SQL Server Private Cloud Demo Infrastructure

In a previous article, I posted a video of Darmadi Komo’s session at TechEd in which he showcased SQL Server in the Microsoft Private Cloud. The demo environment for this session was created by technologists at Content Master, and I thought it might be useful to share some of the “behind the scenes” details of the demo infrastructure. The important point to make about this is that this is a real, working private cloud environment – there are no smoke and mirrors for demo purposes. You might make some different hardware and architectural choices in a production scenario, but the demo environment works and could be used to implement a fully-functional self-service provisioned private cloud solution.

When we started designing a demo environment for the Microsoft Private Cloud, we set ourselves the challenge of ensuring that the entire demo could be run on a single laptop computer, and that it could be easily replicated on another computer if necessary. We selected a Dell XPS 15 laptop with 8GB of RAM, an Intel Core i5 CPU, and a 500GB hard disk as our development machine and started to think about how to design the software environment. Fundamentally, the environment requires the following components:

• An Active Directory domain
• A Hyper-V host
• A Virtual Machine management server running:
  • System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1
  • The VMM Self-Service Portal 2.0 SP1 (note that this is a Solution Accelerator tool provided by Microsoft and is separate from the Self-Service Portal provided with System Center Virtual Machine Manager)
  • The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP)Toolkit
  • Microsoft Office Word and Excel (required by the MAP toolkit)
• A virtual machine template consisting of:
  • A sysprepped installation of Windows Server 2008 R2
  • A prepared installation of SQL Server 2008 R2
  • An ASP.NET application for the “Point of Sale” application shown in the demonstration
  • A batch file script to complete the prepared SQL Server installation when the server is first started
• A couple of virtual machines based on the template to use as existing POS servers in the demonstration
• A few more virtual machines based on the template to use as workstations for different users during the demonstration
• Some instances of SQL Server (various versions and editions) and Oracle for the MAP tool to discover

Our initial starting point for building the environment was the “Build Your Own” section of the Microsoft Private Cloud page, which includes a number of deployment guides. Then we struck gold and found Alan le Marquand’s excellent blog article on creating a private cloud. However, we soon discovered that while Alan’s approach is indeed a great way to try out Microsoft’s private cloud solution for yourself, it assumes that the bulk of the software – including the Active Directory domain and System Center components are installed on the physical host. This would satisfy our goal of building the entire demo environment on a single computer, but it wouldn’t meet our portability goal of being able to easily replicate the environment on another computer. Essentially, we’d have to install most of the software again.

Our preferred approach was to deploy as many of the components of the demo infrastructure as possible in virtual machines, so they can be easily copied to another physical computer and used to recreate the demo environment with a few reconfiguration steps. To achieve this, we came up with a high-level design that looks like this:

The host computer (HV-SRV-01) was straightforward enough to set up. We just installed Windows Server 2008 R2, applied updates until SP1 was installed, and then enabled the Hyper-V role. The SP1 update was required because we wanted to show the Dynamic Memory feature it adds to Hyper-V. We then configured a virtual network and changed the default folder for Virtual machines and VHDs to C:\VMs.

Next up was the domain controller (VM-DC-01). This is a virtual machine, which we created on the HV-SRV-01 host using Hyper-V Manager. We installed Windows Server 2008 R2 and used dcpromo to create an Active Directory domain named lucerne.msft. Since the domain controller would play a fairly minimal role in the demo, we also installed Oracle XE and SQL Server Express on it (so they could be discovered by the MAP toolkit during the demo). We added the DNS and DHCP roles and configured a scope of IP addresses that will be used by the various computers in the demo environment. Then we added the host (HV-SRV-01) to the lucerne.msft domain. It may seem somewhat counter-intuitive to add a physical host to a domain where the domain controller is running in a virtual machine, but it’s required because we want to be able to add HV-SRV-01 as a host to System Center Virtual Machine Manager on VM-VMM-01, and it’s a lot easier to do that if the host is in the same domain as the VMM server (you can add a non-domain joined host to VMM, but it requires installing and configuring the VMM agent on the host – which would affect the portability of the demo environment). In terms of running the demo, you can log onto the host as a local user that has permissions to start the virtual machines – so domain membership of the host had no real effect other than to make the laptop’s boot process a little slower as the host looks for a domain controller that isn’t running (because it’s a virtual machine defined on the host itself!)

