HyperV

Windows Server 2008 R2 HyperV Clustering

I have a on going project bringing in 12 new servers and a c7000 HP Blade Enclosure and a MSA 2012i going on right now and one of the interesting things I have done is to setup 2 Windows 2008 R2 HyperV Servers connecting to a HP MSA 2012i iSCSI Storage device and using the new HyperV Clustering in the Failover Clustering piece of 2008 R2. This is my first attempt at Failover Clustering of any kind and it has been pretty simple actually. It was some trial and error with getting the connection presented to the servers off the MSA but it was a matter of the Lun numbers. I was trying to present the LUN to each server with the same ID. I found that is I add a different ID for each one on the different connections it works then. There is a good article out on how to set this up and here it is. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc732181(WS.10).aspx#BKMK_Connect

 Til Later just Roger

Windows Server 2008 R2 and Published Apps and Virtual Desktops P4

Takes note to self don’t be so self involved in projects and take time to write posts as you go here. That way not so much to spew in one sitting. Yea right as if that will happen. Mean while back at the ranch

Ok had everything configure like I thought it should be now and still not seeing my workstations in the RemoteApps Web Page or in the Programs list on my Windows 7 laptop. That is a cool feature of Windows 7 where you just point to a URL and it brings in your Published Apps and Desktop Pool. You configure this by going into Control Panel on your Windows 7 computer and then clicking on the RemoteApps and Desktop piece in there. So I logged into the Web Access and noticed that under configuration that it was still referring to Localhost so I changed this to my Connection Brokers Internal NetBios name and saved it and boom there was my Desktop Pool now showing in the Web Access. COOL!!!!!! Sorry moment of excitment there but I then went to my Windows 7 machine and went into the RemoteApps piece and hit update and bam there it was there also. Double dang COOL!!!!!!!!!! now I am cooking. Clicked on the piece and logged in and waited for the Virtual Desktop to spin up and start and waited and waited. Double Dang now what is happening so I went back to the document and read it again and found on the workstations I had to set a registry key for the remote connection to be made to it. Bingo did that and now they launch. WHEW!!!! finally I have it all functional. Another note to self read all doc don’t skim. There was more than that to this but I hate to type also so my words of wisdom is get the document and follow along that helps a lot.

Til later just Roger

Windows Server 2008 R2 and Published Apps and Virtual Desktops P3

Well momentary pause for head banging here as what did I do now to break the stuff. Time to read and I went searching and finally found a document called Deploying RemoteApp and Desktop connection Step by Step guide from MS. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2F5B9705-BC09-466E-882B-7227CBB39183&displaylang=en This helped, you can not install the Remote Desktop Connection broker on the same server as the Remote Desktop Session and Remote Desktop Virtualization Service and Remote Desktop Web.

So I spun up a Virtual Server in our HyperV Environment and installed 2008 R2 RC on it and installed the Broker and Remote Desktop Session Service for Redirection  on this server. I uninstalled the Broker from my host machine for the Remote App and Web Access and TS Gateway and the Virtualization service. Followed the document for setting up the broker and away I went the pieces I broke came back online and worked correctly now. Duh…… Takes note to self maybe read next time but then again where is the fun in that.

When I installed the Virtualization service it also will add HyperV but I had already configured and installed HyperV so I was good there and on the server so I installed 2 Windows 7 workstations into the HyperV on the TS Gateway, RemoteApps and Virtualization Server. One was a 32 bit machine and one was a 64 bit machine. I installed Office 2007 and the Live Communicator 2007 R2 onto the machines. These will be going into the Desktop Pool as they call this and the workstations all have to have the same software on them as this basically runs in a Pool as they say you might not login to the same machine each time.

Til Later Just Roger

Windows Server 2008 R2 and Published Apps and Virtual Desktops P2

OK got my server up and running and went through the normal drill and got the settings configured on the server for networking and name and domain joined and all of that fun stuff to numerous to mention but I am sure you all know the drill. But I thought ok what am I going to do for sure here you know maybe get a plan of attack or is this just dive in and go. Thought for a moment and just dove in and went and I first decided to add Remote Desktop Services(Terminal Services) they had me for a minute as I was looking for the Terminal Services option then remembered MS had renamed this to Remote Desktop Services.

