Virtualization management tasks such as cloning existing virtual machines or deploying new ones from templates often involve slinging around multi-gigabyte chunks of data.  It’s preferable to move or copy data on the SAN instead of the LAN because it can be faster, but more importantly, doing so reduces impact to other services that rely on the LAN.

Use the SAN, ESX!

VMware ESX will transfer VMs and templates over a SAN connection whenever possible but, if necessary, it also does a fine job of moving those bits over a standard LAN.  This goes for VMs as well as templates because with VMware vSphere, templates live on SAN datastores, too — shared among multiple ESX hosts — not on network file shares.  If templates were stored on a file server, there would be no choice other than to copy those multi-gigabyte files over the LAN and potentially impact other production traffic.

Nice design choice, VMware!  [Actually, if you go back to the early days of VirtualCenter 1.x, templates could also be stored directly on the VC server and deployed over the network.  That option was removed as of VC 2.0.]

So far, so good.  Let’s take a look at how Hyper-V stacks up.

Obfuscating the Inequalities

In the tradition of the recent storage hot add/remove claims, Microsoft has again gone the extra mile to give the appearance of feature parity.

Take a look at this excerpt from the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 What’s New page:

SAN migration into and out of clustered hosts: This allows virtual machines to migrate into and out of clusters using a SAN transfer, which saves the time required for copying the virtual machine file over the network.

And the features page is even more dramatic, proclaiming:

Virtual machine images can be large and difficult to move over the network. VMM auto-detects SAN infrastructure and enables copying of virtual machine images over fiber at fast speeds, thus leveraging SAN investments.

Sounds good, just like VMware — and at one-sixth the price!  But there is a small problem: it is not true.

Hyper-V uses the BITS service to transfer VMs over the LAN in almost all cases.  There is a scenario where SCVMM can orchestrate the disconnection and reconnection of a SAN LUN, “transferring” a VM to another host.  Enabling the feature requires additional configuration and some software from your SAN vendor.  Of course, it also means going back to one VM per LUN and foregoing the wonders of CSV.  Any takers?

The SCVMM Library Server

SCVMM 2008 R2 provides VM template functionality for Hyper-V.  Templates  and ISO images are stored in a Library, which uses standard Windows file services.  Obviously, that means no SAN copying for template deployments, either — kind of like VMware VirtualCenter 1.0.

Conclusion

“SAN LUN disconnect and reconnect” just doesn’t have the same ring to it as “SAN transfer” but I’m not sure that is sufficient justification for these misleading marketing claims.  And to use the word “copying” is simply dishonest.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming Hyper-V is just like VMware ESX.  Compare for yourself — seeing is believing.

Related posts:

1. IGT Part 2: SAN Misers
2. Storage vendors unanimously applaud SCVMM innovation
3. The Truth About Storage Hot Add and Remove
4. Using SCVMM to attach ISO images to VMware ESX VMs

• vStorage VMFS Volume Grow
• Hot Extend for Virtual Disks
• Hot Virtual Disk Add/Remove

With these capabilities, if space gets tight in your vSphere environment, it is easy to be proactive and address the issue before anyone notices.  The process goes something like this:

• Allocate additional physical hard disk space on your SAN to an appropriate LUN
• Grow your VMFS datastore onto the newly added free space
• Extend, or add new, virtual disks for the VMs that need more storage
• Expand the volume inside the guest to create more usable space

All without a reboot: zero downtime.

Not All Virtualization Platforms are Created Equal

Don’t jump to the conclusion that all hypervisors offer the same flexibility.  Perhaps you are wondering about Hyper-V capabilities?

First, let’s take a look at some Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 (SCVMM) marketing statements:

The What’s New page announces:

Hot addition/removal of Storage: Allows the addition and removal of storage to virtualized infrastructure without interruption. Additionally, “live” management of virtual hard disk (VHDs) or iSCSI pass through disks, allows administrators to take advantage of additional backup scenarios and readily use mission critical and storage-intensive applications.

