Learn to design, build, and manage a virtualized data center using Microsoft Hyper-V
Peter De Tender
Copyright © 2015 Packt Publishing
Table of Contents
Overview of Microsoft virtualization solutions 13
Windows Server Hyper-V 2012 R2 14
Introduction to Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 in relation to Hyper-V 16
System Center Virtual Machine Manager – SCVMM 17
System Center App Controller 17
System Center Operations Manager – SCOM 18
System Center Configuration Manager – SCCM 18
System Center Service Manager – SCSM 19
System Center Data Protection Manager – SCDPM 20
System Center Orchestrator 20
Executing a technical assessment of your as-is environment by using the MAP Toolkit 21
Installing the tool 22
Running the tool – creating your inventory 23
Hyper-V building blocks for creating your Microsoft virtualization platform 29
Physical server hardware 29
Physical storage hardware 30
Physical network devices 32
NIC Teaming 32
Network virtualization 33
Server editions and licensing 33
Walk-through of the Hyper-V Server role installation process 33
Installing the Hyper-V Server role using the GUI 34
Installing the Hyper-V Server role using PowerShell 35
Rapid-eye view of the Hyper-V management console 36
Connecting to a Hyper-V host 36
Managing virtual machines 37
Managing your Hyper-V environment 37
Summary 40
Base Hyper-V settings 42
Virtual hard disks' setting 43
Virtual machines' setting 43
Physical GPUs' setting 44
The NUMA spanning setting 44
Live Migrations setting 44
The storage migration setting 45
The enhanced session mode policy setting 46
The replication configuration setting 46
User-specific session settings 47
Resource pools 47
Hyper-V virtual storage configuration 50
Storage Spaces 51
Storage tiering 51
Deduplication 52
SMB 3.0 for Hyper-V 52
Hyper-V virtual network configuration 53
Hyper-V virtual switch configuration 53
Creating or configuring a Hyper-V virtual switch using GUI 54
Configuring a Hyper-V virtual switch using PowerShell 56
Viewing current Hyper-V virtual switch details 56
Creating a new Hyper-V virtual switch of Private type 57
Advanced Hyper-V virtual network card settings 57
SR-IOV explained 60
Dynamic Virtual Machine Queue explained 60
Creating and configuring virtual machines 61
Creating a new virtual machine using GUI 61
Creating a virtual machine using PowerShell 62
Hyper-V Integration Services 63
Summary 65
Why moving virtual machines is important 68
Live migration without a Hyper-V cluster 69
The process of live migration 70
Configuring your Hyper-V host for live migration 71
Configuration done using the Hyper-V console 71
Configuration done using PowerShell 73
Performing the live migration 73
Executing live migration using the Hyper-V console 74
Executing live migration using PowerShell 76
Verifying the move operation 77
Live migration authentication protocol 79
CredSSP 79
Kerberos 80
Using SMB 3.0 shared storage for Hyper-V 82
Considerations for using SMB 3.0 in a Hyper-V environment 82
Installing and configuring an SMB 3.0 file server 83
Storage migration 87
Moving storage between Hyper-V hosts 88
Hyper-V Replica 90
Hyper-V Replica considerations and requirements 91
Enabling Hyper-V Replica on your Hyper-V host 92
Replicating a virtual machine 94
Summary 100
Hyper-V cluster prerequisites and system requirements 102
Cluster storage 103
Cluster shared volumes 103
Cluster networking 103
Cluster quorum 104
Shared virtual disks 104
Guest clustering 104
Configuring shared storage for your cluster 105
iSCSI shared storage 105
Configuring an iSCSI volume for Hyper-V as a storage solution 106
Implementing a Hyper-V failover cluster 111
Installing the Hyper-V failover cluster server role 111
Creating a high available virtual machine 119
Managing your high available virtual machine 121
Summary 122
Reasons for using SCVMM in your virtualized environment 124
Introduction to the Virtual Machine Manager architecture 126
Installing and configuring Virtual Machine Manager 129
Walk-through of the installation 129
Distributed Key Management 136
Managing Hyper-V hosts 138
Installing the SCVMM agent on a domain member Hyper-V host 138
Managing the network fabric 142
Managing the storage fabric 151
Deploying and managing virtual machines 154
Cloning a VM to the library and reusing the clone 156
Summary 159
Why should you use SCVMM as your overall virtualization platform management solution? 163
How to establish the integration between VMware vCenter and SCVMM 165
Adding VMware vCenter to VMM 165
Adding VMware ESX/ESXi hosts to VMM 167
Managing and operating your VMware hosts out of SCVMM 168
How to migrate virtual machines from VMware to Virtual Machine Manager using VMM 2012 R2 172
How to convert virtual machines from VMware to Hyper-V using Microsoft Virtual Machine Convertor 3.0 178
Best practices in migrating from VMware to Virtual Machine Manager 182
Other solutions to perform virtual machine conversions 183
Summary 183
The concepts of cloud computing 186
What are services and service templates within SCVMM? 187
Configuring services and clouds in SCVMM 188
Configuring a cloud within SCVMM 188
How to configure service templates in SCVMM 192
Creating a service template 192
What are user roles and how to configure them in SCVMM 195
Configuring user roles and mapping them to cloud resources 196
Installing and configuring App Controller 199
Summary 208
Overview of Microsoft's public cloud data center infrastructure – Microsoft Azure 211
Computing resources 213
Web and mobile 214
Data and storage 214
Analytics 214
Networking resources 214
Storage and backup services 215
Media and CDN 215
Identity and access management 215
Applications and developer services 215
Creating your Microsoft Azure account 216
Creating and configuring virtual machines within Microsoft Azure 217
Deploying a VM in Azure using the QUICK CREATE option 218
Deploying a VM using the FROM GALLERY option 220
Uploading an on-premises custom server image to Azure 223
Efficiently managing your hybrid cloud data center infrastructure using App Controller 232
Data center integration using Microsoft Azure site-to-site VPN 240
Summary 244
Understanding Windows Server and Hyper-V licensing basics 246
Understanding System Center licensing basics 247
System Center editions 248
Enrolment for Core Infrastructure (ECI) licensing 249
Extending your license agreements to Microsoft Azure 250
Windows Server licensing in Azure 250
System Center licensing and Microsoft Azure 251
Summary 251
Index 253
Preface
Hyper-V, Microsoft's virtualization technology, has matured into an enterprise-ready platform. Unfortunately,if you are new to virtualization or have an extensive background in VMware, for example, often you find yourself stranded in a pool of unfamiliar terms and concepts or even get lost in the combination of Hyper-V with System Center, without even talking about the questions that might arise around adopting cloud technology. The good news is that these questions are common, both in Server Message Blocks (SMBs) and in enterprise environments. By writing this book, I hope you as a reader can gather together information on some of the most common stumbling blocks to help you chart a clear path to a successful deployment, whether you are using Hyper-V in a standalone or in a clustered setup, integrating with System Center or not, or optimizing toward a private or a hybrid cloud architecture.
