How Hyper-V works: product team videos

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’ve posted quite a bit of information about Hyper-V on this blog – including the Hyper-V presentation I gave at Microsoft UK in April 2008 but TechNet Edge has some videos from the Windows Server Virtualization product team that go into a lot of the detail – and where better to learn about this than from the guys who created the product?

Interview with Mike Neil (Microsoft General Manager, Virtualization) about Hyper-V RTM, including:

  • Why Microsoft decided to get into the server virtualization environment.
  • Changes between the various release candidates and RTM.
  • Challenges encountered along the way.
  • Where Hyper-V is heading.
  • IT Pro challenges for deploying Hyper-V.

Architectural overview:

  • Virtual service provider (VSP) virtual service client (VSC) and VMBus.
  • Disk operations within the Hyper-V architecture.
  • Comparison of fixed, dynamic, and differencing VHD disks.

Snapshots:

  • How virtual machine snapshots work.
  • How to properly export a specific VHD/snapshot.
  • Limitations with multiple branches of snapshots.

Backing up Hyper-V virtual machines:

  • Virtual machine snapshots and Volume Shadow copy Service snapshots (VSS).
  • How VSS snapshots function.
  • What happens with a backup for VSS and a non-VS aware operating system (e.g. Linux or Windows 2000 Server).

Disks and iSCSI:

  • Determine when to use a pass-through disk.
  • How iSCSI works and how to use it with Hyper-V.
  • Learn some best practices for using iSCSI.

High availability:

  • Guest operating system clustering.
  • Virtualization platform clustering.

How Microsoft uses server virtualisation for it’s own IT.

Exchange Server support in a Hyper-V virtual machine

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Virtualisation is great but it’s not a “one size fits all” solution – some workloads just don’t make sense for virtualisation.

For many organisations, Exchange Server is one such workload but there are scenarios when it might be appropriate – at least for part of the messaging infrastructure. Up until now it’s been unsupported (in any case, Exchange Server 2007 requires a 64-bit platform, and that wasn’t available on a Microsoft virtualisation platform before the advent of Hyper-V) but Microsoft is running some of its Exchange Servers on Hyper-V and, as Andrew “Dugie” Dugdell commented a few days back, Exchange Server support for Hyper-V is on its way.

In a Hyper-V briefing last week, I asked Bryon Surace, a Senior Product Manager for Microsoft’s Windows Server Virtualization group, to clarify the situation with regards to Exchange Server support on Hyper-V and he explained that support for virtualisation is part of Microsoft’s common engineering criteria for 2008:

“Windows Server virtualization Support
Each server product must be capable of running within a Virtual Machine (VM) as provided by [Hyper-V] on Windows Server [2008]. Each server product must handle escalation and support running in a VM at the same level as was the product running directly on Windows Server.”

Some of the product teams are still testing their products on Hyper-V but, according to Surace, Exchange is supported but recommendations are to follow on implementation (the Exchange Server product team committed to an announcement within 60 days of Hyper-V’s RTM including a detailed support statement for Hyper-V, and a TechNet article with best practices).