I know it’s been a while — I’ve just needed some time to process what happened between us.

It’s hard to believe that we’d end up here, after all we’ve been through together.  When I needed a service console to manage my hypervisor, you were my first choice — and you were always there for me.  Well, except for those times when I badly needed some upstream RPMs updated… but I’m over that now.  Just about.

But over the years you changed and you are just not the distro I once knew.  I tried to look the other way when you started running around with Xen.  I knew it wouldn’t last.  Talk to Xen much anymore?  I didn’t think so.

How could you drag licensing into the picture?  For all the talk of open source this and GPL2 that, it never made sense that you would let anyone run unlimited RHEL guests only when you are a Xen Dom0 — but not when I am the hypervisor.  Isn’t a guest OS a guest OS?  I guess not.  You got selfish and frankly, people thought you were being a bully.

So you got tired of Xen and started looking around for satisfaction from another, huh?  How’s that KVM working out for you?  I hate to be the one to point this out, but your virtualization manager runs exclusively on Windows and is only accessible through Internet Explorer.  Have you completely forgotten that you are a Linux distribution! I hate for you to hear this from me, but Ubuntu and SUSE have been making fun of you for months.

You and your KVM are going to be too Linux-y for the Windows guys, and too Windows-y for the open source crowd.  I’m concerned about your reckless behavior.  That makes Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization the worst of both worlds.  You’re not thinking about hurting yourself, are you “RHEV”?  I would not even be surprised to find out that you use Bing as your search engine now.  Sorry, that was a low blow.

So you heard about the ESXi no-more-service-console thing, huh?  Well, I moved on, lost some weight, and am ready for the next phase now.

If you ever need a hypervisor to run on, you know where to find me.

Best friends forever,

VMware “Elastic Sky” ESX

[Disclaimer for the humor impaired: Eric Gray does not speak for VMware, nor does he speak for any personified software products.]

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“Yo dawg, I heard you like Patch Tuesday, so I put Windows in your hypervisor so you can patch it while you virtualize!”

Inspired by a joke from Kendrick Coleman. With apologies to Xzibit.

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One outstanding achievement is the way the Hyper-V architects managed to completely collapse the guest operating system layer directly into the hypervisor.  Take a look at this diagram from a Microsoft Virtualization competitive brochure:

[Yes, it's that same brochure again.]

There are several key differences between Microsoft and VMware hypervisor architectures.  While the hardware and applications layers are pretty straightforward, applications don’t run directly on hardware.  As you are about to see, these two platforms take very different approaches when it comes to virtualizing workloads.

The VMware vSphere solution is to use a thin, high-performance virtualization layer that enables a single physical system to simultaneously host multiple virtual machines.  Each of these virtual machines executes isolated instances of traditional guest operating systems — Windows, Linux, Solaris, Netware, etc.

Due to apparent technological advancements in Hyper-V, it is now possible to run applications of all kinds directly on that integrated Windows OS/hypervisor layer without the need for a guest operating system at all.  This allows Microsoft to omit an entire layer from their virtualization architecture.

I’m sure you have seen various announcements about the exceptional support that Hyper-V has for Linux workloads.  Without a guest operating system layer, one must logically conclude that Linux applications are actually running on the Windows/Hyper-V hypervisor integration directly.  Spectacular!

I thought I’d test this technological breakthrough in the lab myself by running Postfix, a very popular Linux SMTP mail server, on Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V.  According to the diagram above, Postfix is classified as an application — the third layer.

Now, in order to install Postfix, I have to interact with the second layer in the stack, which is the “Microsoft Operating System w/Virtualization.”  Since I’m an RHCE, I decided to use a Red Hat Enterprise Linux package of Postfix, but we can all agree that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 would work equally well.  However, I would not recommend using Ubuntu packages since that distribution is not supported by Hyper-V.  Another side benefit to this technique is the fact that Windows has great mouse support.

Just as one would do on a legacy Linux system, I opened a trusty command shell and installed the package like so:

This is the first step to getting Postfix installed and running.  I do have to admit that it took a few additional troubleshooting steps in my case — most certainly unique to my environment, so I will spare the details.

In order to complete the Postfix implementation, you’ll need to edit several configuration files.  Do not use Notepad for this, as it does not understand the peculiar format of these text files:

One would think that the virtualization layer could also dynamically accommodate for UNIX line formatting, but that evidently was not part of the design.  Fortunately, this is a very minor issue since WordPad can be used without problem:

Once you have the basic configuration in place, restart the service and validate — telnet to port 25 and send a test email.

There you have it, amazing Hyper-V virtualization — same capabilities as VMware vSphere with 25 percent fewer layers!

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Please, take a moment to acknowledge this release.  No, really.  I mean, if Microsoft thinks there is a single person left in the free world that hasn’t heard about R2 and free Live Migration, they might be forced to produce another wave of announcements.

They may even resort to Tupperware-style home launch parties for the server next time.  Have the neighbors bring blade servers over for that one — you know, power and cooling issues in the living room.

