Failover Hyper-V cluster nodes with mixed Upper & Lower case names

I’ve seen a lot of Hyper-V clusters during my daily work. Most of the time, I see a mixture of none standardised names or letters. Also a mixture of upper and lower case names.

There’s is only one option to have all your cluster nodes in Upper case names within the failover cluster manager, you’ll have to use the command line! For example:

cluster.exe /cluster:<name of the cluster> /add /node:<name of the node in UPPER case>

For this command to work, you’ve to install ‘Failover Cluster Command Interface’.

       

How to: Create a VM within a few second in Hyper-V 2012 R2

In some cases I’ve to create multiple VM’s within my Hyper-V environment. You can choose to create and configure each VM manually, but you can also use PowerShell. Now you can see how powerfull PowerShell really is! I’ve created multiple VM’s within a few seconds and ready to rock! I’ve created the following script. The only thing you’ve to do, is changing some variables 🙂

In this example the script will create a new VM named RES-MGN01. The VM will be configured with 2 GB, using Dynamic Memory. The VM is using a differencing disk (VHDK) with a Windows Server 2012 R2 sysprepped parent VHDX, placed on an SSD disk (P: drive) in my server. The virtual switch the VM is connected to, is named NIC – WAN.

$VMName = “RES-MGN01”
$VMMemMaxBytes = 2048MB
$VHDXName = “OS.vhdx”
$VMMemStartup = 512MB
$VMMemMinBytes = 512MB
$VMPath = “E:\”
$VHDParent = “P:\Hyper-V Parents\TMPL-W2012R2DC\Virtual Hard Disks\TMPL-W2012R2DC.vhdx”
$VMSwitchName = “NIC – WAN”

New-VM -Name $VMName -Path $VMpath$VMName -Generation 2 -SwitchName $VMSwitchName

Set-VM -Name $VMName -DynamicMemory -MemoryStartupBytes 512MB -MemoryMinimumBytes $VMMemMinBytes -MemoryMaximumBytes $VMMemMaxBytes

New-VHD -ParentPath $VHDParent -Path $VMPath\$VMName\$VMName\$VHDXName -Differencing

Add-VMHardDiskDrive -VMName $VMName -Path $VMPath\$VMName\$VMName\$VHDXName

Add-VMDvdDrive -VMName $VMName

Start-VM -Name $VMName

2014-01-14_11h48_41    2014-01-14_11h49_20    2014-01-14_11h50_27

2014-01-14_11h51_18    2014-01-14_11h52_12

Unitrends | Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Giveaway

Today kicks off the Unitrends “Countdown to Doctor Who” giveaway.  We’re counting the days to the 50th anniversary of the first broadcast of Doctor Who (Nov 23) and celebrating with gift cards and Doctor Who themed giveaways.

All you need to do is browsing to the Unitrends website and download Unitrends Enterprise Backup (UEB) for VMware or Hyper-V. You can also win a ¤25 giftcard. Just tweet your love for #DoctorWho and mention @Unitrends. Unitrends will select 10 Twitter winners per day, how cool is that!!

Doctor-Who-Banner

Hyper-V 2012 R2 Bandwith Management

A really great and powerfull new feature within Hyper-V 2012 R2 is “Bandwith Management”. With this new feature, you’re able to limit the bandwith of a particular VM. So for example, if you have a VM that generates a lot of network traffic, you can limit the bandwith. To show how powerfull this feature is, I’ve builded a small demo environment.

I’ve created two VM’s. They’re connected through the same Virtual Switich “Internal – LAN”. To generate some network traffic, you’ve have also need some data. To create some testfiles or dummy files, you can use the tool FSUTIL.exe. This tool is default available in Windows 2003 and later. In my testlab I’ve created some testfiles. The size of an dummy file is calculated in bits, so to create a file of 1 GB or 5 GB looks like:

1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 1 or 5 (or another size in GB). So first you’ll get the Bits, then Bytes, then Mega Bytes, then Giga Bytes.
1 GB = 1073741824  
5 GB =  5368709120

C:\Windows\System32\fsutil file createnew D:\dummy_1GB.file 1073741824
C:\Windows\System32\fsutil file createnew D:\dummy_5GB.file 5368709120

Just copy the “dummy” files from VM1 to VM2 and let’s see how many throughput we have without some limitations. After that, I’ve enabled bandwith management and limit the VM one 15 MBps, that’s not that much 🙂 Let’s copy the “dummy” files again….now you see that the network traffic stocks at 15 MBps. That’s gonna take some time to copy all that data 😉

BM_01    BM_02    BM_03

BM_04    BM_05    BM_07

BM_08    BM_09

In this example you’ve seen how powerfull the new bandwith management feature is within Hyper-V. Whitout bandwith management, there’re no limitations at all. With bandwith management enabled, you can just give that much bandwith to a particular VM you want. That’s really great and really powerfull!!

Hyper-V 2012 R2 connect with enhanced session to a Gen2 VM

A great new feature within Hyper-V 2012 R2 is the enhanced session connection. With this new feature you are able to connect to a Gen2 VM through the VM Bus. This will bring a lot of new possibilities and capabilities. One of the missing things in Hyper-V 2008 R2 is copy and paste from the parent to the child VM. With the new Generation2 (Gen2) VM’s, this is also possible!! 🙂

Now you can copy and paste items like, ISO’s, textfiles, folders, etc. to your child VM. How cool is that! In this example I’m copy and paste a simple folder, but here you can see how powerfull it is.

EH_01    EH_03    EH_02

EH_04     EH_05    EH_06

Hyper-V 2012 R2 announced!

Last week on TechEd North America, Windows Server 2012 R2 is announced. Here are some highlights of “Hyper-V – What’s New in Windows Serve 2012 R2” session (MDC-B330):

Generation 2 VM: A generation 2 VM knows that it is virtualized! It can boot ISCSI and synthetic NIC, so no emulated hardware anymore! A generation 2 VM is available for Windows 8 and Server 2012 or higher. Converting a VM to a generation 2 VM is not possible.
Automatic Activation: No more KMS servers in your environment to activate your guest VM’s. Now it is possible to automaic activate your guest VM’s using OEM or volume licenses.
Online VHDX resize: Do you need any more disk space? Increase and decrease the size of the virtual hard disks online. The VM is up and running while performing this action!
Zero downtime upgrade: Upgrade from Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V to Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V without any downtime using cross version live migration.
Faster Live Migration: Live Migration is about 2 times faster now using compression.
Linux guest support: Linux VM’s are fully supported now. Use dynamic memory, online backup, online VHDX resize and better video experience using new video drivers.
Compatibility with Windows Azure IaaS:  Windows Azure IaaS uses exactly the same Virtualization as Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, so VM’s can be moved between your private cloud and the public cloud!
Enhanced VM inteaction: Remote Desktop over the VMBUS, which enables full remote desktop capabilities, copy files, enhanced login, audio redirection, and even more.

There are a lot of more new features and capabilities within the new Hyper-V 2012 R2 release. Hopefully I can see some information in Madrid at the Microsoft TechEd Europe! 🙂