WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2012

Archive for September, 2011

Get Ready For a Busy Couple of Months

Thursday, 08 September, 2011 18:18 Written by John

I’m a big fan of DPM, as I mentioned last week. I was really happy to see the Beta release of DPM 2012.  However, I’m MORE excited to see that we’ve announced the RELEASE CANDIDATE of Virtual Machine Manager 2012.

VMM2012 has been in Beta for a while and it’s the first piece of the System Center suite to make it to RC status.

Given the clip at which we’re getting new info on the SC suite, not to mention the upcoming BUILD conference that promises lots of new info on Win8, it can’t be long before we see the RTM versions of System Center products.  It’d be nice to see them rev all of the new products at the same time, but that might be a bit too much to ask for.

So who’s played with VMM2012? This is a dramatically improved product over the current version and is definitely a step in the right direction in Microsoft’s fight against VMware.

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New peek at Windows 8

Wednesday, 07 September, 2011 22:19 Written by John

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised to see more and more details emerge about Windows 8 as Microsoft is preparing for its annual BUILD conference next week. The more I hear about the next release, the more excited I get about the future of Windows Server, Hyper-V and the System Center stack.

The Win 8 Engineering team put together a fantastic blog post about some of the new features of Hyper-V and I wanted to call out a couple:

  •  Create VMs with 32 vCPU and 512GB of RAM.  I’m glad we’re making some headway in scalability.  A lot of people are holding off on virtualizing their Tier 1 apps because of 4 vCPU limit.  Granted, don’t take that to mean that performance is going to scale linearly as you add more vCPUs, but now we’ll have the ability to test out larger and larger workloads.  RAM is the hot button issue now, especially with VMware’s vRAM limitations. This is probably the single biggest issue that I have with vSphere. I think it’s a great product, but paying more then more you use is asinine.
  • Live Storage Move. That’s a bit of an awkward name, but the concept is sound. Having the ability to move a running VM from one storage location to another with no interruption is cool, but I don’t see a tremendous demand for it in my space (small-medium business).  The majority of the customers I interact with have 1, maybe two SANs and rarely, if ever, have the need to move VMs from location to location. I suppose this is great for larger customers that need this flexibility every now and then, but not on a day-to-day basis.
  • Support for Wireless networks. Ok, this is a cool one for those of us out in the field and interacting with customers or partners. Creating a second boot partition and installing Win Server 2008 R2 worked fine, except I couldn’t get it to connect to a wireless network without jumping through some hoops. For everyone out there running Hyper-V in production, remember, just because it supports wireless networks, doesn’t mean you should USE wireless networks.

Add all of this, together with Hyper-V Replica and you can see just how much work Microsoft has put into the next version of Windows and Hyper-V.

What else do you all see?  Anything interesting from the video?

Don’t forget, we’ll see more next week at BUILD!

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Yay, I Did It!

Thursday, 01 September, 2011 21:57 Written by John

Finally!  I managed to pass the Desktop Virtualization MCP exam. I’m now an MCITP – Virtualization Administrator on Windows Server 2008 R2. For whatever that’s worth. :-)

MCITP Logo

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DPM 2012 Beta Now Out In The Wild

Thursday, 01 September, 2011 02:23 Written by John

Data Protection Manager 2012 logoIt’s been interesting to see how much traction Data Protection Manager 2010 has been getting over the last year. It seems like I’m having far more conversations around the capabilities and functions of DPM recently. From a capability standpoint, it’s an absolutely solid product for backing up Windows-based workloads. On top of that, creating a solid backup, replication, and DR strategy with DPM is incredibly easy.

Now, we have more reasons to be excited. The Beta version of DPM 2012 has been released today and adds a whole slew of capabilities.  Here are the highlights from the DPM Team Blog:

Provides centralized management

  • Centralized monitoring
  • Centralized troubleshooting
  • Push to resume backups
  • Manage DPM 2010 and DPM 2012 from the same console
  • Media co-location
Fits existing environment
  • Integration into existing ticketing systems, workflows and team structures.
  • Enterprise scale, Fault tolerance & Reliability.
  • Generic data source protection
  • All common Operations Manager 2007 R2 deployment configurations supported
Helps reduce management costs
  • Remote administration, corrective actions and recovery
  • Certificate based protection
  • Prioritize issues with SLA based Alerting, consolidation of alerts and alert categorization
  • Role based administration
  • Support for item level recovery, even when DPM is in a VM
That last bullet point is especially cool. DPM originally required it’s own physical server (with the Hyper-V role enabled) in order to do ILR of VMs. Now, with that requirement gone, you can take one (or more) physical server(s) out of your environment and still get the goodness out of DPM.  Centralized management has also been a big improvement with the new version. Now you have the ability to monitor and manage multiple DPM installations from your Operations Manager console.
It will be interesting to see the new product in action once I get my demo lab up and running (more on that later).
You can download the beta from here.
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