The Top Benefits list proclaims:

Hot addition/removal of storage: With this capability, administrators can quickly and efficiently respond to changing storage requirements of virtual machines. This ability to hot-add additional storage eliminates the previous need to take the host down to upgrade storage thus increasing business continuity for end users and reducing complexity for administrators. Additionally it allows administrators to confidently deploy mission critical applications (in which up-time is of paramount importance) that may have rapidly changing storage requirements such as web, database or other business applications.

An IT decision-maker just might get the impression that both ESX and Hyper-V have essentially the same features. They do not.

You may be surprised to find out that all of the descriptions above merely refer to adding a new virtual disk to a VM — providing the conditions are right.  You cannot grow an existing VHD, and you can’t safely remove a VHD with SCVMM.

Plan Ahead

First things first.  If your Hyper-V VM does not have a virtual SCSI adapter — templates and VMs from Hyper-V R1 do not — you won’t be able to hot add a new VHD until you correct that shortcoming.  Hello downtime.

SCVMM can add a new blank virtual disk to a VM or it can copy an existing one across the network from the Library — if you copied it there beforehand, but there is no way to add a VHD that may already be present on your SAN — even if it is already sitting right next to the destination VM.

Removal?

Up-time may be of paramount importance, but preventing data-loss was evidently not part of the original design.  Removing a VHD with SCVMM results in the immediate deletion of the underlying VHD file.  Ouch!  Thankfully, a recent patch improves administrator job security by throwing up a warning before this happens, providing an option to cancel.  There is no way to simply disconnect a VHD using SCVMM.

It turns out that if you really want to take advantage of those “Additional Backup Scenarios” by hot adding and removing virtual disks, you need your trusty Hyper-V Manager utility.  Still think System Center is a single pane of glass?  And that’s not the only task that requires administrators to switch between Hyper-V interfaces.

Conclusion

Microsoft is trying hard to ride the coattails of VMware ESX.  The latest release of Hyper-V R2 still does not have capabilities enjoyed by VMware administrators since the ESX 3.5 days.

Don’t believe the obfuscated marketing literature.  VMware vSphere is for real.

Related posts:

1. vSphere Thin-Provisioned Disk Performance
2. Responsible Thin Provisioning in VMware vSphere
3. The Truth About VM SAN Transfers
4. Easy recovery from a full VMware ESX datastore

Not much.

First Things First

Before you can use PRO to Live Migrate virtual machines between hosts (which is sort of the whole point), you need to first configure Hyper-V, failover clustering, and Cluster Shared Volumes — something eWeek found to be significantly more complicated than VMware ESX.

After Hyper-V and Live Migration are up and running, the next step is to install SCVMM 2008 R2 so you can integrate it with your System Center Operations Manager 2007 (SCOM) environment.

What’s that?  You don’t have SCOM deployed?  Go ahead and set it up.  Come back in a few days when you’re ready to go to the next step.

Integration Time

After your environment has both SCVMM and SCOM up and running, it’s integration time! If you have ever thought that the next-next-finish Microsoft wizards were boring, then this is the task for you.  You’ll get a chance to make configuration changes to various systems and possibly even Active Directory — haven’t you always wanted to learn about the SetSPN utility anyway?

But don’t let me spoil the excitement by giving away the ending — pick up your own copy of the 34-page integration guide and experience the thrill for yourself.

Second Opinion

Some of you are probably thinking that this is an exaggeration, it can’t be all that bad.  Let’s take a look from another perspective, presented in the Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) guide for SCVMM 2008 R2:

As you can see from the above excerpt, integrating SCVMM with SCOM clearly increases the time, effort, and complexity of your virtualization deployment.  And don’t forget that SCOM is required for monitoring your Hyper-V infrastructure, too.