The installation of VM-VMM-01 was the biggest task in creating the demo environment. We created the virtual machine for it with Hyper-V Manager, installed Windows Server 2008 R2, applied updates to SP1, and added it to the lucerne.msft domain. We enabled the Application Server role and ensured that Windows Authentication was enabled in IIS.  Then we installed SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer Edition, Microsoft Office 2010 Standard (only Word and Excel are required) and the MAP toolkit. Next we installed System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1 and attempted to add HV-SRV-01 as a host. At this point, we hit our first major blocker. When attempting to add the host, we encountered the following error:

Error (2923)
A malformed response was received while trying to contact the VMM agent on hv-srv-01.lucerne.msft. (Unspecified error (0x80004005))

After some troubleshooting, we figured out the cause of the problem. The Dell laptop we used came with an Intel wireless network card, and the driver installation included some WMI-based management and monitoring software. For some reason, this was causing WMI to return spurious data to the VMM server when installing and connecting to the VMM agent on the host. We removed the management software (but not the network card driver), and were able to successfully add our physical laptop as a Hyper-V host to SC VMM on our virtual machine.

Now that we had a working SC VMM installation, we set about installing the VMM Self-Service Portal 2.0 solution accelerator, and this is where we hit our second blocker. The installer for the self-service portal checks for a pre-requisite of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise edition. We had installed Developer edition, which while being functional identical to Enterprise edition did not meet the prerequisite requirements enforced by the portal setup program. So a little back-tracking later (thank heavens for Hyper-V snapshots) we had replaced SQL Server Developer edition with Enterprise edition and could continue. The self-service portal has two main components, each installed using a separate setup program. The self-service portal itself is basically a database back-end with an ASP.NET Web application through which users can request infrastructure resources. However, there is also an optional reporting dashboard for the self-service portal that requires a SharePoint site. To satisfy this requirement, we installed SharePoint Foundation 2010 as a front-end Web, and then configured a site to use the existing SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise instance on the virtual machine as a back-end database. Then we were able to install the VMM self-service portal reporting dashboard.

The next task was to create a virtual machine template for the “Point of Sale” server used in the demo. To accomplish this, we created a virtual machine on which we installed Windows Server 2008 R2 (with the Application Server role enabled) and deployed our demo application (a simple ASP.NET Web application that provides a point-of-sale system for selling books) in an IIS virtual directory. We then used SQL Server 2008 R2s “SQL Sysprep” feature to install a prepared instance of SQL Server on the virtual machine – this is in effect a partial installation of SQL Server with no server identity dependencies (so the server can be renamed, and the SQL Server installation completed at a later time). To automate the completion of the SQL Server installation, we ran the setup wizard as if completing the prepared instance manually, and then cancelled on the final screen and copied the .ini file that had been created by the setup program. We could then create a batch file that runs the SQL Server setup program (from a locally stored copy of the installation media) and specifies the .ini file to perform a silent, automated installation. We also created a simple Transact-SQL script to create the point-of-sale application database in the local SQL Server instance after its installation has completed and called that from the same batch file.

With everything now in place, we used System Center Virtual Machine Manager to create a virtual machine template from the virtual machine we had built. Essentially, this creates a Sysprepped image of the virtual machine that can be customized the first time it is started. Then, we configured the template by specifying the virtual hardware settings and default computer name, license key, domain membership etc. to be used to customize the image when started. We also specified that the batch file we had included in the image should be run automatically the first time the computer was started and logged into – completing the installation of SQL Server and the application database.

We then used the template as the basis for two virtual machines – VM-POS-NY and VM-POS-TechEd. These were created in System Center VMM from the template, and serve as pre-existing point-of-sale servers in the demo.

Finally, we created three simple virtual machines that included Windows Server 2008 R2 with Internet Explorer 9. We added the Desktop Experience feature, enabled the Themes service, and customized the desktop to use the Aero theme (so the user interface looks like Windows Vista/7 rather than the traditional Windows Server UI). We named these computers VM-WKSTN-Admin, VM-WKSTN-Operator, and VM-WKSTN-User, an they’re used in the demo to represent the workstations of the various user roles involved in a self-service provisioning scenario.

