Re-post from; http://www.windowsitpro.com/content1/tabid/57/catpath/virtualization/topic/windows-server-8-hyperv-30-evens-odds-vsphere-140573

At the recent Windows Server Workshop at the Microsoft campus in Redmond Washington Jeff Woolsey, Principle Program Manager Lead for Windows Virtualization in the Windows Server and Cloud division presented the new features in the next version of their Hyper-V virtualization platform. In the introduction to the workshop Jeffery Snover, Distinguished Engineer and the Lead Architect for the Windows Server Division made the bold statement that with Microsoft it’s the third release is where Microsoft really gets it right and with regard to what Microsoft demonstrated in the next version of Hyper-V this is definitely true. The upcoming Hyper-V 3.0 release that’s included in the next version of Windows Server has closed the technology gap with VMware’s vSphere.

Hyper-V 3.0 Scalability

The days when Hyper-V lagged behind VMware in terms of scalability are a thing of the past. The new Hyper-V 3.0 meets or exceeds all of the scalability marks that were previously VMware-only territory. Hyper-V 3.0 hosts support up to 160 logical processors (where a logical processor is either a core or a hyperthread) and up to 2 TB RAM. On the VM guest side, Hyper-V 3.0 guests will support up to 32 virtual CPUs with up to 512 GB RAM per VM. More subtle changes include support for guest NUMA where the guest VM has processor and memory affinity with the Hyper-V host resources. NUMA support is important for ensuring scalability increases as the number of available host processors increase.

Multiple Concurrent Live Migration and Storage Live Migration

Perhaps more important than the sheer scalability enhancements are the changes in Live Migration and the introduction of Storage Live Migration. Live Migration was introduced in Hyper-V 2.0 which came out with Windows Server 2008 R2. While it filled an important hole in the Hyper-V feature set it wasn’t up to par with the VMotion capability provided in vSphere. Live Migration was limited to a single Live Migration at a time while ESX Server was capable of performing multiple simultaneous VMotions. In addition, vSphere supported a similar feature called Storage VMotion which allowed a VM’s storage to be moved to new locations without incurring any downtime. Hyper-V 3.0 erases both of these advantages. Hyper-V 3.0 supports multiple concurrent Live Migrations. There are no limits to the number of concurrent Live Migrations that can take place with Hyper-V 3.0. In addition, Hyper-V 3.0 also provides full support for Storage Live Migration where a virtual machine’s files ( the configuration, virtual disk and snapshot files) can be moved to different storage locations without any interruption of end user connectivity to the guest VM.

Microsoft also threw in one additional twist that vSphere has never had. Hyper-V 3.0 has the ability to perform Live Migration and Storage Live Migration without the requirement of a shared storage on the backend. The removal of this requirement really helps bring the availability advantages of Live Migration to small and medium sized businesses that came afford a SAN or don’t want to deal with the complexities of a SAN. The ability to perform Live Migration without requiring shared storage really sets Hyper-V apart from vSphere and will definitely be a big draw – especially for SMBs that haven’t implemented virtualization yet.

VHDX, ODX, Virtual Fiber Channel & Boot from SAN

Another important enhancement with Hyper-V 3.0 was the introduction of a new virtual disk format called VHDX. The new VHDX format breaks the 2TB limit that was present in the older VHD format and pushes the maximum size of the virtual disk up to 16 TB per VHDX. The new format also provides improved performance, support for larger block sizes and is more resilient to corruption.

Hyper-V 3.0 also supports a feature called Offloaded Date Transfer (ODX). ODX enables Hyper-V to take advantage of the storage features of a backend shared storage subsystem. When performing file copies on an ODX enabled SAN the OS hands off all of the data transfer tasks to the SAN providing much high file copy performance with zero to minimal CPU utilization. There is no special ODX button. Instead ODX works in the backend. ODX requires the storage subsystem to support ODX.

Companies that use fiber channel SANs will appreciate the addition of the virtual Fiber Channel support in the Hyper-V guests. Hyper-V 3.0 guests can have up to four virtual fiber channel host bus adapters. The virtual HBAs appear in the VMs as devices very like virtual NICs and other virtual devices. Hyper-V VMs will also be able to boot from both fiber channel and iSCSI SANs.

