Hyper-v 3 Part 1 Storage vMotion

Well, with my last post, I was not able to join Hyper-v 3 to SCVMM 2012 RC. Therefore, most of labs can’t be done. After I cried loud, our MS TAM help me to find a new copy of SCVMM 2012 CTP. This version is designed for Windows 8 and all functions are in Go status!!

With this exciting news, I managed myself (thanks a lot to my team mates!) to get 3 HP G5 servers to build a test environment today. Just like all test labs, I spent lots of time to work hard to find solutions and I hope my post will save your time and let’s uncover Hyper-v 3 true power together!!

Again, if I made any mistakes, please feel free to point out.

Introduce my Test Lab:

My test lab involves 3 physical hosts in the same subnet. There is no FC SANs available nor NAS exists. Each Hosts has it’s own local disks. I installed Windows 8 Beta on all 3 servers since this is one of conditions to do labs. 2 Servers I have enabled with Hyper-v 3 and I installed SCVMM 2012 CTP on the last server.

Note:

There is no issue of installing Windows 8. But with SCVMM, you need to install AIX and .NetFramework 3.5. You can’t tick the .NetFramework inside of W8, that would fail with not able to download. What you can do is following:

And restart server afterwards

Hyper-v 3 Storage vMotion is quite good

The one thing Hyper-v R2 can’t do is storage vMotion. Without this feature, I’m not able to migrate a live VM from one share LUN to another shared LUN without powering off VM. In the Hyper-v 3, MS not only managed to do a share storage vMotion in a cluster with SAN, you can storage vMotion between two standalone Hosts with a windows 8 share folder (SMB 2.2) !! (No more expensive VSA?).

Create a share folder

Live Migration is just normal vMotion with disk files sitting on the share storage. In this case, it’s a windows 8 share folder.

Since I have only local disks, I want to have some shared storages as the part of habit I got from Vmware. With Hyper-v 3, all what you need is a Windows 8 server and create a traditional share.

That’s it. No drama. No need for any specific share rights. This share purpose is to enable you to see this share when you add it into VMM. Once it is added, VMM will modify the accessing rights.

There are 2 steps to add this Share resource. The first steps is to add it to VMM library. so all VMs will sitting on that. You also need to add share resource to individual hosts so VMM will add hosts ID to security list.

Add to VMM Library

Add to individual host

Once it is added, your host is able to migrate VMs to share library.

This is how VMM setup access rights on the folder.

Storage vMotion (between host and share folder)

Basically, you can migrate VM files from local disk of your host to a share folder and from share folder to share folder or move it back to local disk.

According to my calculation, there is no ping drop during moving. The ping value sometimes is increase from 2ms to 65ms.

Storage vMotion from host to host

It’s interesting that MS say Hyper-v 3 is able to storage vMotion between two standalone host but they recommend to do it with a share folder accessable by both hosts. So does that mean you can Storage vMotion + vMotion from Stand alone host to stand alone host?

From my test result, It actually tried but failed at 81%. What it happened was Storage vMotion kicked in and copied 9GB data from one host to another host. During the copy procedure, the ping value jump up to 600ms. But the file is copied completely. Then, ping drop back to 2ms and tried to translate the last bit in the memory and that’s where it failed.

Overall, Hyper-v 3 can do Storage vMotion and with at least 2 sessions at same time. The ping value jump up can be contributed with my 100Mbit/s network limitation. Hyper-v 3 can use a normal windows 8 share folder as storage space which saves tons of money. so no more NAS and VSA? The new Windows 8 vhdx supports 64TB so there is no worries on how big a single file can be.

Bugs I have found:

1.With Windows 8 beta, RDP connection seems dropped if I started to copy large files via network. The whole server actually seems to be frozen status until copy is finished. My guess is that W8 didn’t prioritize RDP over copy session.

2.When I storage vMotion a VM which use differencing disk, the original disk (or parent disk) are not moved with storage vMotion.

SCVMM 2012 RC can’t manage Windows 8 Beta Hyper-v 3

I was trying to install SCVMM 2012 to manage Windows 8 beta. But unfortunately, Windows 8 Hyper-v has some major changes in services and you can’t import any Hyper-v 3 beta into SCVMM 2012 RC at this stage.

 

I will confirm with MS and update it later.

 

Windows 8 Hyper-v 3 New Dynamic Memory testing!!

