Future Technology can’t come soon enough

As I’ve been reviewing my Hyper-V and storage infrastructure at work, I can’t help but wish that future technology was available right now.

Primarily, I wish I had production ready releases of:

  • Windows Server 8 (For Hyper-V 3.0)
  • 802.11ac devices

Within my environment, running on our Dell MD3220i SAN I’ve got a file server VM with multiple VHDs attached. Most of these VHDs correspond to a DFS folder target that is being replicated using DFSR. The problem is that the folder target storing the majority of files is projected to grow beyond 2TB before the end of 2012.

My short term plan is to use a passthrough disk to a new LUN on an MD1220 attached to our SAN, but I’d really like to keep it contained within a VHDX file from Windows Server 8.

The reason for that is BACKUPS. The plan I’m thinking about right now is to use Hyper-V Replica to an offsite server for disaster recovery, with file-level backups of the contents of our VMs to an offsite NAS using some method of dedupe and compression. Again, waiting on Windows Server 8 for that.

The issue with this backup plan is connectivity to our offsite location which is a building across the parking lot from our head office that we lease.

Right now it’s connected by an 802.11a connection at 54Mbps. That’s really too slow to be able to do backups across, especially when we’re looking at just 500GB of Exchange data.

I’d really love to be able to set up an 802.11ac device that provides up to gigabit throughput. While I have read manufacturers such as Broadcom are working on these chips, they’re not commercially available yet.

 

The implementation of just these two things would make me much happier with my infrastructure and give me better scalability for the future.

 

Internet Explorer 10 suggesting sites you never typed

I’ve started using the Windows 8 Consumer Preview as my primary OS, and have come across something incredibly frustrating within Internet Explorer 10.

Try typing a letter or two in the address bar, and you’ll most likely see a bunch of URLs that you have never typed or visited before:

 

The only way to remove these from appearing is through Internet Options.

Click Tools (or the gear icon) > Internet Options > Content tab > “Settings” under the AutoComplete section, and then uncheck this box:

 

 

 

Now the only thing that will appear are your typed URLs, history, and favorite items.

 

 

Performance Monitoring Hyper-V Part 1 – Setup

There are many sites out there that document how to monitor Hyper-V performance, but only a few of them have any detail on the actual setup and results of the monitoring. Perhaps this post (and the next one coming) will assist you, or perhaps it will only be of benefit for my personal reference documentation.

Its sad to admit, but until this month I hadn’t spent any large amount of time looking at my Hyper-V cluster to check for performance issues because I’ve been so busy. With the addition of new staff at work (invaluable!) I’ve had the chance to get caught up on actual system administration.

In addition to the necessity of doing this because it’s the right thing to do, there’s a new software implementation that is being considered, and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t over-selling our cluster capabilities.

Real-time active monitoring

Hyper-V Windows Gadget: Made by Tore Lervik. I found this tool about 2 weeks after my initial implementation. Right now I’m only using it for active monitoring of the guest CPU performance, but it has many other features that make it worth downloading.

Hyper-V Monitor from Tore Lervik

Hyper-V Mon.exe: This was discovered while reading a post at the excellent Hyper-V.nu by Peter Noorderijk. The actual post detailing this (and other monitoring which I’ll get to) is here. I really like this tool because it gives the actual CPU utilization of your hosts, in addition to other data.

 

Scheduled Monitoring and Analysis

A very useful tool that I discovered through the Hyper-V.Nu blog post is the “Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL)” tool. It can be found here on codeplex. This tool provides the ability to set a Performance Counter profile, export it to a Data Collector Set, and then import the results for analysis.
I won’t detail how to set up and use the tool in full here, as it’s been covered by Peter at the Hyper-V.nu link above, however there are a couple things to mention.

If you’re trying to use this with Hyper-V Server (as opposed to Windows Server with Hyper-V role) you’ll find that you can’t just run Performance Monitor to import that data collector set; instead you’ll need to use the Logman command.

But before you do that, you must modify your exported XML template in a text editor, because the Logman command is going to throw an error unless you don’t. When you open it up, look at line 5 & 6:

PAL_Microsoft_Hyper-V_R2_SP1
@%systemroot%\system32\wdc.dll,#10026
@%systemroot%\system32\wdc.dll,#10027

For some reason, logman doesn’t like the dynamic DisplayName and Description that are used by default. Change these to some static value, and save the xml file.

Next, copy the xml file to your Hyper-V host, and then remote into the host and run the following from the command line:

logman import Hyper-V_Monitor -xml "c:\Hyper-v_Counters.xml"

Then you can start the counters with:

logman start Hyper-V_Monitor

By default the results will be saved in C:\PerfLogs\System\Performance on your host. If you want to schedule the start and stop, you could use schtasks.exe to schedule the logman command.

Once you have the output from performance monitor, you can load it into the PAL tool as described at Hyper-V.nu, and view your results.

In part two, I’ll review my results and what I’ve found about them.