Forums

Forums: New Disk2VHD Tool released

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 12:47:48 GMT

Here are my experiences with the previous tool. Hopefully some of these can now be worked around in the current release.

http://owsug.ca/blogs/brad/archive/2010/07/30/New-Disk2VHD-Sysinternals-_2800_v1.62_2900_-Tool-Available.aspx

Forums: How to restart Hyper-V config tool

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 11:24:01 GMT

Hi folks,

MS Hyper-V Server 2008 64 bit

How to restart "Hyper-V configuration tool". Immediately after installation it was there.

On command prompt;

C:\>hvconfig.cmd [Enter]
'hvconfig.cmd' is not recognised as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

I followed "Hyper-V Server 2008 Setup and Configuration Tool Guide". Please help. TIA

B.R.
satimis

Forums: Hyper-V virtual switch with multiple ports

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 02:55:10 GMT

I am looking at the virtual networking in Hyper-V and trying to figure something out. Is it possible to have a virtual switch with multiple ports like we have in VMware? As far as I can tell, I have one virtual switch per NIC.

Forums: RE: Hyper-V virtual switch with multiple ports

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 12:28:29 GMT

Mattie, you won't find that Hyper-V virtual switches are managed like VMware. You'll just create networks in the Virtual Network Manager within Hyper-V and the virtuals are created. Not a lot of great info out here. These are some good resources I've used in the past.

Hyper-V: Virtual Networking Best Practices

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/hyper-v-virtual-networking-best-practices.aspx

Here's a post from the server virtualization guy that may help you

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2008/01/08/understanding-networking-with-hyper-v.aspx

Also, check out this e-book which may assist

Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions

http://www.asiaing.com/understanding-microsoft-virtualization-solutions-free-ebook.html

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