What Is Hyper-V? The Authoritative Guide

hyper-v

What Is Hyper-V? [Definition & Uses For It]

Whether you’re just beginning to look into virtualization platform options for your company, or you’re a new Hyper-V user trying to get up to speed, it can be a challenge to find all the information you need in one place. That’s why I created this guide—to give you an all-in-one resource you can bookmark and refer back to as often as you need to, so you can get up and running on Hyper-V more smoothly. Continue reading

Hyper-V: How To Backup Virtual Machines

hyper-v backupIf you’re new to Hyper-V and wondering how to back up your virtual machines (VMs), there are different ways you can approach the task. But like most things—some options are better than others.

Below are the most common ways Hyper-V users attempt to preserve data on their VMs, with one caveat: Some of these methods should not be relied upon as your sole backup strategy. But they do serve a purpose, and they can be useful in the right situation.
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New Podcast – MVPITPro by Andy Syewicze & Rob Corradini

This is the start of an awesome podcast series called MVPITPro.  I am excited to be working with MVP Andy Syewicze from Altaro Software to produce this series of podcasts for all the IT Pros out there. Episode one is with my fellow MVP and friend Symon Perriman of FanWide, and 5nine Software before that. 🙂 So sit back and enjoy the ride!!!  And maybe you learn a little bit about being an MVP!!

YouTube player

MVPITPro

Enjoy, until next time, Rob Corradini, MVP, Cloud & Datacenter

Hyper-V Failover Clusters – What You Need to Know and How 5nine Can Help

Building a Hyper-V failover plan is a critical step for any organization wishing to maintain 24/7/365 availability of their Microsoft Cloud. However, configuring Hyper-V failover clusters and managing Hyper-V hosts has its own set of unique challenges, nuances and steps. This article provides an introduction to Hyper-V failover challenges, discusses its benefits and shares some resources where virtualization administrators can access more information. Continue reading

Joining 5nine Software as Director of Product Management

Today, I am excited to announce I will be joining the awesome team at 5nine Software as Director of Product Management. My primary job responsibilities will be for the product strategy and direction of 5nine’s security and management solutions.
5nineSo, you ask, why Product Management? It’s been a lifelong dream to be part of shaping the direction of a technology solution.  By joining 5nine, I hope to simplify IT, Cloud and beyond, because there’s always a better way 🙂

“What prepared me for this was very surprising looking back.”

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Windows User Profiles…The Mysteries Untold – Part 1

Happy New Year Everyone…This is my first blog post of 2017. Woo Hoo!!  As always, I love to blog about questions from the field.  This one came from a customer testing their new Virtual Desktop Infrustrure (VDI) on Nutanix and had 1 out of 50 users profiles be corrupt. He asked why did this happen and how can I avoid this in the future. Now, I would say that 1 corrupt profile out of 50 is fine during a test, but let understand why it happens. This topic is especially important to understand because directly relates to VDI and your end-user experience in VDI.

Windows User Profiles

What is a Windows User Profile? It not just your desktop 🙂

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Storage Spaces Direct Explained – Storage QOS & Networking

Yo everyone…This is going to be a short blog post in this series. I am just covering Networking and Storage QoS as it pertains to S2D. There are the technologies the bind S2D together.
Storage QoS

S2D is using the Storage (QoS) Quality of Service that ships with Windows Server 2016 which provides standard min/max IOPS and bandwidth control. QoS policy can be applied at the VHD, VM, Groups of VMs, or Tenant Level. Benefits include:

  • Mitigate noisy neighbor issues. By default, Storage QoS ensures that a single virtual machine cannot consume all storage resources and starve other virtual machines of storage bandwidth.
  • Monitor end to end storage performance. As soon as virtual machines stored on a Scale-Out File Server are started, their performance is monitored. Performance details of all running virtual machines and the configuration of the Scale-Out File Server cluster can be viewed from a single location
  • Manage Storage I/O per workload business needs Storage QoS policies define performance minimums and maximums for virtual machines and ensures that they are met. This provides consistent performance to virtual machines, even in dense and overprovisioned environments. If policies cannot be met, alerts are available to track when VMs are out of policy or have invalid policies assigned.

Storage QOS & NetworkingWhat’s New in Networking with S2D?
In Windows Server 2016, they added Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) support to the Hyper-V virtual switch.
For those that don’t know what RMDA is it technology that allows direct memory access from one computer to another, bypassing TCP layer, CPU , OS layer and driver layer. Allowing for low latency and high-throughput connections. This is done with hardware transport offloads on network adapters that support RDMA.
Back to Hyper-V virtual switch support for RDMA.  This allows you to configure regular or RDMA enabled vNICs on top of a pair of RDMA capable physical NICs. They also added embedded NIC teaming or Switch Embedded Teaming (SET).
SET is where NIC teaming and the Hyper-V switch is a single entity and can now be used in conjunction with RDMA NICs, wherein Windows 2012 Server you needed to have separate NIC teams for RDMA and Hyper-V Switch.
The images below illustrates the architecture changes between Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2016.
Storage QOS & Networking
Storage QOS & NetworkingNext up…Management and Operations…

Until next time, Rob

Storage Spaces Direct Basics – Explained

'Steno Keypads 50% OFF' 'So, would you like the model that only types verbs, or the one that only types nouns?'Storage Spaces Direct BasicsStorage Spaces Direct BasicsLike anything else, I’m going to start with the basics of the stack and then dive into details of each component over the next few blog posts. There’s a lot to digest…So let’s get rolling…

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