At the time of writing, Windows Server 2012 R2 has been released for about 6 months, and the adoption in the market is huge. Besides all the other interesting features of this latest version of Microsoft's server operating system, one of the key reasons to actually migrate is the updated virtualization component, Hyper-V.
When I'm talking to customers myself about virtualization and more specifically the Microsoft solutions that enable virtualization, I always tell them to forget everything they know and have heard about Hyper-V before. Not that the previous version was bad, actually not at all, but its feature set is so much different than the initial version in Windows Server 2008 close to 6 years ago. At that time, the market adoption of Hyper-V was rather low. Other virtualization platforms owned the market. But not anymore…
And this is exactly the key reason why we have worked out this book, to take you on an interesting journey, where you will learn everything there is to know about Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V.
The book starts from the planning phase, during which we highlight some interesting tools that can help in assessing your current physical and/or virtual environment, whether it is running Microsoft or Linux operating systems, regardless of what hypervisor you are already using in your data center. This is followed by explaining what the new Hyper-V features of Server 2012 R2 are. A very important aspect of adopting Hyper-V is its management layer, made possible by System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2, as well as by using other System Center components such as Server App Controller to name just one.
The second part of this book will guide you in the realization of a "private cloud", starting from describing what private cloud actually means, what tools you need for running such a private cloud, how to perform full management of this on premises with a mixed virtualized infrastructure, ending with a chapter dedicated to Microsoft Azure, which allows you to not only run virtual machines "in-the-cloud", but also actually provide migration mechanisms back and forth.
Okay, now you know what you will learn from reading this book. And we know your expectations are high. You are a technical expert in operating and administering your current environment, and you want to dive into the technology right away. But before we do this, let's make sure everybody is on the right track here. That's why we would like to start with explaining some of the basics around server virtualization and what it takes to run a virtualized infrastructure. And if you are already familiar with these terminologies, feel free to jump right away to Chapter 1, Introduction to Microsoft Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Introduction to Microsoft Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V, helps the reader in finding out if their existing environment is "ready" for Hyper-V; we will position a Microsoft tool here that can help in doing the assessment (MAP Toolkit).
Chapter 2, Unwrapping Hyper-V 2012 R2 Components, handles the different components of a Hyper-V virtual infrastructure, such as virtual machine, virtual disks, virtual network configurations, and alike.
Chapter 3, Live Migration, Storage Migration, and Hyper-V Replica, talks about virtual machine migration, including what mechanisms are available from within Hyper-V itself and the difference between live migration and quick migration. The last topic will detail the Hyper-V Replica feature.
Chapter 4, Building a High Available Hyper-V Cluster, describes how to implement a high available cluster, the different components you need, and how to execute failover testing.
Chapter 5, Hyper-V Management Using System Center Virtual Machine Manager, will not only position a System Center VMM as a Hyper-V management and administration solution, but also explain the benefits of using it compared to the standalone Hyper-V manager.
Chapter 6, Integrating System Center VMM 2012 R2 with Your VMware Environment, details how the integration works, how to configure the interaction between SCVMM and VMware vCenter, and explains the possibilities of the interaction between both platforms.
Chapter 7, Operating Your Private Cloud Using SCVMM and App Controller, tells you that once your private cloud is operational from a technical perspective, it's time to start looking at optimizing your service delivery; maybe providing self-service functionalities to your users. By using System Center App Controller, we will show you how this can become possible in your environment. We will cover how to install it, how to configure it, and what could be a possible roadmap for integrating it in your environment.
Chapter 8, The Road to a Public Cloud Data Center Infrastructure Using Microsoft Azure, starts with the features of Microsoft Azure, related to running a virtualized infrastructure, and describes how this platform can be integrated in your existing on-premise private cloud strategy.
Chapter 9, Hyper-V and System Center Licensing, talks about the different aspects of Hyper-V licensing and System Center licensing, as well as guiding you in making a decision, based on some real-life scenarios.
What you need for this book
We'll need the following software for our book :
• Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard or Data center edition
• Microsoft System Center 2012 R2
• Microsoft Azure subscription
• VMware ESX 5.1
• VMware vCenter Management tools
Who this book is for
This book is mainly targeted at the common network and system administrator who has to deal with server virtualization in their day-to-day job, primarily using Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center. It assumes you have some practical experience with the previous versions of Hyper-V, although this is not a requirement, without being a subject matter expert.