Extensible Virtual Switch & NIC Teaming

In keeping par with the sweeping changes in Hyper-V’s compute capabilities and storage Microsoft also made a some of significant enhancements to Hyper-V’s networking capabilities. First, they updated the virtual switch that’s built into the Hyper-V hypervisor. The new virtual switch has a number of new capabilities multi-tenant capability as well as the ability to provide minimum and maximum bandwidth guarantees. In addition to these features the new virtual switch is also extensible. Microsoft provides a API that allows capture, filter and forwarding extensions. To ensure the high quality of these virtual switch extensions Microsoft will be initiating a Hyper-V virtual switch logo program.

Another overdue feature that will be a part of Windows Server 8 is the built-in ability to provide NIC teaming natively in the operating system. VMware’s ESX Server has provided NIC teaming for some time. Prior to Windows Server 8 you could only get NIC teaming for Windows via specialized NICs from Broadcom and Intel. The new NIC teaming works across heterogonous vendor NICs and can provide support for load balancing as well as failover.

The Magic Number 3

As Jeffery Snover pointed out three does seem to be the magic number – at least for Hyper-V. Hyper-V 3.0 brings Microsoft’s virtualization on par with VMware’s vSphere. Businesses that are just getting into to virtualization or those businesses that may be bulking at VMware’s latest price increases will find Hyper-V to be a very cost effective and highly competitive alternative.

Smart Teaming

Risual are one of 21 partners within the Microsoft Consulting Services Smart Teaming Agreement. Established in January 2011 the Smart Teaming agreement has been setup to enable efficient, predictable, and transparent partner sub-contracting relationships by standardizing the engagement process, sharing skills / capability, demand data, and driving consistent value for Microsoft and its partners.

The Smart Teaming agreement runs for three calendar years ensuring a strong relationship is established and maintained between partners and Microsoft Consulting Services. The agreement enables partners to support Microsoft with augmenting key engagements by providing skills that cover the Microsoft stack and also supplying niche and in demand skills.

In the UK, Microsoft are committed to ensuring 80% of all sub-contracting is covered by the Smart Teaming partners and to date has been a great success in achieving this metric.

When using the SharePoint command-line tool STSADM, you may receive “Command line error.” even though the syntax is correct:

Solution

Manually type out the command rather than copying/pasting from another application such as Internet Explorer. This is caused by the encoding method, particularly any hyphens in the command. Hyphens and dashes vary between ANSI and UTF-8 encoding.

Microsoft have released an Outlook connector for Facebook , you can get the download from here http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5039&WT.mc_id=rss_alldownloads_all

Instructions to Set up

• Once Installed restart Outlook and you may be prompted by the Outlook Social Connector configuration wizard to connect to Facebook.
  1. Under Social Network Accounts, select Facebook.
  2. For User Name: enter your Facebook email account.
  3. For Password: enter your Facebook password.
  4. Click Connect
  5. Once the connection is successfully completed, click Finish
• If you were not prompted by the Outlook Social Connector configuration wizard, you can still connect to Facebook.
  For Outlook 2010:
  1. On the View tab, in the People Pane group, click People Pane, and then click Account Settings.
  2. Under Social Network Accounts, select Facebook.
  3. For User Name: enter your Facebook email account.
  4. For Password: enter your Facebook password.
  5. Click Connect.
  6. Once the connection is successfully completed, click Finish.

Once Added you will be able to see your friends latest posts, status updates etc from the People pane in Outlook

Microsoft has recently revealed the new file system RsFS. Much more detail can be found at the following blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/16/building-the-next-generation-file-system-for-windows-refs.aspx

In this blog, I am just highlighting some of the key things to take away about ReFS:

• Only Windows Server 8 will include the ReFS
• Windows 8 desktop will continue with NTFS
• ReFS will not be usable as a boot drive, this will come in future versions of Windows
• ReFS cannot be used on removable media devices (USB Disks)
• Failover clustering is supported
• There will be no way to convert an existing NTFS drive to a ReFS. Creating a new ReFS drive and copying data will be the only migration path for moving files onto a ReFS drive.
• Bit locker encryption is supported on ReFS
• Corruptions automatically detected and fixed

Capacity limits of ReFS:

Cheers

Paul

After being on site where the users are currently being upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2010 we found that a lot of users were struggling with finding some of the basic functions that used in Office 2003 on the new Office 2010.

