Hyper-V Server R2

I'm currently attending a conference with a lot of people who own the same kind of companies that I do. It's a fun experience to get to talk to other people who do what I do and face the same things as I do every day.

While the conference is marketing centric, you can't stop IT guys from talking about technology. One conversation that has come up a lot is in regards to virtualization. I'm currently working on two separate virtualization projects for clients. We had to choose a horse, so to speak, between Microsoft and VMWare when it came to the different platforms.

Needless to say, I chose to hitch my cart to the Hyper-V horse in this race. We've seen Microsoft enter markets as the underdog in the past and become the dominant player within a few years. I feel that the virtualization market is going to play out the same way.

You can really tell that they're out to win by the features that they are offering for free. In the past, any kind of clustering required Windows Server Enterprise. If you're using the Hyper-V role on top of Windows Server 2008, you still need Enterprise or better in order to take advantage of the clustering capabilities.

However Microsoft also has a free product called Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Included for free are some features that are not available with Windows Server Standard running the Hyper-V role, including Cluster Shared Volumes.

Using this free technology, we are able to create highly-available clusters for our clients. With so much running on any one physical machine now, the hardware becomes much more valuable. Using Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) along with shared storage like iSCSI or Fibre Channel, you can protect your critical systems making sure that even with the total failure of a complete server, you can keep on running.

Our "bread and butter" is small businesses, many of whom are too small to really need this level of virtualization. But I really enjoy working with my larger clients and getting to play with this kind of technology. That's not to say that we don't get to use Hyper-V with our smaller clients. We have many SBS 2008 servers running Hyper-V child machines, and even a few SBS 2008 systems running AS the child machine.

Whether you're using VMWare, Hyper-V or any other technology, virtualization is an amazing technology and I can foresee a day where everything we work on is a virtual machine in some form.

Backup Solutions for Small Businesses

I think it's probably fair to say that the days of tape are in the past. At least when it comes to the majority of small businesses. I think the only client of ours that still "requires" the use of tape is an advertising agency that frequently has to pull very old files off of tape. And even that is somewhat debatable.

Most of our day-to-day file protection is done using shadow copy now. To me, that is probably one of the best features that was introduced with Server 2003. Most of our clients are using SBS 2003, which includes a front-end for using NTBackup complete with reporting and easy scheduling. However, one huge thing that is missing from this is the ability to recognize portable hard drives as valid backup destinations. It will recognize tape drives, and any drive that shows itself as removable, like the Dell RD1000 drive (which is just a 2.5" SATA drive in a housing that acts like a tape cartridge).

That is why I was glad to hear about the changes to backup in the new SBS 2008. It is specifically geared towards using portable hard drives to protect your data (however it no longer supports tapes). The drives are setup using a configuration wizard which labels the drive and "commandeers" them for use exclusively by the backup system. The system accesses the drives using low-level API and optimizes them for speed, and therefore they are not accessible by drive letter or visible to Windows Explorer.

The system is smart enough to know the difference between multiple drives and performs an ongoing differential backup and keeps the disks so that any of them can be used for full disaster recovery. This greatly simplifies the issues we have had in the past with sites that required cumulative incremental backups due to the size of their backups.

Until all of our clients are on SBS 2008, our current backup script is pretty handy. We had cobbled pieces of it together from various other samples over the years, and I finally put it together into a single script a couple of months ago. You simply define what you want to backup and save the selection set as a BKS file in the usual spot. The script requires one of three parameters. You launch it with either /full, /incremental or /emailtest. The first two should be self-explanatory. The third tests the scripts ability to figure out which of the log files from NTBackup is the most recent, converts it to ASCII (side note: even though NTBackup log files can be opened with Notepad, they are actually binary files) and then sends it to the specified email server and recipient.

Our script calls sendemail.exe by Brandon Zehm to use as the email engine. If you are interested in seeing it for yourself, I will put it up in a separate post, or you can download it here.