If you count beta and RC releases, this thing seems like it has been announced a dozen times already this year.  And considering that they’ve been doing battle against VMware with those unreleased products all along, counting them would not be unfair — especially considering the fanfare that accompanied each pre-release.

We’ve got it.  It’s here, it has free Live Migration, and it’s super fun.  According to some reports, R2 has even been known to whiten teeth and freshen breath.

So, please, acknowledge the release of R2 today.  Do it for the children.

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Windows Server 2008 R2 will not be version 7 at all!

Actually, Windows Server 2008 R2 will be version 6.1. Will it still be binary compatible with Windows 7?

Sorry about that folks… don’t panic, Windows 7 is version 6.1, too.

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While in some contexts the difference is minimal, one obviously affected area is monitoring with System Center Operations Manager 2007 (SCOM), which exposes volume GUIDs in various user interfaces:

In related news, an interesting report recently published by a top medical journal found that those in a relatively new information technology position known as “Hyper-V Administrator” exhibited strongly enhanced memory recall capabilities. This correlation is thought to be a result of the rigorous, albeit unintentional, mental training these personnel undergo in the course of their daily responsibilities.

“It appears to be a classic case of the Von Restorff effect,” said Dr. Sedgwick McCaskey, primary contributor to the research and author of the best-seller Don’t Forget IT.

The report also went on to explain that some “Hyper-V Administrators” have found mnemonic devices to be a great help in their jobs. “Instead of trying to remember all of those random letters and numbers, I sometimes make up songs or rhymes,” said one anonymous participant in the study.

It’s great to see nimble professionals that are able to quickly adapt in the face of change. Especially considering the fact that every new Windows Server 2008 R2 system has a hidden 100 MB partition created automatically during installation by default.  And since that volume has no drive letter, it shows up in SCOM with – you guessed it – the volume GUID:

Ouch.  Pass the Ginkgo.

Just to be clear: three paragraphs of this article are satire; the rest is factual.  If you can’t figure out which is which, feel free to ask.

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Take the following example*, where an anonymous author had the audacity to say:

It is our goal that the final (RTM) version of SCVMM 2008 R2 will ship within 60 days of the ship date of Windows Server 2008 R2.

Sixty days?  That’s almost two months!  Microsoft virtualization users will need to go two months without a management platform?  Surely not.  And with the Windows Server 2008 R2 release expected in October, that would put SCVMM R2 in December.  Unimaginable!

It’s not clear just who could have started all of these rumors about the SCVMM release date, but a public apology is certainly warranted.  Let’s start the investigation right away.

* Excerpt from the SCVMM R2 Release Candidate release notes document.

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What’s that? It has not yet released?

Sorry about that, I was confused for a moment — all of the key features of Hyper-V that Microsoft Virtualization team has been talking about for months are actually in the R2 product, which is currently just at release candidate status.  I’m sure you would forgive me for such an oversight.  But I hear it has Live Migration!

Are you curious about what is coming after 2008 R2 on the Hyper-V roadmap?  I was, too, but recently I was able to obtain a comprehensive document describing many of the proposed new Hyper-V features.  Please understand that plans may change based on “customer demand” and some features may be deferred until Hyper-V 2013 R2, currently scheduled to release in 2H 2015.

Certain features may also be initially introduced using the “Quick” architecture, compromising uptime minor functionality in order to satisfy customer demand.  I’m sure everyone remembers “Quick Migration” — the technique of moving a running VM that introduces several minutes of downtime due to the lack of a clustered file system on Windows.  In 2008 R2 “Quick Storage Migration” continues the trend, introducing VM downtime in order to move virtual disks across LUNs.

Here are my top predictions for new “Quick” features to look forward to:

• Quick Fault Tolerance – secondary VM is mirrored on another host and automatically reboots if primary VM fails
• Quick CPU hot-add – CPUs may be added to a running VM — takes effect after next reboot
• Quick Host Profiles – automatically configures host networking, storage, and security (requires other System Center infrastructure and “slight” knowledge of WMI and PowerShell)
• Quick Power Management – hosts automatically power off but must be manually powered on
• Quick Linux guest customization – may not make the 2013 release

If you would like to know more, view the original document directly at the source.

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In an effort to clarify the overly complex concept of “parent partition,” Microsoft changed the terminology before things really got out of hand.  Surely you’ve heard the one about the Hyper-V administrator that called into Microsoft product support asking why he had to give a portion of his new system to his mother and father.

Now you can perform all of your Hyper-V management from the Management Operating System — unless you are using Server Core, which can’t actually run any management tools in its Management Operating System.  In that case, you simply employ the Management Operating Juncture, Advanced Virtual Edition (MOJAVE) to manage the Management Operating System remotely.

Xen-based hypervisors, please take note: you are expected to stop referring to dom0 immediately.  Especially you, SUSE and Red Hat — if you know what I mean.

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