB HD, 4GB RAM, Intel BIOS) with two virtual servers and two desktops. Hyper- V is Windows Server 2008 role and I installed it from the Server Manager. Both following pictures show the beginning and the end of Hyper- V installation.

0Capture Hyper-V Installation

Fig 1: Hyper-V Role in Server Manager

Capture Hyper-V Installation Complete

Fig2: Hyper-V Installation Results

After the installation done, I configured the Hyper-V with command line hvconfig.cmd. Obviously, I have two options to configure Hyper-V:

From Hyper –V Manager in Server Manager

From Command line hvconfig.cmd

The following window shows the output of Hyper-V configuration from hvconfig.cmd command line.

Capture Hyper- V configuration tool

Fig3: Hyper-v configuration tool

Hyper-V Management Tools

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) is a centralized and powerful management and monitoring tool for virtual machines. SCVMM checks for problems across several VMs at once. It is a great tool for the virtual administration. For example, when we select a virtualization host server In the SCVMM interface, the result displays the list of its VMs; selecting a specific VM shows its CPU and memory usage and others. One thing I found very interesting is the incorporation of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) that allows access to remote VMs from the management console.

server_diagram_6inW_bw

Fig: 4 Management System Center (source: Microsoft)

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, SCOM 2007

This feature provides monitoring of the health and performance of the virtual machines. For example, virtual network saturation, add and remove VM network adapter, control of the network bandwidth, manage virtual memory and processor. It includes powerful tools to deal with alerts and issues that need immediate response. It is great for Microsoft infrastructure servers and application servers in physical and virtual environment in order to increase the efficiency while enabling greater control of the IT environment.

Conclusion

The vulgarization of Virtualization is still in its early stages and has long way to go and much to learn. I believe that it will deeply change and ease the tasks for administrators, considerably reduce IT costs and create environment impacts free. Decidedly, Hyper-V remains the future of best solutions for companies to reduce IT costs and unsure a reliable and scalable system. IT departments heavily rely on Hyper-V in the following domains:

Dynamic Data Center - Live Migration

Cluster Shared Volumes

Software Testing and Development Consolidation

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery