Forums

Forums: Official Guidance on Dynamic or Static VHDs

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:26:10 GMT

Does anyone have an official guidance on whether we should use static or dynamically expanding VHDs in Hyper-V R2? I have always heard dynamic results in a performance hit, but wanted to get a second opinion.

Forums: Re: Official Guidance on Dynamic or Static VHDs

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:00:44 GMT

Not an official guideline but personal experience: always use fixed size disks if possible. I started with dynamic disks but switched to fixed size disk and the performance gain was noteable, especially for the not so beefy servers someone has in the basement ;-)

The only disadvantage: if you do backups, you need much more space from the beginning and backups are taking much longer because the whole image has to be copied.

Forums: Re: Official Guidance on Dynamic or Static VHDs

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:06:09 GMT

Check out this recent article from John Savill: http://enews.penton.com/enews/windowsitpro/virtualization/2010_03_03_030310/display.

Forums: Guests cannot access share on host

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 07:37:22 GMT

Hopefully someone here can help me. I am having a very strange issue with one of my hyper-v hosts.

I have two hyper-v hosts, both are configured identically. On one I can access host shares from any guest, on the other not. The shares are working and available to all the other machines on the network, just not the guests on this one host. I can even ping the host IP from the guests using the name of the host and the IP of the host.

My guests are multiple OSes like WinXP, W2K8R2, W2K3. The host is W2K8SP1.

When I try to connect a share from the guest I get either

An unexpected network error occurred.

The specified network name is no longer available.

I've already spent days trying to solve this problem, no luck so far. Already tried to delete and rebuild the virtual network, disabled IPv6, nothing worked so far.

Anyone has an idea?

cheers,
Stefan
http://www.code4ward.net

Forums: Re: Guests cannot access share on host

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:33:09 GMT

Just tried that, still no luck. Same as before.

Looks like I will reinstall this box tonight with W2K8 R2 and keep my fingers crossed that this "glitch" is gone after that...

Forums: RE: Guests cannot access share on host

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:56:32 GMT

If you run a continuous ping from guest to host, what is the result? Any replies dropped? I saw some issues like this in my lab and lad to drop back to using legacy network adapters as opposed to the synthetic version.

Have you tried to use a 'legacy network adapter' in one of these guests to rule out the NIC driver on this specific server?

Forums: RE: Guests cannot access share on host

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:19:29 GMT

Thanks for your response, much appreciated!

Guests are not on a private virtual network?
Host has one NIC (had two before but I had to disable one). I have one virtual network configured external and bound to the physical NIC. All guests and the host are connected to the virtual network.

Have you ruled out duplicate mac addresses?
Yep, MACs are unique.

Were these systems P2V? If so, check the mac addrs.
Nope, all were installed from scratch in the child partition.

Guests and hosts are within the same Kerberos trust boundary?
Nope. No domain. Host is standalone and guests are standalone. All hosts share the same username and password to access the resource. My other hyper-v host I mentioned earlier is configured the same way and there are no problems at all.

Guests cannot access the shares by IP address?
Exactly. Neither name nor IP is working.

Any difference in the routing table on these guests versus their neighbors on other hosts?
No difference. Althouth, I see IPv6 route table which is different but in both cases IPv6 is disabled. No idea why it's showing up...

Are you using VLANs for your VM guests?
No

Are intergration services the same version on the guests?
Yep, but it's also not working if only one guest is running. So there's no interference/conflict from another guest I guess.

Do they have the same virtual Nic type? on the guest?
Yes. It's the standard adapter not the legacy.

Very strange...

Forums: RE: Guests cannot access share on host

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:54:21 GMT

Just to add to these suggestions,

Are intergration services the same version on the guests?

Are guests patched to the same level?

Do they have the same virtual Nic type? on the guest?

Forums: RE: Guests cannot access share on host

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:30:56 GMT

I've seen a couple of scenarios where this happens, but guessing neither will apply to you given your expertise. Given the error message, these problems tend to be at layer 2 or 3 in the stack.

A few questions for you:

Guests are not on a private virtual network?

Have you ruled out duplicate mac addresses?

Were these systems P2V? If so, check the mac addrs.

Guests and hosts are within the same Kerberos trust boundary?

Guests cannot access the shares by IP address?

Any difference in the routing table on these guests versus their neighbors on other hosts?

Are you using VLANs for your VM guests?

Forums: Hyper-V or VMWare?

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:54:43 GMT

Hi all,

I'm new to the forum and am trying to get a little information, if you don't mind.

I'm trying to find out what would be the best virtualization set-up for a small office of 50 employees? I've heard that Hyper-V is good enough on the Windows R2 2008 server (which we've got), so why do so many professionals favour VMWare? Any advice or links to a relevant blog/video to help me understand the space a little more would be great.

Many thanks!

Forums: Re: Hyper-V or VMWare?

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:59:46 GMT

Hi,

VMWare has been in the enterprise virtualisation space for longer but their products are expensive.

As a VCP and fan of their tools I work with both Hyper-V and VMWare, Hyper-V is working very well for me and many smaller to mid sized customers so I would consider looking towards Hyper-V for this number. Most important in the server / virtualisation / desktop space is a strong and configurable management platform, for this I recommend trialing the newest management suite "System Center Essentials 2010".

Here is the link to the product, if you do download it, please post back to the forums any issues / your experiences.

http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/essentials/en/us/default.aspx

Regards
Ronnie

Forums: RE: Hyper-V or VMWare?

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:01:29 GMT

Hi,

Here are some Hyper-V versus VMware Comparisons you could look at and some other interesting stuff too! Kinda hard to know who is unbiased though. Remember that Hyper-V R2 give you Live Migration (failover with no downtime, yeay!)

http://ctistrategy.com/2009/08/18/vmware-vsphere-microsoft-hyperv-whitepaper/

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/datacenter/?p=1820

http://www.milesconsultingcorp.com/Hyper-V-versus-VMware-Comparison.ASPX

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid94_gci1346926,00.html

http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/virtualization/feature-for-feature-vmware-esx-server-versus-microsoft-hyper-v.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/hyperv-faq.aspx

Forums: Change Listening Port of Hyper-V Remote Control back to 2179?

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 03:05:38 GMT

My Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V host is currently not listening on TCP 2179, but is instead listening on port 5900. I think this is happening because I had a SCVMM 2008 agent on this host.

Anyone know how I change the port back to 2179? I have searched the Internet and searched the registry and cannot find a good answer.

Forums: Re: Change Listening Port of Hyper-V Remote Control back to 2179?

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 17:57:07 GMT

Hi,

I think this may change depending one what version of VMM and what OS VMM was on when you deployed the agents.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc917896.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc917872.aspx

Regards - Ronnie

Forums: high CPU performance after migration VM from VS2005 to Hyper-v R2

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:23:47 GMT

We migrated branch site running Virtual server 2005 with 3 virtual machines all running Window Server 2003. We stopped the VM’s copied to USB external device.

Reinstalled host with windows 2008 Server R2 Enterprise and add it to VMM Server 2008 R2.

Once Hyper-V role added by VMM server we imported the VM’s.

Once the VM could start we uninstalled the VM Additions 13.814 from the guest 2003 servers.

We mounted the vmguest.iso and installed the Hyper-V guest services.

Increased the CPU resource of VM’s to 3 GHz Dual core but the CPU processor performance on task manager in VM is so slow we cannot even click on something.

The performance is terribly slow, CPU performance of VM’s remain above 90%

Then we build 1 clean new virtual machine with same virtual CPU and memory specs on same host with the above 3 virtual machines and it has no slow performance issue.

Is there performance problem with migration virtual machines from Virtual Server 2005 to Hyper-V 2008 R2 that somebody can help us with?

The physical host server specs: IBM 3650

8 x 2.66 GHz Intel Xeon CPU’s

18 GB Memory 9.7 GB available

713 GB storage available (RAID 5 SCSI Internal disks)

Thanks

Forums: Re: high CPU performance after migration VM from VS2005 to Hyper-v R2

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:21:46 GMT

Made interesting discovery, the VM’s that was migrated their HAL in Device Manager Driver version is newer then the newly installed VM that only got SP2 for Win2003. The new VM performance is fine.

The migrated VM HAL Driver Versions:

ACPI Uniprocessor PC

Driver version: 5.2.3790.3959

New installed VM:

ACPI Uniprocessor PC

Driver version: 5.2.3790.1830

Forums: RE: high CPU performance after migration VM from VS2005 to Hyper-v R2

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 07:27:18 GMT

Here is more info on the problem with bad performance on migrated VM's

I used System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) to convert the 3 virtual machines that did run on Virtual Server 2005. the Virtual Machine Additions version 13.813 or later was installed. VMM 2008 did not uninstall Virtual Machine Additions, now i unfortuenly do not have a virtual server 2005 in branch remote site to uninstall VM additions, that is why i uninstalled it when it started on Hyper-v host
The hardware abstraction layer (HAL) did upgrade when I installed the integration components “virtual guest services” in VM's by mounting ISO vmguest.iso located on local branch Hyper-v host.

Process information for SRV001020:

Name                Pid Pri Thd Hnd   Priv        CPU Time    Elapsed Time
Idle                  0   0   1    0      0     8:57:32.656     0:00:00.000
System                4   8 113 1778      0     0:22:39.734     0:00:00.000
smss                328 11   3   31    148     0:00:00.015    15:44:23.906
csrss               380 13 15 825   1828     0:00:23.359    15:44:20.359
winlogon            404 13 21 543   7944     0:00:01.593    15:44:20.202
services            452   9 17 389   4576     0:01:14.218    15:44:19.874
lsass               464   9 40 732 11888     0:00:51.750    15:44:19.874
svchost             684   8   5   87    848     0:00:00.218    15:44:19.796
svchost             776   8 11 331   1440     0:05:15.093    15:44:19.656
svchost             832   8 10 146   3824     0:00:07.078    15:44:19.390
svchost             860   8 14 173   2664     0:00:00.828    15:44:19.390
svchost             896   8 50 2154 23764     0:09:21.812    15:44:19.374
spoolsv            1048   8 11 130   3264     0:00:00.890    15:44:18.781
vmicsvc            1072   8   3 101   2760     0:00:07.343    15:44:18.781
vmicsvc            1092   8   5 146   6344     0:00:03.875    15:44:18.765
vmicsvc            1108   8   3   80   2224     0:00:00.015    15:44:18.765
vmicsvc            1132   8   2   82   2216     0:00:07.078    15:44:18.765
vmicsvc            1148   8   3   87   2288     0:00:00.000    15:44:18.718
msdtc              1180   8 18 180   2000     0:00:04.500    15:44:18.406
svchost            1272   8   2   68    556     0:00:00.000    15:44:17.499
inetinfo           1380   8 11 205   3732     0:00:07.937    15:44:17.265
msftesql           1448   8   6 405   3736     0:00:04.906    15:44:16.999
sqlservr           1500   8 52 861 1598992     0:09:35.218    15:44:16.171
NTRtScan           1612   8 21 548 15632     0:01:49.843    15:44:14.718
svchost            1708   8   2   39    304     0:00:00.062    15:44:14.406
ReportingServicesService 1728   8 18 467 34876     0:01:02.125    15:44:14.140
sqlwriter          1840   8   3   83   1016     0:00:00.093    15:44:13.562
wsusservice        1920   8 15 517 43664     0:00:22.593    15:44:13.234
CcmExec            2120   8 17 1166 19676     0:00:37.625    15:44:09.859
smsexec            2160   8 72 1308 50076     0:02:00.015    15:44:09.562
sitecomp           2256   8   3 138   5364     0:00:01.281    15:44:08.859
smssqlbkup         2308   8   3   93   2760     0:00:00.125    15:44:07.124
smswriter          2356   8   4 132   3264     0:00:00.062    15:44:06.624
TmListen           2376   8 22 287 11428     0:00:25.562    15:44:06.499
svchost            2420   8 16 173   2972     0:00:01.265    15:44:05.687
svchost            2436   8   6 110   2440     0:00:00.156    15:44:05.546
svchost            2672   8 26 229   2728     0:00:45.000    15:44:03.234
CNTAoSMgr          3136   8   5   62   1128     0:00:00.328    15:43:57.796
w3wp               3192   8 13 212   5300     0:00:05.250    15:43:57.171
wmiprvse           3364   8   6 135   3116     0:00:01.234    15:43:53.390
csrss              3696 13 10 130    864     0:00:33.578    15:43:41.468
winlogon           3728 13 15 272   4924     0:00:02.234    15:43:38.468
wmiprvse           3856   8   7 250 21864     0:00:02.578    15:43:33.249
rdpclip             212   8   3   78    992     0:00:00.093    15:43:17.171
ctfmon              764   8   1   80    480     0:00:00.156    15:43:10.249
explorer            828   8   9 286 14056     0:01:09.671    15:43:10.249
wmiprvse           1116   8   7 136   1800     0:00:01.828    15:43:08.374
PccNTMon           3040   8   8 142   4904     0:02:02.750    15:42:41.202
taskmgr            2020 13   3   89   1372     0:03:09.453    15:42:38.374
svchost            3592   8 15 225   2868     0:00:00.234    15:42:31.312
w3wp               4060   8 28 802 68640     0:00:32.812    15:42:30.202
w3wp               4388   8 17 251   5364     0:00:02.203    15:41:59.640
TmProxy            4980   8 11 116   2972     0:00:01.421    15:41:29.374
logon.scr          5800   4   1   22    384     0:00:04.843    15:33:16.359
dllhost            4536   8 15 198   2552     0:00:00.812     1:01:12.988
csrss              4856 13 10 131   1072     0:00:01.328     0:39:04.741
winlogon           4056 13 14 260   3684     0:00:00.906     0:39:04.586
rdpclip            2076   8   3   78    996     0:00:00.125     0:38:37.299
explorer           6020   8   9 292   7720     0:00:03.390     0:38:35.533
PccNTMon           5996   8   8 141   4896     0:00:06.531     0:38:33.536
ctfmon             4836   8   1   80    488     0:00:00.046     0:38:33.536
mmc                3548   8   3 140   7044     0:00:00.296     0:14:07.653
wmiprvse           4048   8   5 118   1840     0:00:00.000     0:11:03.426
scrnsave.scr       4680   4   1   19    276     0:00:00.000     0:03:55.328
cmd                1560   8   1   31   1500     0:00:00.000     0:02:02.203
pslist             1468 13   1 173   1100     0:00:00.062     0:00:00.078

