By Matthew Mattoon on Sunday, March 07, 2010

A brief walk-through on using Hyper-V Synthetic Devices with Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) Alpha 3.  Since Lucid uses a 2.6.32 kernel we get the benefit of not having the modules precompiled.  Also since Lucid is using a version which is newer then 2.6.32.9 we also get the benefit of the SMP fixes in the VMBUS module.

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By Matthew Mattoon on Tuesday, February 23, 2010

I have recently began working on the Poshboard project (http://poshboard.codeplex.com) which is a Silverlight/.NET application which at a very basic level allows you to use Powershell via a website, however the real value in this technology is in the graphing capabilities...

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By Matthew Mattoon on Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Linux-VServer is a lightweight context-based virtualization implementation.  It allows a shared kernel to support multiple instances and distributions.  Read on to learn the basics.

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By Matthew Mattoon on Monday, January 04, 2010

I have been awarded the MVP award by Microsoft in Virtualization for the year 2010 (I also had it last year 2009).  So if you are an MVP and going to the summit I will see you there.

http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/

By Matthew Mattoon on Thursday, December 31, 2009

This article describes installation of a custom kernel image compiled with Hyper-V Synthetic Drivers and Linux-VServer functionality on Ubuntu and Debian.

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By Matthew Mattoon on Thursday, December 31, 2009

This article will provide you with the steps to enable Hyper-V synthetic device driver support on Ubuntu Linux 10.04 Alpha1 amd64.

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By Matthew Mattoon on Friday, December 18, 2009

This article is a step-by-step of compiling a linux kernel on Debian 5 using kernel.org sources specifically for the purpose of getting drivers for Hyper-V synthetic devices.

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By Matthew Mattoon on Friday, December 18, 2009

This article is a step-by-step of compiling a linux kernel on Ubuntu 9.10 using kernel.org sources specifically for the purpose of getting drivers for Hyper-V synthetic devices.

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By Matthew Mattoon on Thursday, December 03, 2009

Good Morning!  At least it feels unusually good over here.  As many of you know this last summer Microsoft opened the code for the Hyper-V Synthetic device drivers (Linux Integration Components).  here

 

This move allowed linux developers to integrate the drivers into the linux kernel.  Today Linus Torvalds released the first version of the linux kernel with these drivers installed.  here

 

Over the next few days I will be heads down putting some different distributions through their paces on the new kernel, and developing documentation to help most you implement this in your environments.

...

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By Matthew Mattoon on Wednesday, September 23, 2009

In this article I am documenting the process for installing the Hyper-V Integration Components (v2) within a  Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.3 VM. My environment consists of x64 VMs, I have not taken the time to test this process for x86 VMs, however it should hold true, as long as you update the package names to reflect the appropriate architecture.  

In my testing I have found that the current versions (v1 and v2) do not work with linux kernels 2.6.20 or newer (with some exceptions for v2), which means in order to use the ICs you will need to have 2.6.19 or older. Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.3 included the Linux 2.6.18-128 kernel.    

Now before we get started you need to deploy a new VM with Oracle Enterprise Linux installed. Please...

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By Matthew Mattoon on Friday, July 10, 2009

In this article I am documenting the process for installing the Hyper-V Integration Components within a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 or a CentOS 5.3 VM. My environment consists of x64 VMs, I have not taken the time to test this process for x86 VMs, however it should hold true, as long as you update the package names to reflect the appropriate architecture.  

In my testing I have found that the current versions (v1 and v2) do not work with linux kernels 2.6.20 or newer, which means in order to use the ICs you will need to have 2.6.19 or older. Since both RHEL 5.3 and CentOS 5.3 included the Linux 2.6.18-128 kernel.   

While reading the Hyper-V Integration Components readme they talk about implementing the Xen kernel (x2v) this...

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By Matthew Mattoon on Monday, June 15, 2009

All I have been getting a lot of questions offline lately for what I do to test the performance of Linux VMs with and without the Linux ICs.  So here is a quick write-up on how I do my tests.

 

Note:  These tests we done on a beefy system, however it was by no means a production server, and it did have other load at the time.  You should experience better performance numbers assuming you have an adequately sized host.

 

VM was Debian 5 amd64 with a single core, 1GB of RAM, no GUI, and a 40GB vhd file.

 

Test is a single command:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/test.file bs=4M count=1000 conv=notrunc

Upon the conclusion of the copy it will give you specifics of the transfer.  It will give you a MB/s...

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By Matthew Mattoon on Saturday, May 30, 2009

Cheng Wei on the SCVMM product team has an excellent write-up on what Maintenance Mode actually means, and what takes place under the covers when you enable maintenance mode.

 

You can find the full article here.

By Matthew Mattoon on Friday, May 29, 2009

The Windows Server Core Team has posted Microsoft Support highest reported issues pertaining to Hyper-V in Q3 of 2009.  I recommend reading through these before considering calling Microsoft Support and logging a call, which can save you some money (or prepaid incidents).

Anyways a lot of the issues are pretty obvious (such as update to the RTM version of Hyper-V).

Have yourself a look and save yourself some money.  Full article can be found here.

By Matthew Mattoon on Tuesday, May 19, 2009

This article describes getting mouse integration working on Hyper-V Linux VMs.  This will only work with v1 of the Linux Integration Components which will not work with Hyper-V 2008 R2.  So if you are using Hyper-V 2008 and the Linux Integration Components v1 then read on.

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By Matthew Mattoon on Tuesday, May 12, 2009

 In this article I am documenting the process for installing the Hyper-V Integration Components within a Ubuntu or Debian VM. I am specifically writing this for Ubuntu 8.04.2 and Debian 5, however I have additionally confirmed that this process works on both...

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By Matthew Mattoon on Tuesday, April 14, 2009

The following describes a scenario and resolution which I recently resolved.  The AffectedListName was a Mail-Enabled Security Group which was not able to be found in the GAL on any client using Cached-Exchange Mode.  

Our scenario was caused by a existing group being renamed but the SMTP address not being changed.

I am using the following variables which you will need to change to suit your environment: AdministrativeGroupName MailboxServerName AffectedListName AffectedListOldName Company.com  

Enable Diagnostic Logging: Using Exchange System Manager -> Administrative Groups -> AdministrativeGroupName -> Servers -> MailboxServerName Right-click and Properties of MailboxServerName. ...

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By Matthew Mattoon on Friday, January 23, 2009

OK, so I am deploying a new Virtualization Infrastructure.  In doing so I ran across a problem I had not seen before so I thought I would log the scenario, in order to be of help to someone some day...

My hardware was a Dell PowerEdge2950 with an Intel Pro 1000 VT Quad NIC installed in the original config.  

I installed Hyper-V Server 2008 and immediately went to work configuring the machine and found that the only network cards detected were the onboard broadcoms.  Now since we plan on using more than 2 interfaces, this just will not work.  I tried manually installing the drivers off of the Dell page, however I was receiving "OS not supported."  This is no doubt due to an overzealous install checker.  I tried a few different...

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By Matthew Mattoon on Wednesday, November 12, 2008

The storage team has a post on how to automate the generation of DFS Replication Health Reports.

These reports include a massive amount of information, and can be incredibly helpful in determining the status of your replication.  Reports can also be manually generated with the File Server Management Tool.  I personally find that reporting is one of those things that really lends itself to automation.

Complete article here.

By Matthew Mattoon on Monday, November 10, 2008

Both the Evaluation and Workgroup Editions of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 can be upgraded to the Retail SKU.  Michael on the SCVMM team has a post describing the process.

Article can be found here.