So I select RDS and oh my more options now what. I had to select from Remote Desktop Session Host, Remote Desktop Virtualization Host, Remote Desktop Licensing, Remote Desktop Connection Broker, Remote Desktop Gateway, Remote Desktop Web Access. So I picked everything except for the Licensing. Bad move but more on that later this was a test so who carried at that point until I fully understood how things works and what I really wanted. The install went pretty quick of the services and the normal rebooting proceeded and when the server came to the desktop I went to configuring the TS Gateway and adding Apps for the Remote Apps everything I have normally done on a regular 2008 server for these functions. Talked to Randy and got a SSL Cert for the Gateway and published it up with ISA and testing proceeded and things worked as expected. So I thought now what is this Virtual stuff so started to read and found I could setup and publish a Virtual workstation. Cool so I followed the documentation on the server to do this and all of a sudden nothing workie anymore and I could only connect by the /admin switch to the server. What the heck did I do now.

Til later just Roger

Windows Server 2008 R2 and Published Apps and Virtual Desktops P1

I know I haven’t posted much lately as I have as my wife’s says been ignoring her even and diving into the Windows 2008 Server R2 RC and Windows 7 RC and getting lost into whatever world I go to when I get something new to learn. Hmmm wonder what she means by that.

But anyways as I mentioned earlier I had upgraded my Vista Laptop to Windows 7 RC and it has been rock solid and has been responding faster than the Vista did. Or it could be from the sleep deprivation of all I have done the last week and I am running slower.

I talked with our Internal Network Admin and said hey Randy you know that spare blade we have? Can I use that for the 2008 R2 RC Server as I have some ideas for it. We have a existing 2008 Server TS Gateway in use and I wanted to give the Windows 2008 Server R2 RC a spin. But he had no problems with it so away I went.

The install is pretty straight forward just like 2008 Server but they have made some visual changes by adding some pretties to the screens graphics wise but installed pretty much the same. I was installing Windows 2008 Server R2 RC on a HP BL 465c Dual QC 36 Gig of RAM  and this is running on our HP c3000 Enclosure. More to come

Til later just Roger

Windows 2008 Server with HyperV and NIC Teaming Part 3

As we get ready to roll this out live I rebuilt the Host servers and had no trouble with Blade1 and the networking and the switches probably because a was there when I did this. So OK I got Blade1 going and the Virtual Servers redid and ready for the live prime time. No biggie I will just redo Blade2 and set things up like the other one. Things was going fine until I got to the point of getting the SAN NICs in the Vlan and trunked. Things was fine but I didn’t realize one little detail. When you trunk your NIC’s in the switch that is what you see the trunk name not the Ports. I fought this and fought this not realizing what was going on and finally had to have Jason come back just to tell me oh yea you got to Pick the Trunk name and add that to the Vlan. Duh!!! Ok see previous post and the line about “KISS” Keep it Simple Stupid.

Til later just Roger

Windows 2008 Server with HyperV and NIC Teaming Part 2

This one has been definitely a adventure in getting up and running. In Part 1 of this I talked about what we had to do with the Teaming with HyperV. Well that wasn’t the end of the adventure as I thought. I had tested the VS Servers by pinging the IP’s which I would get a response from. I also tested browsing the network and Internet access all looked well. What happened though when I added a static IP to the NICs of the VS Servers was I could still ping the world but not go anywhere. I thought OK they work when DHCP handles the addressing so what I did was on the LAN NIC of the IIS Servers I set a reservation for the NIC and assigned the IP that way on the LAN NIC that we wanted and this worked. I could do what I needed to on the network and such so now what to do on the NLB NIC.

