Free ebook: Introducing Microsoft System Center 2012 R2

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Microsoft System Center is one of the three pillars of Microsoft’s Cloud OS vision that will transform the traditional datacenter environment, help businesses unlock insights in data stored anywhere, enable the development of a wide range of modern business applications, and empower IT to support users who work anywhere while being able to manage any device in a secure and consistent way. The other two pillars of the Cloud OS are, of course, Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Azure, and Microsoft Press has recently released free Introducing books on these platforms as well.

Whether you are new to System Center or are already using it in your business, this book has something that should interest you. The capabilities of each component of System Center 2012 R2 are first described and then demonstrated chapter by chapter. Real-world and under-the-hood insights are also provided by insiders at Microsoft who live and breathe System Center, and those of you who are experienced with the platform will benefit from the wisdom and experience of these experts. We also included a list of additional resources at the end of each chapter where you can learn more about each System Center component.

Download the PDF – here

How to: Building a virtual Hyper-V 2012 R2 infrastructure

NOTE! Building this environment is not supported by Microsoft. This is only usefull for study Hyper-V and the System Center 2012 R2 Suite.

When you want to build an Hyper-V cluster, you’ve have to had at least 2 servers or desktop machines for your Hyper-V host servers. I don’t have that much hardware, so I want to install and run everything on my desktop machine (see this blogpost). But wait for a moment, we want to install a hypervisor within a hypervisor? Is this  possible? The answer is yes and no!

Installing Hyper-V isn’t that difficult. Just hit a copple of times on “Next” and your Hyper-V host is up and running. But the next step is to install a new VM and enabling the Hyper-V Server Role. When you enable the Hyper-V Server Role within a virtual machine, you’ll receive an error. This is because Windows is checking all the prerequisites for enabling the Hyper-V role.

So, there’s a way to install Hyper-V whitin a Hyper-V environment. The only thing is, you cannot start a VM within this virtualized Hyper-V host. So you can build for example a Hyper-V cluster with multiple VM’s on it, but you cannot start these machines!! For me it is enough for testing purposes and studying. For example, you can build your own virtual Private Cloud with Hyper-V 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2.

1.) I’ve installed 2 new VM’s within Hyper-V 2012 R2. These are going to be the virtualized Hyper-V hosts.
2.) The Hyper-V Server Role is still disabled
Get-WindowsFeature -Name Hype*
3.) Install the Hyper-V role
Enable-WindowsOptioanlFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Hyper-V -All -NoRestart
4.) Install the Hyper-V management tools
Install-WindowsFeature RSAT-Hyper-V-Tools -IncludeAllSubFeature
5.) Install the Windows Failover Clustering Feature
Install-WindowsFeature RSAT-Clustering -IncludeAllSubFeature
6.) Install the Multipath IO feature for ISCSI storage
Install-WindowsFeature Multipath-IO
7.) Restart the machine 8.) After the reboot you’re able to create and build your Hyper-V cluster

NOTE! Building this environment is not supported by Microsoft. This is only usefull for study Hyper-V and the System Center 2012 R2 Suite.

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