The following statement "VMM 2008 uninstalls Virtual Machine Additions, upgrades the hardware abstraction layer (HAL), and installs the integration components" in article below did not work,
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd296684%28WS.10%29.aspx

Forums: RE: high CPU performance after migration VM from VS2005 to Hyper-v R2

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:45:03 GMT

We've encountered some odd issues when working with VS 2005 guests over the years....I remember SNMP was something that frequently caused spikes in the CPU. Can you run the Sysinternals PSList tool against that guest to get a look at the running processes so we can spot the resource hog?

Forums: scom 2007 clustering alerts

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 05:00:46 GMT

Hi All, good day.

i m currently running a SCOM 2007 and had been receiving a alert regarding the cluster service which is cluster resource failed, the hosts is running the windows 2008 with Hyper-v. Had already run the validation for the cluster and it passed, it normally comes with event ID 1135, 1069, 1025. i checked in the hyper-v host and the last job it running is the VSS, does VSS causing the problem? Thanks alot for your help.

Forums: RE: scom 2007 clustering alerts

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 18:08:22 GMT

There are definitely some known issues with the VSS Writer and Hyper-V in Windows 2008, although those issues were resolved in Windows 2008 R2 I believe.

Two things you may do that can help shed more light on your situation:

Post the detailed alerts from SCOM so we know what you are seeing.

Read the following articles and blogs that describe more of the Hyper-V VSS Writer issues:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/winserverhyperv/thread/d7026f87-4f58-4576-b89f-302c44da6532

http://www.windowsvistaplace.com/enabling-vss-for-hyper-v-backups-with-windows-server-backup/virtualization

http://blogs.technet.com/askcore/archive/2008/08/20/how-to-enable-windows-server-backup-support-for-the-hyper-v-vss-writer.aspx