At TechEd, Darmadi presented the demo on a Dell Precision laptop with 16GB of RAM. To move the completed demo environment to this laptop, we simply:

1. Installed Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and named the computer HV-SRV-01
2. Copied all of the virtual machines to C:\VMs on the new laptop
3. Started VM-DC-01, removed the old HV-SRV-01 from the domain and added the new HV-SRV-01 to the domain
4. Started VM-VMM-01 and removed the old HV-SRV-01 host, and then added the new HV-SRV-01 host

I’ve missed out a few details, and I may return to the subject of using SQL Server prepared instances in VM templates in a future post; but for now, hopefully this has given you an insight into the single-computer private cloud environment we built for the TechEd demo.

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SQL Server in the Private Cloud

Damadi Komo's session from TechEd discusses how to implement a virtualized private cloud solution for database servers. The demo scenario for the session was designed and developed by Content Master - watch out for future posts discussing the demo infrastructure and how we created it!

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New CSV Hyper-V cluster with VMM07R2 SP1

 

Open the VMM

Get the add host menu and to enter the cluster named

Regards

sAnTos

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Cluster Shared Volumes. NTFS error

Hello

Do you have this error?

Have you partitioned the disk?

pictures to solve the problem. I think, it is no necessary to explain them.

(any questions by email

Note: the disk2 is in the other host in the cluster

sAnTos

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SCVMM08 R2 SP1

hello

 

 

sAnTos

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WmiPrvSE . Error solved with SP1

hello

We have 5 Datacenter 2008 R2.

We had problems with the WmiPrvSE processe.

We have solved these problems with the SP1

Only 20-30k

Before, We had 500-600k and the MMC console failed.

Regards

sAnTos

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What are Microsoft’s real virtualization technologies?

OK, so something is either real or virtual, right? But behind the contradiction implied by this title, is a serious question. What exactly is virtualization?

Not only are virtualization technologies becoming more and more prevalent in all kinds of organizations, from small businesses through to global enterprises, but the term "virtualization" is also being used more and more, and sometimes to describe things that may not be virtualization as this term has commonly been understood. For example Microsoft, and other vendors, has applied the "virtualization" brush to a range of technologies, not all of which are really virtual! Or have they …

One definition of virtualization is: The capability to run an application or a computer in a virtual environment without affecting the components that already exist on that particular desktop or server.

This definition mostly works for desktop virtualization technologies, such as Virtual PC 2007 and Windows Virtual PC on Windows 7, VMware Workstation, and server virtualization technologies such as Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware Server, that enable several operating systems to co-exist on the same physical hardware, and in protected "bubbles" so that one OS does not affect any others.

However, as we shall see when we go through some of Microsoft's current "virtualization" technologies, the above definition doesn't always fully explain things.

Server virtualization is probably the least ambiguous technology area for Microsoft. Server virtualization enables multiple servers, such as domain controllers, DNS servers, and Web servers, to run as discrete virtual machines on the same physical computer host. Server virtualization enables the physical consolidation of multiple traditional servers to improve and maximize hardware utilization, and to consolidate workloads onto fewer enterprise class servers. Server virtualization is also about reducing costs, by using fewer physical computes, with reduced electrical costs for cooling and server power consumption.

But what about desktop virtualization? Desktop virtualization enables software applications, operating system, and hardware configuration to be packaged to run in a self-contained, virtual environment, enabling users to run multiple operating systems and applications on a single computer. With desktop virtualization technologies, such as Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 SP1 and Windows Virtual PC, including Windows 7's XP Mode, the virtual machine files are installed and executed on the local client desktop computer. In enterprise environments, desktop virtualization can be augmented with technologies such as MED-V that are used to deliver and manage client virtual machines over the network from central servers.

Isn't this clear and unambiguous? Yes, if you just include "traditional" definitions of desktop virtualization, but what about approaches such as using Microsoft's Remote Desktop Services (RDS) to deliver desktops and applications hosted on central servers, but presented on user's desktops as if they were running locally? This approach de-couples the user desktop from their physical workstation, but importantly there are not separate virtual machines on the server; rather every user is running a session on the server, and any applications they run must be compatible with the server OS. This approach is sometimes called presentation or session virtualization. And where shortcuts to remote applications are provided on user's desktops, this approach is sometimes also referred to as a type of application virtualization.