The following URL will take you to a Microsoft website that will enable users to launch a “virtual” Office 2003 program, find the tool that they used before in the 2003 version and then it will show you exactly where to find it in Office 2010 equivalent:

http://office2010.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/learn-where-menu-and-toolbar-commands-are-in-office-2010-HA101794130.aspx

Simply click on the guide that you want to open, install Silverlight if not already installed, and then it will open the guide of the program that you selected. In this example we have opened Outlook and want to know where I go in Outlook 2010 to open a new meeting request:

Outlook 2003:

Outlook 2010:

These guides can also be downloaded to the local PC in case the user if offline.

Cheers

Paul

We had a query from a customer recently , asking how you can disable ActiveSync on a Per User and for All Users basis.

You can disable ActiveSync by doing one of the below steps depending on your requirements.

To Disable ActiveSync on an Individual User Basis

1. Open the Exchange Management Console.

2. Under Recipient Configuration, select Mailbox.

3. Select Properties from the action pane or right-click the user’s mailbox, and then click Properties.

4. Click the Mailbox Features tab.

5. Select Exchange ActiveSync

 To Disable for all users

1. Click Start, click Administrative Tools, and then click Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager. (Please Note this must be done on all CAS Servers)

2. Double-click to expand the server name, and then double-click to expand the Application Pools folder.

3. Right-click MSExchangeSyncAppPool, and then click Stop to disable ActiveSync.

Now that TMG 2010 SP2 has been released you may be wondering how you can Slipstream it into your media, so I’m just going to provide you with a quick easy guide below.

First of all we are going to extract the TMG media by coping the contents of your TMG 2010 DVD/ISO into a folder. (for demonstration purpose i will be placing it into C:TMG2010Slipstream)

Once you have copied the contents now go ahead and download Forefront TMG 2010 Sp1 , Forefront TMG 2010 SU1 and TMG2010 Sp2.

The first download TMG SP1 will come as a .MSP file named TMG-KB981324-AMD64-ENU.msp, so if we can place that into a folder named TMGSP1 (C:TMGSP1)

Now its a bit trickier with the next 2 downloads they will come as .exe files , so we will start off with TMG 2010 Software Update 1. Open command prompt map to the location where you have save TMG SP1 U1 and run TMG-KB2288910-amd64-ENU.exe /t C:TMGSP1SU1 and also do the same for TMG Sp2 TMG-KB2555840-amd64-ENU.exe /t C:TMGSP2.

Now that we have all the relevant files extracted we will need to slipstream them.

So first of all open command prompt and map to the folder we extracted the TMG media to earlier C:TMG2010Slipstream and then navigate to the FPC folder inside of there.

So we would run

Cd “C:TMG2010SlipStreamFPC”

Now we will slipstream the TMG media by running the following commands.

TMG SP1

msiexec /a MS_FPC_Server.msi /p C:TMGSP1TMG-KB981324-AMD64-ENU.msp

TMG SP1 Software Update 1

msiexec /a MS_FPC_Server.msi /p C:TMGSP1SU1TMG-KB2288910-AMD64-ENU.msp

TMG SP2

msiexec /a MS_FPC_Server.msi /p C:TMGSP2TMG-KB2555840-AMD64-ENU.msp

Once you have run those commands you will have the slipstreamed media in the TMG2010Slipstream Folder (C:TMG2010SlipStream)

We had an issue recently when upgrading TMG 2010 Eval to full blown licensed TMG. To upgrade to TMG Full version we inserted a TMG disk and ran the installation wizard which came back with the following error “The Internal Network is missing. Verify that the Internal Network has been defined”

What the issue turned out to be is that we had installed TMG Sp2 onto the TMG Evaluation which was causing the issues, so what we had to do was Slipstream TMG Sp2 into TMG install files and setup ran fine (I’ll be blogging how to Slipstream TMG SP2 soon)

Here is the location of the mail control panel just in case you cannot see it in the list of control panels that are available:

C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice14MLCFG32.CPL
OR
C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft OfficeOffice14MLCFG32.CPL

You can simply copy and paste the lines above into a run box to display the mail setup control panel:

Cheers

Paul