Hyper-V Woes

I have been quiet lately, for a variety of reasons, but I'm back and ready to moan.

I've just had my first attempt at working with MS Hyper-V, and boy was it fun! Now, before I start, I'm not MS bashing for the sake of it here, I was determined to give this a good go and do my best to a simple system up and running quickly. I'd also like to point out that I DO have experience in working in Virtual environments, in VMware ESXi, VirtualBox and a little bit of KVM.

Setting up the VM parameters was great, nice and easy, just like using VMware Infrastructure Client but with the added advantage of working on the localhost rather than across a network. We'll not go into why the physical server is in Australia and how I accessed the physical server, that is for another day's blog.
"I like this!" I thought.........
Installing the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS OS was next and started off quite well, chose my options etc, but then I got "No Network Adapter Found" error message, things started to go pear shaped. I Googled and found a solution which involved loading hv modules at boot by generating a new initrd image. Great, easy. Or not.....

No dice. Nada. Zip. Nothing. No network connectivity at all. "Ok, I'll try some other suggestions" I thought. I tried setting a legacy adapter in Hyper-V, manually starting the hv modules and restarting networking, editing the interfaces file, multiple reboots, but still the NIC is not recognised.

So I have an installed VM server with no connectivity, only just above the chocolate teapot in terms of usefulness then.

Next thing to try is a full re-install (thank goodness it's Linux and only takes 15-20 mins start to finish) but I'm not holding out much hope....and I was right not to. I installed VirtualBox on the Windows server and had my VM up, running and configured in less than half an hour.

The thing is that this process just worked on ANY OTHER virtualisation platform I've tried it on. I was not trying to do something difficult or out of the ordinary, it was a bog standard install of a simple server OS. Now before anybody takes a pop at me and says that the problem lies with Linux for not having the kernel modules to work with Hyper-V, that is not relevant, especially as the kernel modules were loaded. If MS are serious about Hyper-V becoming a VMware beater, they need to provide support for as wide a collection of guest OSs as possible. I've just wasted several hours of my life trying to use what is supposed to be an enterprise class system to do something very simple, which it refused to do. Fail Microsoft, fail.

Virtualisation Part 2

Ok, it's been a while coz I've been up the walls this last while, but I've got my iSCSI Storage Server running, with slightly mixed results.

I used FreeNAS to set up a storage server with 2 x 160GB HDD in RAID 1 and a 250GB disk as a standalone disk.

I planned to use the RAIDed disks as a LUN for my VMware ESXi host and the other disk for backups from my laptop (Win7 Pro). The using the disk for backups from my laptop worked a dream, but when I tried to use that at the same time as booting a VM stored on the LUN, I got problems. The VM would not boot properly, and while it was booting, I lost access to the iSCSI disk from my laptop.

I'm not sure if the problem is with the bandwidth, as I was using a single Gigabit NIC on the storage server, but I've got a hold of another Gigabit NIC to put into the server to see if this helps.

The experience has taught me a lot though, especially about how iSCSI works and how it can be an effective, lower-cost solution for SAN storage.

Now, if only I could get it to work as I want it to..........

Watch this space.

Virtualisation Part 1

I've been doing a lot of work on virtualisation this last few weeks, focussing specifically on VM Ware as a platform, and I like it!

I've been running an ESXi host at home for quite a while now and found it terribly useful for quickly setting up test environments for whatever I happened to be working on at the time, such as Alfresco, IP PBX etc. However, I've been looking into larger scale deployments recently for some specific projects I've been working on, awfully hush hush, and the more reading and studying I'm doing, the more I reckon this could be a major way to save money and consolidate infrastructure, even for small enterprises.

While "Cloud" buzzwords have been flying around like a swarm of angry mozzies for a long time, and the meaning seems to be getting less clear rather than more clear, VM Ware seems to be a great basis for building a Private Cloud Infrastructure which is more flexible than that provided by Amazon EC2 and similar vendors. While the offerings from these may be flexible to a point, and great for development, where always on, resource specific servers are required, it is hard to beat being able to allocate exactly as much or as little in the way of RAM, CPU cycles and storage to each individual VM.

I've been designing several virtual infrastructure setups recently and I have to say that without the flexibility provided by VM Ware on even a small number of physical hosts, my job would be much harder, taking into account HA and backup scenarios and the systems required for these.

All this looking at Virtual Business Infrastructure has meant I've had to immerse myself into a new world of Storage Servers, SAN, NAS and NFS. Very interesting indeed, and I'll go into this in more detail in part 2.