Microsoft Virtual Server

Optimizing operating systems for virtual hosts

By eliminating wasteful resource use on your host servers, you can make more resources available for additional virtual machines.

Most operating systems today have been developed to run on physical servers in non-virtual environments. Because all the virtual machines are competing for the same resources on the host server, you want to limit the guest operating system so it only consumes resources that it needs to perform whatever function that it has been designated to do.

Microsoft Windows is notorious for wasting server resources in its typical default configuration. Many unnecessary services are loaded that most servers do not need: for example, when’s the last time you needed the Windows Audio, Print Spooler and Wireless Configuration services on your SQL Server? Windows also constantly reads and writes to disk for things like swap and log files and Windows networking tends to be very chatty on a network often generating excessive network traffic.

All of these additional services generate excessive and often unnecessary network, CPU, memory and disk resource usage. It may not be all that much on any one individual server, but add that up across 12 virtual machines on a host and it makes a difference.

Windows Server 2008 takes a step in the right direction with its Server Core installation which strips out many of the unneeded components including the GUI. Many Linux distributions are already optimized to perform specific functions as well. Additionally, there are many virtual appliances available that have very small footprints and make for good alternatives to full-blown operating systems.

Here are some tips for reducing the amount of resources that your servers consume:

• Keep event and audit logging to a minimum
• Disable unnecessary Windows services
• Disable unneeded network protocols
• Disable screen savers and visual effects
• Remove any unneeded applications
• Remove all unneeded hardware from the virtual machine configuration
• If the server was a physicla-to-virtual (P2V) converstion, delete any non-present hardware
• Optimize anti-virus confgurations to exclude specific directories or disable real time scanning
• Disable NTFS last accessed time stamp
• For Linux systems, disable unneeded daemons, services and background tasks and do not run X-Windows if possible.

In the future, operating systems will evolve to become specifically optimized to run on virtual servers. Until then you should take steps to ensure that your guest servers are optimized to run on virtual hosts.

When not to treat VMs like physical servers

A general rule of thumb in virtual environments is to always treat virtual machines the same as you would physical servers. While this rule holds true in many cases, IT administrators should be aware of some exceptions to this rule. Let’s go over some reasons that you would not treat your virtual machines like physical servers:

• Patching – You should apply all the same operating system and application patches to a virtual machine as you would a physical server. However it is best to stagger your patch deployments so you do not patch and restart all of your virtual machines at the same time. If you did this concurrently you can cause excessive resource utilization on your host servers which could impact other virtual machines running on the host.
• Securing – Secure the virtual machine operating system as you would physical servers, in addition you should ensure that you have proper security setup on the host server’s management console that allows access to the VM as well as on the virtual machine files located on the host server’s disk system. It does no good to have tight security inside your VM and have weak security outside.
• System Monitoring – This is one area that can be very different for virtual servers. There is no need to monitor virtual machine hardware, if you have converted physical servers to virtual machines you should make sure you un-install any hardware management agents from them. In addition virtual machines boot much faster then physical servers. Because of this, many monitoring systems will not detect server re-boots because the boot process happens quicker then the monitoring interval. You may find that you need to adjust your polling interval for virtual servers so you can detect the faster re-boots.
• Performance Monitoring – Another area that is very different from physical servers. Traditional operating system performance reporting tools are often inaccurate when used on virtual machines because they are unaware of the virtualization layer and the underlying physical hardware. You should always use virtual server specific reporting tools to accurately measure performance on virtual machines.
• Anti-virus – Make sure you install anti-virus software on all your virtual machines the same as physical servers. Again one thing to be careful of is to stagger any on-demand scans and definition updates as to not overwhelm the host server. Having all your VMs running a full scan at the same time can completely bog down a host server.
• Backups – It’s OK to backup your virtual machines using traditional operating system backup agents. Always make sure you do not backup too many VMs on a single host at the same time. There are more efficient ways to perform backups in a virtual environment that you may look into to either complement or replace traditional backup methods.
• Disk defragging – You should periodically defrag virtual machine disks using traditional operating system tools for maximum performance. However be careful not to defrag a VM that has a snapshot running, doing this can cause the snapshots rapidly grow in size and degrade host performance. As usual do not defrag more then one VM on a host at a single time because of all the excessive disk activity that is causes.

Be careful not to do too many of the same operations concurrently. With physical servers, only a single server is effected, but in virtual environments many other servers running on a host server can be impacted.

Where are the Microsoft Hyper-V users?

So, earlier this week I wrote a blog about Clabby Analytics Analyst Joe Clabby’s report spelling out a handful of reasons why Microsoft’s Hyper-V is going to take the lead in the virtualization market away from VMware Inc. over the next five years.

I received a lot of feedback on this blog from people defending VMware, and thought, why not get some Hyper-V users to talk to me about the product - how it performs, its related management tools, features, etc. I asked Microsoft’s press team to send some users my way for interviews, and about a week later Microsoft’s “Rapid Response” team sent me a couple of links to case studies.

Thanks, but I would like to interview some users myself, outside of Microsoft filters. How about at least sending me the contact info for the users profiled in these case studies?

Microsoft’s response was, “Unfortunately regarding direct contact information for the Hyper-V case studies, we have no further information to share.”

What? Really?

This strikes me as odd because Microsoft’s competition, VMware and even smaller virtualization companies like Virtual Iron refer me to real users to interview about their products.

Does this mean that Microsoft doesn’t have the same level of product confidence as the competition? VMware has offered plenty of customer references, and while those users do complain about the acquisition cost of VMware’s software, I don’t think I’ve heard any serious gripes about the product itself.

So I am interested in hearing from Hyper-V users about its performance, because as users and analysts have said, Microsoft won’t sail past VMware on price alone.

Microsoft to ship Hyper-V … finally

Word has it that Microsoft is finally getting it together and releasing Hyper-V, putting the tech world on notice that it is now safe to exhale.

Phew, we were all about to turn blue.

Has someone ever told you a story about some aging celebrity, and your first thought is, “Wait, you mean they’re not dead yet?’ I probably shouldn’t admit this, but when I read that Hyper-V was coming out, I thought, ‘What do you mean, it’s being released? I thought that already happened!”

My mistake, I had confused the release with another important Microsoft — ahem, milestone — in March: the Hyper-V release candidate (RC).

Excuse me for being flip, but I was bored to tears by this whole Viridian-cum-Hyper-V saga long ago. Two years ago, when I first started covering virtualization, the big news was that Microsoft had made Virtual Server 2005 available for free. Immediately thereafter, VMware returned the volley and made its hosted virtualization platform VMware Server free too, eliminating any real advantage Virtual Server 2005 may have had over the better-established GSX. So much for that story line.

Since then, we’ve lived through name changes, (Viridian to Hyper-V), release candidates, pricing announcements (why $28 dollars, why not $25? $29.99?), delays (will Microsoft meet its 180-days-after-Longhorn deadline? Will it beat it?), feature cuts, feature clarifications (“Quick migration” anyone?), and countless press articles with VMware cast as David to Microsoft’s Goliath — or is it the other way around?

Everything except an actually shipping, nonbeta, nonrelease candidate product.

Until now.

As a journalist, I’m just happy that the wait is over, and we can all stop walking around on tenterhooks, expected to drop everything every time Microsoft comes knocking at our inbox with some virtualization-related announcement that may or may not pertain to the release of Hyper-V.

Now we can all get on with our job of waiting for Microsoft to update us on the status of all the product features that it excised from Hyper-V last year: quick migration, hot add of system resources, increased numbers of CPUs, etc. What a relief!

Microsoft extends virtualization management footprint with enhancements

Microsoft announced that the beta release of Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM 2008 ) will now provide the ability to manage Microsoft Virtual Server, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMware ESX platforms as part of the expanding Microsoft System Center family of products.

In this beta release, VMM 2008 can interface into VMware Virtual Infrastructure to perform migrations and use a new feature called Intelligent Placement. This feature will identify the best host for a virtual machine using the key components of network, memory, processor and network usage information. Intelligent Placement will interact with a pre-defined set of business rules configured in with VMM 2008.

This beta is available for download now from Microsoft. The release is a welcome addition to the growing management space for virtualization platforms, including cross-platform solutions.  A summary of the new features available with VMM 2008 are available in a downloadable PDF document and from the System Center VMM website.

Upgrades, virtualization, and a tantalizing glimpse of the future

I’ve recently been through a number of operating system upgrade experiences on the small network I maintain to learn about new technologies, and it’s really made me hunger for an all-virtual future. I just installed Windows Server 2008 in a VM (VMware Server) and contrasting that with the pain of upgrading several machines to Vista, let me just say that I have seen the future, and it’s vastly superior to the present.

The ideal scenario, IMO:

Every machine ships with a virtualization layer, or at least that’s what you install on bare metal.

Every operating system comes as a VM, in a file, with a script to customize it as needed.

Every application comes in a virtual application machine — I’ll call it a virtual application component (VAC) to avoid confusion. Adding it into a VM CANNOT kill the base OS or paralyze other apps in the odd ways that apps sometimes do.

Every OS or app installation is instantly reversible and recoverable.

We’re not very far from that, eh? You can almost see Nirvana over the horizon. I’m sure I’m missing some key ingredient that will stop it all from happening (greed, maybe?). What do you think? Can we get there?

It does make me wonder what Microsoft’s Hyper-V strategy will be. Will Hyper-V be a candidate for that bare-metal layer? Or is that just going to be ESX or Xen, not that there’s anything wrong with them. Well, ESX is a bit much for desktops. Will Microsoft, in a short-sighted attempt at making sure you buy at least one copy of WS08, force you to install Hyper-V and the OS together?

Why I say short-sighted, among other reasons, is that if today’s computers had a Hyper-V layer, Vista would be having a different life. Or at least the possibility of one. There are many reasons why Vista hasn’t taken off, but at least one is the difficulties of upgrading. Here are some I’ve experienced:

1. If you had partitioned your hard drive for XP and created a boot partition with, say, 20GB, you couldn’t directly upgrade to Vista. Vista wants something like 19GB of free space to do an upgrade even though it doesn’t take up nearly that much space. If you had unallocated space on the drive, you probably couldn’t expand the boot volume into it, because for reasons I don’t  understand, most XP boot volumes can’t be grown. Nor does the Vista install routine have any special mojo to accomplish that. So you had to blow away XP and do a clean install, and then reinstall all your apps. Such fun!

2. Then there’s the strange upgrade policies for Vista itself. Now I admit that I haven’t tracked down all the ramifications of enterprise licensing, but at the retail level, it sure is screwy. Let’s say you have a machine with an OEM copy of a  lower version of Vista and you discover you need some of the features of Ultimate (oh yeah, I can’t live without BitLocker). You might think that buying the retail version of Ultimate would allow you to upgrade. Not a chance! Only buying a special upgrade version will do that — the full retail version can only be used to install a clean copy, once again forcing a reinstall of all apps. Who thought that was a good idea?

In both cases,  wouldn’t it have been so much nicer to snapshot your VACs to a network drive, install the new VM appliance, assigning it disk resources from anywhere, reconnect your VACs and go?  Maybe in the near future, your VACs would live on the network, either public or private, and the distinction between locally and remotely hosted apps would be somewhat transparent to the user.

Yes, I know there are all these nasty little issues of hardware compatibility and so on.  And then there’s the occasional “change in the driver model” that renders half your hardware obsolete. But if these problems are sorted and isolated into the right layers, I have to believe life will be easier. Call me a cockeyed optimist.

Virtualization strategies for the SMB

The small and medium businesses (SMB) are unique in their approach to virtualization. In attending a recent VMware Users Group (VMUG) meeting it became clear that virtualization is much easier to embrace for the large enterprise, whereas the smaller IT shops have an entirely different dynamic. Here are three strategies currently employed by the SMB while approaching virtualization:

Free tools

The SMB may not have the money to jump into an enterprise virtualization management suite, so the free tools work nicely in their environment. Free tools such as VMware Server, Microsoft Virtual Server, and Citrix XenServer Express Edition offer virtualization at various levels that will generally meet requirements. The free virtualization packages have their benefits, but there also are limitations. These limitations revolve around storage management, high availability and redundancy.

Cite disaster recovery

The SMBs present at the VMUG frequently used disaster recovery to justify the upfront expense for decent virtualization management software. Disaster recovery tends to present a better argument for funding rather than simply stating that management software for virtualization technologies are superior to that of the free equivalents.

All or none

SMBs tend to shoot for an all or none approach to virtualization. If utilizing virtualization, serious reasoning is required to explain why a server can and should not be a virtual system. This correlates to the hardware purchases. In this situation, all new server purchases must be capable of the virtual host role regardless of the immediate availability of the desired end-state of the virtual environment.

It is tougher for the smaller IT shops

The smaller organizations have a particular challenge taking the virtualization plunge due to smaller budgets. The challenge for SMBs is to find a way to justify the expense and not in using virtualization itself-the benefits are obvious. The most difficult step, however is to get a business buy-in for the potential added expenses, and this is where SMBs should focus their efforts if they are trying to convince executives to use a virtualized system.

The spreading of the field

When you think virtualization, VMware comes to mind as the leader, correct? Sure ESX is the premium product right now for x86 virtualization, but there is a movement that needs awareness right now. Last week I mentioned that we should evaluate Citrix XenServer and this week I will expand the scope of that recommendation. The base technology of virtualization will soon be a commodity, and basic elements are free with VMware Server, XenServer Express Edition, Microsoft Virtual Server, and Microsoft Virtual PC. The base virtualization technology is now readily available so many ways, that the real distinguishing factor will be the management of the virtual environments, the high-availability, costs, and ease of use.

Once shunned out of many IT shops in lieu of the “Windows Revolution” Novell now offers a virtualization management layer, Novell ZENWorks Orchestrator. Now, before you blow off to some other post - consider this - most Novell products are really good at what they do. NetWare was a superior file server (sure - there were client issues and interoperability issues - but there still is no better rights assignments for file serving), Novell jumped on the Linux boat early, and you can see how Linux has clearly maintained its momentum. So, from the management standpoint we will really need to evaluate this solution as well. Orchestrator also is going to embrace cross-platform (Xen, VMware, and Microsoft) management. That alone should be enought to get your ears perked up. Remember, virtualization is relatively young in the x86 space - so anything we can do to not close any doors from the intial embracing of the technologies would be a good idea.

Standardized virtualization: DMTF accepts Open Virtual Machine Format proposal

They may compete for customers, but virtualization rock stars Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware and XenSource have settled their differences long enough to submit a draft proposing an industry standard format for portable virtual machines to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF).

The DMTF announced its acceptance of the draft yesterday.

“This is a great effort by these companies to bring forward a draft specification to deploy different kinds of virtual machines and virtual appliances in a secure way,” said Winston Bumpus, DMTF president.

“Right now you can download virtual appliances from lots of places, but some are hypervisor specific, some have hardware requirements. There are all kinds of dependencies. This scenario allows you to download and try an application without doing all of the configuration steps,” Bumpus said.

The proposed format, called the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF), would package all virtual machines (VMs) with an XML wrapper that would allow all virtualization platforms to safely and efficiently run the VM.

The OVF would also incorporate a security check to ensure that the VM had not been tampered with from the time the image was created to the time of download, and a license check.

“We really envision ISVs being able to encapsulate their products in virtual machines. I’ve been comparing it to an MP3 file — it’s more than just music, there’s metadata in a standardized format. It’s really going to change how software is deployed and distributed,” Bumpus said.

According to Bumpus, the OVF should roll out in the next 6-9 months.

For more information on DMTF and what they do, see SearchDataCenter.com’s article, DMTF tries to SMASH system management costs.

LinuxWorld: Expert reviews Microsoft’s mixed messages, Novell’s virtualization news

Xen expert Bernard Golden sounds off on Microsoft’s presentation at LinuxWorld 2007 and the impact of Novell’s new Linux SUSE and virtualization products. Golden is a systems integrator, SearchServerVirtualization.com expert and author of the upcoming book, “Virtualization for Dummies”.