Unlike the Microsoft virtualization conglomeration, VMware DRS is an integral part of vCenter Server — purpose-built for virtualization.  Talk about additional layers…

Related posts:

1. PRO Tips: pros only, please
2. Two thousand?
3. Save $14,970 on VMware ESX management
4. Managing VI3 with SCVMM considered harmful

Microsoft Hyper-V R2 derives HA clustering capabilities and Live Migration from the additional Windows Failover Clustering layer that can be added to the hypervisor.  With all that integration, you might think a remote console connection would seamlessly fail over along with the VM during a Live Migration.

Sorry, not in this release. Is it an omission, or just a bug?  Time will tell.

Now that System Center Virtual Machine Manger 2008 R2 (SCVMM) PRO tips can be used to automate Live Migration — if it is integrated with System Center Operations Manger 2007 (SCOM), that is — administrators connected to a remote VM console may find themselves suddenly cut off.

See it in action in this short video:

Oh, sure it’s not hard to go back into SCVMM, find the VM, and reconnect — but should you have to do that manually?  VM remote consoles may not be needed for day-to-day administrative tasks, but is that reasonable justification to ignore usability and integration?

Because the Microsoft Virtualization solution is a conglomeration of various components — Windows Server, hypervisor role, Failover Clustering, SCVMM, SCOM, etc. — it is much more difficult to provide a seamless experience.  This remote console issue is really just an indicator.

Related posts:

1. SCVMM/PRO Complexity: High
2. Choose any two: Hyper-V, HA, Linux
3. vSphere Console Stays Connected During VMotion
4. PRO Tips: pros only, please

I first read of this particular issue on Network World today.  But unlike the official Microsoft Virtualization Team Blog, NW actually includes some details about this supposed ban — like this quote from an official VMware spokeswoman:

Yes, competing vendors are allowed to exhibit, including exhibiting competing products.

The VMworld contract was big news — back in May — but since then, like it or not, most competitors and industry watchers have conceded that the fine print in the VMworld contract is industry standard.  Just read the comments in that Virtualization.info article referenced by MSFT.

While it does make for pretty good drama, you should know that VMware has not banned Microsoft from exhibiting SCVMM 2008 R2.  I do admit, “Try the virtualization manager that VMware doesn’t want you to see!” does sound a lot more intriguing than “Here’s SCVMM R2, it does mostly the same stuff as the first release, and it can manage vSphere now — if you count VI3 feature parity.”

See you at VMworld.

Related posts:

1. Hello, SCVMM 2008 R2
2. How to get to VMworld 2009
3. What’s New (and What’s Vapor) in SCVMM 2008
4. Wild SCVMM 2008 R2 rumors and speculation

Just one week before VMworld 2009 — quelle coïncidence!

Related posts:

1. Wild SCVMM 2008 R2 rumors and speculation
2. Is SCVMM 2008 R2 really banned from VMworld?
3. SCVMM 2008 Management Pack Finally Released
4. Misleading documentation or none at all? I’ll take the latter, thanks.

And what customers are saying is, they have these existing VMware systems, our product, System Center, actually manages VMware. We do a world-class job of managing VMware, so they can use one pane of glass to manage their legacy VMware environments together with their Hyper-V system.

World-class job of managing VMware? Not according to my investigation.  And Network World found much of the same.

One pane of glass to manage VMware and Hyper-V? Not so fast — in order to manage just a Hyper-V environment, you need a whole array of tools:

• Hyper-V Manager
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Console
• System Center Operations Manager 2007 Console
• System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Console
• Third-party network interface teaming utility
• Server Core console configuration tools
• iSCSI configuration utility
• Failover Cluster Manager
• Perfmon
• … the list goes on

And oh, by the way, you also still need the vSphere Client because SCVMM cannot configure ESX host settings — hardware, storage, networking, resources, etc.

The easiest way to get “single pane of glass” management for Hyper-V is to simply redefine the “pane” to be an LCD display:

Presto!  Single pane of glass to manage VMware and Hyper-V.

Related posts:

1. Save $14,970 on VMware ESX management
2. SCVMM Damage Control
3. VM Resource Management: Hyper-V versus SCVMM
4. Checkshots or Snappoints?