Oh, OMG. The ugly Windows 3.1 style fish. ……

This is first feature I’m testing with Hyper-v 3. I personally is shocking with how good Dynamic Memory is. If I make any wrong comments in this blog due to lack of knowledge of Hyper-v, please leave comment. Thanks

We all know Dynamic Memory feature in Hyper-v R2. This is quite argument point between Vmware and Microsoft. Vmware claims they have Memory over committing, memory sharing(schedule not real time), memory paging and memory balloon technology. Well, Personally, I have to say Vmware has done great job to allow more VMs memory consumption then what a host can hold. It is hard to do it without knowing OS core to reuse the memory.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has Dynamic Memory. It allows you to “Dynamic using memory” by setting up lowest memory and maximized memory for each vm. Well, to be honest, I’m not very interesting about this tech since it’s very similar as what Vmware does.

Now, thing is completely different from Hyper-v 3.

You can increase your vm memory on the fly!

Yes, Vmware can do same thing long time ago. I used to write a post about it. However, it can only happen to Windows Datacenter version. Vmware does that by physically plug in virtual memory DIMMs into OS hardware. However, only Windows Datacenter level has capability to pick them up and add them into OS on the fly.

Hyper-v 3 does that with almost every Microsoft system. Following is the list.

• Guest operating system	Editions	Configuration requirements
  Windows Server 2008 R2	Standard and Web editions	Install Windows Server 2008 R2 SP 1 in the guest operating system.
  Windows Server 2008 R2	Enterprise and Datacenter editions	Do one of the following: Install Windows Server 2008 R2 SP 1 in the guest operating system. Upgrade the integration services in the guest operating system to the SP 1 version. Note Installing Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 is the recommended method because it provides the added benefit of installing all updates included with SP1.
  Windows 7	Ultimate and Enterprise editions (32-bit and 64-bit)	Do one of the following: Install Windows 7 SP1 in the guest operating system. Upgrade the integration services in the guest operating system to the SP1 version. Note Installing SP1 is the recommended method because it provides the added benefit of installing all updates included with SP1.
  Windows Server 2008 with Service Pack 2 (SP2)	Standard and Web editions (32-bit and 64-bit)	Upgrade the integration services in the guest operating system to the SP1 version.Apply a hotfix as described in article 2230887(http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=206472).
  Windows Server 2008 with Service Pack 2 (SP2)	Enterprise and Datacenter editions (32-bit and 64-bit)	Upgrade the integration services in the guest operating system to the SP1 version.
  Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 (SP1)	Ultimate and Enterprise editions (32-bit and 64-bit)	Upgrade the integration services in the guest operating system to the SP1 version.
  Windows Server 2003 R2 with Service Pack 2 (SP2)	Standard, Web, Enterprise, and Datacenter editions (32-bit and 64-bit)	Upgrade the integration services in the guest operating system to the SP1 version.
  Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 2	Standard, Web, Enterprise, and Datacenter editions (32-bit and 64-bit)	Upgrade the integration services in the guest operating system to the SP1 version.

Let’s Testing!!

I tested both on windows 2008 R2 SP1 and Windows 2003 R2. The result is the same. As long as you install “Intergration Services Setup Disk”, you will be able to increase memory on any VMs on the fly!

First, I created a VM and go into settings.

This is the default settings of maximum memory settings. It has nothing to do with  your host memory. It’s just maximum figure of Hyper-v 3 can handle. We don’t want Hyper-v to handle all memory. so I changed this figure to 512MB also changed start memory to 500MB like following picture.

Then, I restarted W2K3 and you can see how much physical memory it has.  Please be aware this physical memory is just figure of minimum memory figure. It will increase with how much memory you consume.

Now, let’s change the maximum memory figure on the fly to 1GB!

Once you increased the memory, you won’t see it reflect to OS immediately. You have to use memory and beyond the current physical memory level. Let’s increase number of IE window from 1 to 102. -_-b

Amazing! isn’t it?

Few other points:

At Hyper-v 3, you can increase maximum memory but you can’t decrease them on the fly! You do can decrease minimum memory memory on the fly although I don’t see much point here.

Hyper-v 3 supports balloon technology as well. The smart-page feature may contribute some scenarios with HA. But I haven’t got time to test it.

More features updates are coming. Please stay in tune. 🙂

Reference:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff817651(v=ws.10).aspx