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.
Read More »
|
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.
Read More »
|
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.
Read More »
|
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.
Read More »
|
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.
Read More »
|
By Matthew Mattoon on
Sunday, December 06, 2009
This article describes how to get the new linux kernel 2.6.32 installed under Ubuntu 9.10. The method in this article is to use a Linux Kernel Image from Lucid Lynx development repositories.
I have documented better ways of doing this in other articles...
Using my pre-compilied linux kernel image (debian and ubuntu)
Manual compile of linux kernel sources (debian and ubuntu)
Read More »
|
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.
...
Read More »
|
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...
Read More »
|
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...
Read More »
|
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...
Read More »
|
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 is a follow-up article which will allow you to get mouse control within the Guest OS without having to 'capture' your mouse. Now generally this is not necessary, since Linux in the Datacenter is generally without a GUI, however I use Hyper-V on my Laptop and have a Linux Desktop Guest which this makes it helpful for.
Now in order to do this you will need the linux integration components previously installed. I discussed this in a previous article for Ubuntu and Debian (found here). Additionally I plan on having a follow up article for CentOS, RHEL, and Fedora (however I am slightly slow on these since I am not as familar...
Read More »
|
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...
Read More »
|
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. ...
Read More »
|
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...
Read More »
|
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.
|
By Matthew Mattoon on
Friday, September 26, 2008
Cheng has a post on using Distributed File System with System Center Virtual Machine Manager found here. I have been running SCVMM with DFS-exposed libraries since Beta 2 of SCVMM 2007. He has taken all of the guess work out of how to do it and has essentially documented everything I had to figure out. If you have a virtualization infrastructure in multiple sites then you should definitely take a look at this article.
|