Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Hyper-V live migration not useful!

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So can someone please explain to me why Microsoft is working on live migration and just did a demo(1, 2) of this new feature? Some of you might think, what the heck are you talking about? Well let me quote a couple of lines out of a MS Virtualization blog a couple of months ago:

We’ve drilled into these scenarios further and asked customers, who have currently have Live Migration capabilities, if they have changed their servicing process. In particular, when do they perform their hardware servicing. Is it during business hours 9-5? The overwhelming answer is, “No, we still schedule server downtime and notify folks of the scheduled downtime.”

Even customers with Live Migration still wait until off hours to service the hardware.

So if the customers are waiting until off hours, thus not needing this feature… why the hell spend all that precious time till 2010 to get this in 2008 R2!?! Why not spend your time useful and INNOVATE for a change? Come up with a feature that shocks the world.

Well let’s end this blog possitive, great idea to give away a stripped down standalone Hyper-V version away for free! Well it might sound as if I’m not serious, but I’m really curious how stripped down it is. What I understood is that it’s just Windows 2008 Core with Hyper-V pre-installed and all the other roles left out. Well we’ll just have to wait and see.

My laptop can whistle…

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Or atleast that’s what it sounds like. It seems that my HDD of my Lenovo X61 is dying… A shame, especially if you consider that it contains my  complete home lab within VMware workstation. Let’s just hope I can get this thing running again, but the “unmountable boot volume” makes me think I’m running out of luck. So just to be sure I’ll try to image my disk to another disk, and than do a repair with the Windows XP CD and let’s just see what it comes up with.

I think I will spend some time tomorrow on writing a backup script… which dumps my doc’s to my ftp server in a zipped file.

HA, primary and secondary nodes?

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Because I’ve been looking into HA myself I wanted to clarify things up, for you guys and for myself… writing is a good way of getting the facts straight. I’ve seen and get a lot of questions regarding HA. So I just bundled a bunch of questions I received over the last couple of months…

How does a primary and / or secondary get selected?

  • The first 5 hosts that join the VMware HA cluster are automatically selected as “primary nodes”
  • All the others are automatically selected as “secondary nodes”
  • When you do a reconfigure for HA the primary nodes and secondary nodes are selected again, this is random

What’s up with these primaries and secondaries?

  • Primary nodes hold cluster settings and all node states which are synced between primaries
  • Secondary nodes send their state info(resource occupation) to the primary nodes
  • Nodes send heartbeats to each other, primary nodes send heartbeats to primary nodes only and secondary also only to primary. And they do this every second. (Which is a changeable value: das.failuredetectioninterval)

So what if a primary node fails, will a secondary be promoted?

  • No, there will only be a new primary appointed when the failed one is removed from the cluster. A secondary will be promoted to primary at random.

But what if all my primary nodes fail?

  • This is an unaddressed issue, that’s the reason why you can only account for 4 host failures within a cluster! There needs to be at least one primary!

So when does the gateway come in play?

  • Actually the gateway, which is the default “isolation address”, will only be used when an isolation has occurred. So when the AAM client thinks it’s isolated it will check the isolation addresses.

So if anyone has a question just drop it here and I’ll try to answer it and update the above list…

VirtualCenter log files in your temp directory

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By default your VirtualCenter logfiles are stored in a temp folder(as of 2.5 they are stored in: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\Logs). VMware Wolf wrote a nice article about all the locations these log files are stuffed. For some reason I don’t get a pleasant feeling when I store my VirtualCenter (VPXD) log files in a temporary windows directory or the profile directory for that matter(thanks for the comment!!). If there’s one thing admin’s clean up first when they tend to run out of diskspace it’s their temp directory… it’s called temp for a good reason!

So in order to prevent this you could change the location of the VPXD log files very easily. Edit “vpxd.cfg”. It’s located here: %AllUsersProfile%\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\.

Add the following lines in the “<config>” section and change the path accordingly:

<log>
<directory>c:\VC_Logs</directory>
</log>

FYI: Microsoft’s live migration

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So Microsoft just announced that the next version of Hyper-V, which will be out with Windows 2008 R2, will contain live migration! There are couple of other note worthy news items:

  • Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, a new hypervisor-based server virtualization product (like ESXi), will be released within 30 days and be available at no cost via the Web
  • Microsoft will demonstrate live migration feature of Windows Server 2008 R2. And the next version of Microsoft Hyper-V Server (the one after 2008) will have live migration capabilities.
  • System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 will be released within 30 days [not a surprise], which will manage Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 or VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3

So the big questions is, when can we expect this feature?

The answer can be found on this blog article.

I’m really curious about R2 and hope we can expect a Beta soon!!