I started by googling the NLB setup of a Virtual Server and I came up with MS KB Article 953828. There was a hotfix for the 2008 Servers that would be doing this but nothing for 2003 Server. On this they talked of steps to do after the hotfix so I thought why not give this a shot. So I staticaly set the IP on the NLB NIC and then used the NLB Manager on Blade1 to configured the Load Balancing on the first IIS Server. Once this was done I shut down the IIS Server and on the NIC defined for the NLB in HyperV manager I added the MAC Address of the NLB Cluster IP started the VS Server up and it was working. I am assuming it has something to do with the switching of the Team and also the HyperV Switch and the MAC address of the involved NIC’s in the whole process. That is something to be figured out yet on why I seen this behavior but in the mean time I have things working the way they need to be working.

Til later just Roger

Windows 2008 Server with HyperV and NIC Teaming

I have a client who wanted his server to be fail-over safe from NIC’s to switches to his HP iSCSI MSA 2012i. We used the HP NIC teaming for the SAN NIC’s and for the HyperV NIC Teaming our first sets of tests went fine and then we started having a problem with the HyperV Servers losing connection to the network. I dug into this and found that this is a known issue with HP NIC Teaming and HyperV. Now what am I going to do to make this work properly? I dug on the web for a while and I found a post on the web from a MS test Engineer. On it he explained how to use the Broadcom Nic Management Suite to use the teaming feature from that and then create your HyperV Networking. Ok I thought what do you ahve to lose here so I set it up. I let the HP Network Management do the SANTeaming and then used the BACS 11.6.10 version do the teaming of the HyperV NIC’s. I got this setup and the Virtual Servers running and started my testing and this worked. No loss of pings or anything here. Looking better so now for the true test if I lose a NOC will they keep working so I unplugged one of the NIC’s and the HyperV Servers keep running like nothing happened. I am now on hour 16 of the test and the VSs are still going no problems.

Til Later just Roger

Windows 2008 R2

Have you checked out Server 2008 R2 Beta yet? I downloaded it today and have been working on getting it installed. There are 2 things that I am interested in with this build and that is the new features for HyperV and the new features available for the Terminal Services or as MS now calls it Remote Desktop Services. It looks like they have tied some of the TS Stuff in with the new Windows 7 client OS so this will be cool to see where that goes as I have clients now using the TS gateway and the TS Remote Apps.

Also I am intrested in the Live Migration in hyperV as we are moving into this heavily with some of our customers should be interesting to see where this all goes for sure. Back to some more playing with the Public Beta I downloaded and will let you know what I think.

Til later just Roger

Server 2008 HyperV, HP BL 480c and failover with a MSA 2012i

I know I have been talking about the project I have going on at one customer site. We got a HP c7000 and in this we have 2 BL 480c Blades with dual QC CPU’s 48 Gig RAM, 4 NICs and 4 146–HDs and we also have a HP MSA 2012i iSCSI SAN device with 12 450 Gig 10k SAS Drives in it and we had 2 GBE2c switches in the c7000 for the interconnects.

One of the goals from the customer was to have complete failover for the networking as we will be running Virtual Servers on the 2008 Servers on the host machines the BL 480c’s. So with help from Jason one of our network guys and fellow blogger on this site we got the failover working. I have to admit I am not the greatest with networking so his help was much appreciated on this project. He has been in the process at this site of moving in a new core network switching using the HP Blade Switches is what I will call them but I think they are PROCURVE 5400ZL Switches.

How we ended up doing it was pretty simple as we took the GBE2 switches out and put HP passthrough modules in the c7000. When we would down one of the GBE2c switches the failover would not work as Jason thought the response of the switches was not fast enough. But we used HP Teaming on 2 of the NICs for the HyperV networking and we teamed the other 2 NICs for the SAN networking that would be handling the iSCSI traffic to the MSA. We had spread the MSA connections and the team connections across multiple switches on the HP Switch Blade. We had 2 Virtual Servers running on each Blade Server and when I downed the MSA Array Controller the servers keep working as the other Array picked the failed Array of the MSA on the fly and then Jason pulled a switch and everything just keep working because of the NIC Teaming. I know this in not detailed a lot but it was all pretty simple actually and not that complicated once you get to the end result. But it is working.

Til later just Roger