Today I’d like to point out an article from ZDNet that continues the tradition with the upcoming Quick Storage Migration feature in R2:

Unlike VMWare’s storage migration feature, Storage vMotion, Microsoft has chosen not to use a “Live” storage migration approach with their Quick Storage Migration, which suspends VM activity for several minutes while the VMs are being moved, after which the VMs are resumed from suspend. Microsoft insists that this is to ensure referential integrity of the data being moved, and that the majority of large enterprise customers which they worked with to integrate this feature did not do storage migration during production hours.

Unbelievable.  Interesting use of the word “chosen.”

I’ll be sure to link back to this blog post when Hyper-V 2013 comes out and Microsoft finally has Live Storage Migration.  Stay tuned!

But seriously — are you using Storage VMotion to move production virtual machines?

Related posts:

1. How to see if Quick Migration is right for your workload
2. Hyper-V More Stable, Just as Mature as VMware vSphere?
3. Hey boss, where do you want these virtual machines?
4. Exclusive: Hyper-V 2013 Product Roadmap

With template deployment comes VM (or “image”) customization — each instance of an OS needs to have a unique hostname and, in the case of Windows, a unique SID (security identifier).

Not surprisingly, each vendor has taken a different approach to image customization.  Let’s take a closer look.

VMware vCenter Server Image Customization

With VMware vSphere and vCenter Server, VM templates are simply virtual machines with a special flag that essentially prevents users from accidentally powering them on.  In fact, you can clone and customize a new VM from a standard VM if you prefer — converting to template first is not even required.  Sysprep is only run on the new VM after it is cloned — the original template/VM is never generalized by Sysprep.

The great thing about this design is that it gives you the ability to instantly convert a template back to a standard VM.  That makes it very easy to update templates and, for example, minimize the exposure of deploying virtual machines in dire need of numerous security patches.

Of course, vCenter also supports Linux guest customization, unlike competitors.

Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) Image Customization

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manger also has VM templates, but the workflow is quite different from vCenter.

When you create a template in SCVMM, the guest OS is generalized with Sysprep before it is copied into the library.  That effectively destroys the original VM and, in fact, this is what the warning message states when you create a template.

Maintaining a clone of every VM template obviously introduces some management overhead.  Another option you might consider: when it is time to update a VM template, simply deploy a fresh VM from the previous template, make changes, and then re-create a new template from the VM.  That sounds like it will work, but there is actually a problem that prevents it from being a viable solution. For technical reasons, Sysprep can only be run on a particular OS image a total of three times.  You can read all about the details in this TechNet article. UPDATE: Activated systems in a KMS environment are not affected by this limit.

Here is what happens when you exceed the Sysprep limit when attempting to create a template in SCVMM:

Looks like SCVMM administrators will either be maintaining master clones of all templates, or reinstalling VMs from scratch when updated templates are needed.  Kind of makes you think about the whole “managing physical plus virtual” thing, doesn’t it?

Citrix XenCenter Image Customization

Curious to know how Citrix handles Windows VM cloning and customization?  They just don’t bother — the documentation simply explains how to manually run Sysprep on a Windows VM before converting to a template.  All the disadvantages of the SCVMM model — without the automation.  Nice.

Summary

VMware vCenter Server is the only virtualization management platform that offers fully functional, non-destructive VM templates for both Windows and Linux guest operating systems.

What interesting VM/template strategies have you adopted?

With apologies to the “Don’t Taze Me, Bro!” guy.

Related posts:

1. SCVMM to VMware: You will be assimilated
2. Which guest operating systems can be customized by SCVMM?
3. Finding thin-provisioned virtual disks with PowerShell
4. Even GPL can’t make Hyper-V Linux VMs well

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.

Related posts:

1. SCVMM 2008 Management Pack Finally Released
2. Hello, SCVMM 2008 R2
3. Hyper-V deployments suddenly drop to zero
4. Is SCVMM 2008 R2 really banned from VMworld?