And then there is the whole area of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) …. VDI is an alternative server-based desktop virtualization method that uses virtualization technologies enable users to run their own client desktops, but hosted on a central server. In Microsoft's VDI, multiple client operating systems run in virtual machines on a Hyper-V server; the server then remotely presents each desktop to the client computer, over RDS. By using virtual machines running on the server, every user can run their own desktop OS version (and not be limited to a server OS), and customize their own unique desktop settings.

So, there's more to virtualization than virtual machines; we've also got session-based virtualization and, perhaps most importantly, there's also the concept of de-coupling, where elements such as hardware, OS, applications, and user state and data, that in a traditional rich desktop environment would be all packaged together, are now potentially in their own separate spaces.

Does considering virtualization to be of different types help with some of the other "virtualization" technologies?

Let's consider user state virtualization. The term user state virtualization describes the ability to separate user data and settings from applications and operating systems, so that users can access their own personalized environment, no matter which device they are currently using. So, in this case, it is the de-coupling element of virtualization that is key – we are not talking about multiple concurrent user states here, and there are no virtual machines involved. Instead there's the ability to separate user state data from the applications and operating system so that users can move from environment to environment, or device to device, and automatically pick up their saved data, favorites, application settings and so on no matter where they are. In Windows environments, user state virtualization technologies include Folder Redirection, Offline Files, and Roaming User Profiles.

How about application virtualization? As a generic term application virtualization describes technologies that deliver applications across the network to end-users, without the need to install these applications on the user's desktop. There are two key methods for virtualizing applications; through specific application virtualization tools and through presentation virtualization.

Application virtualization tools typically package a software application so that it runs in a self-contained, virtual environment. This virtual environment contains all the information required to run the application on the client computer, without installing the software application locally. So, again the decoupling element of virtualization is important, as the application is not "installed" on the host operating system. In typical implementations, such as Microsoft's App-V, application code is downloaded on demand from a central server and executed on the local desktop computer. Although the application is running within a virtual OS environment, this is not a complete virtual machine; rather it provides virtualized interfaces to OS components such as the Windows Registry, and is a great approach for dealing with incompatibilities between applications; but is not useful for dealing with incompatibilities between an application and the host OS; this is because the application it does still make use of OS features, and must still meet the same platform and system requirements as a regular application; for example, if an application won't run under Windows 7 as a traditional installed application, it will still fail when run under App-V on a Windows 7 workstation.

Presentation virtualization typically describes technologies where the execution of application code takes place remotely from the end-user's interaction with the application interface. In Windows environments, presentation virtualization is used by applications delivered using RDS, such as traditional terminal services applications. Using technologies such as Microsoft's RemoteFX, such applications can appear to the end-user as if they are running locally, particularly if configured as a RemoteApp, where the individual application is launched from a regular application shortcut on the user desktop; in this way the user may be unaware that the application is actually a terminal into a remote session running on a server. So, again we've got de-coupling, and with sessions rather than virtual machines.

Looking at Microsoft as an example vendor, what we need to do is think of different types or classes of virtualization. The key feature in all types of virtualization is perhaps the de-coupling of elements such as hardware, OS, applications, and user state and data. Using this as a principle, we can see that the "traditional" approach, such as desktop and server virtualization, achieves this de-coupling by using distinct virtual machines. With user state virtualization, the de-coupling is achieved using remote central data storage; with application virtualization, the de-coupling can be from virtual application environments or through sessions in the case of remote applications and desktops. And implementations using VDI, can achieve de-coupling by using all these tools; virtual machines, centralized storage, and session-based technologies.

So, as long as we can think of the core virtualization concept as a separating or de-coupling approach, then there's no reason not to use the term for a wide range of approaches – and if this is case maybe all Microsoft's virtualizations are real ….

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Merge Hyper-V files. Merging .avhd and .vhd files

Hello

We had a big VM

I remove applications and Hyper-V did the merging process with all files by itself.

Good

sAnTos

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Hyper- V , XenDesktop 4, Cluster and VMM08R2 error

 

HI

We have XenDesktop 4.

The machines are in a WS08R2 CSV Cluster.

The machines in node1 connect with XenDesktop 4

The machines in node 2 didn’t connect with XD4.

We look at the VMM08R2

The node 2 give us these error.

But the WS08 server runs well. The hyper-V R2 runs well.

But, The machines in node 2 didn’t connect with XD4.

The only solution was restart Node 2.

After these, Everything went well.

