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.

New Hyper-V Server Standalone

Microsoft has announced a new product called Microsoft Hyper-V Server. It's a free, standalone version of Hyper-V server with limited features. Based on what I have read, it's a core-install of Server 2008, meaning you will need to use external tools, or a command shell to configure and maintain it, and all it will run is Hyper-V.

If one of your guest OSes is going to be Windows Server 2008, and you need to license it, you're probably better off just buying a license for Windows Server 2008 Standard. If you run Hyper-V on Standard, you are allowed to extend that license to a single guest OS. This is probably what most small businesses will do, and run it on a full install of Server 2008 so all of the tools to manage it are in the same spot.

I can definitely see how this standalone product will come in handy for a few niche projects. It's always better to have the option for something like this, especially since VMWare has a couple of free virtualization server options.

Hyper-V Stuck at 53%

Just a weird little issue. Seems that the KB article has been out since March but HP is yet to fix the problem.

If you install any updates to Hyper-V on certain HP servers running their NIC management software, after you reboot you will be stuck on "Stage 3 of 3" at 53%. Luckily there were a few good hits for this on Google and we easily fixed it.

The fix involves booting from the CD and using Repair (which is much improved in Server 2008 - I'm impressed), then renaming a file.

I'm sure the Microsoft KB article would have appeared in my results, however it has 54% instead of 53% (I did find some older references online that had 54% in them).

Here's the article in case anybody else runs into this:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950792

I'm really digging Hyper-V. Yes, I still like ESX too, so I don't want to hear anything from VMWare fanboys.