Very strange

sAnTos

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The Technet Wiki for Hyper-V

Do you like to have everything about Hyper-V together?

You got it!

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/hyper-v-survival-guide.aspx

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/windows-server-2008-r2-survival-guide.aspx

 

a no-microsoft link

http://www.vcritical.com/category/virtualizationism/

sAnTos

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Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions

hi

 

Hi we are this link

http://trycatch.be/blogs/roggenk/archive/2010/03/02/understanding-microsoft-virtualization-solutions-r2-update.aspx

 

It is a book about all Microsoft Virtualization Systems . The R2 update included.

It is a great book, and free.

sAnTos

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Phantom Network Adapters in Virtual Machines and more….

hi

Sometimes if you:

a) copy a VM from a host to another

b) Hype-V R2, the Network Adapters vanish

c) Other problems with the NICs.

Follow this links to solve the problems:

http://winserverteam.org.uk/blogs/mark/archive/2008/04/07/removing-phantom-network-adapters-from-virtual-machines.aspx

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311272/en-us

(devcon tool)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/269155/en-us

sAnTos

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Hyper-V R2, network problem

Hi

Do you have problems with the VM and NICS?

Try this link:

The network connection of a running Hyper-V virtual machine is lost under heavy outgoing network traffic on a Windows Server 2008 R2-based computer

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974909/en-us

sAnTos

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Hyper-V R2, BSDO, evbda.sys error. CPU C-States

Hi

We have some HP Blade bl460c G6 and We have problems with some random reset.

The dump file speaks about evda.sys file.

The HP company want to update the firmware and NIC drivers. We did it. But we have the problem again.

A colleague got this links: (Thank you Marta Marco)

http://www.minasi.com/forum/post.asp?method=ReplyQuote&REPLY_ID=157302&TOPIC_ID=32281&FORUM_ID=51

http://boardreader.com/thread/R2_Hyper_V_HP_hardware_6ihulXowp.html

The first link speaks about this R2 update: (but Microsoft dont recommend to install it in a production environment).

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974598/en-us

So, Now, We did about C-States. We switch off the option.

And We changed to high performance the power options in the panel control as well

is that right? We hope so

sanTos

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Hyper-V Security Guide

hi

I downloaded it

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2220624b-a562-4e79-aa69-a7b3dffdd090&displaylang=en




sAnTos

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Hyper-V R2 reboot blade. No logs

hi
We have 4 HP blades BL460 G6.

We installed Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V for VDI with Citrix XenDesktop.
The server restart by random.
No logs in Blade Chassis.
There is a dump file.
We studied the dump file and we sent it to HP.
The HP company advise us about to change some firmware and drivers about NICS.
I am not sure about the solution.

This picture is the NIC update:


saNtos

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WmiPrvSE memory leak. The computer 'localhost' failed to perform the requested operation because it is out of memory or disk space

Hi

The computer 'localhost' failed to perform the requested operation because it is out of memory or disk space.




I got these error.
The disk had 75 % free space.
So, the memory is the problem
I killed the WmiPrvSE. The processes had 700.000k.
After, I killed it, everything goes well and the processe started again with 6.000k.
The hyper-v manager started to work without problem.

You can solve the problem restarting the server of course. But the server was in a enviroment production.





sAnTos

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Connecting to Virtual Machine Management service

Hi

Have you read the post before?

The solution is the same.

I remove some files from the disk with 11G free. We have 25G free. We restarted the server, and everything goes well.

sAnTos

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The computer 'localhost' failed to perform the requested operation because it is out of memory or disk spac

Hi

Yes, We had a problem in a disk.
We had 11G, but Hyper-V manager shut down. The VM runned well.



We changed some vm to another disk, we restarted the host server and everything is ok now.

NOTE:

See WmiPrvSE entry. It is a better solution.
Close this service and It is solve de problem

sAnTos

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Virtual Machine connection off.

hi

We have hyper-V R2.

I had a problem with the blade host server.

When We started the host server some machines waiting for starting.

I couldnt turn off. The virtual machine connection is off. See the picture`

Although we restarted the server and everything gone well.

My colleague Marta Marco found the problem in this log: (thanks Marta ;-) )

http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/rdixon/archive/2008/12/20/virtual-machines-found-stuck-with-status-quot-starting-quot-in-hyper-v-workaround.aspx

The vmwp.exe service looks the problem.

sanTos

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