S02E05: Hyper-V 2012

In this episode we take a look at Hyper-V 3.0 one of the great new enhancements available as part of Windows Server 2012. Using the beta version of Windows 2012 we see how easy it is to replicate a virtual machine between two stand alone Hyper-V servers, yes that’s right standalone, not a cluster or shared storage in sight. It’s easy, part of the product and just works! Hmm, another compelling reason for VMWare customers to reconsider come license renewal.

ITidiots return with new 'server'

So, in the olden days of ITidiots the two servers we had maxed out at 8GB each, which is nothing nowadays if you want to run any kind of Hyper-V based test lab, well not for hosting System Center 2012 anyway. So we needed something much betterer. Real servers are just too expensive for the amount of money I wanted to spend and I had an old ATX case kicking around so I thought I would use that. All I needed was a motherboard, CPU, some memory and some storage.

Motherboard

I gotta admit i dont know a huge amount about motherboards nowadays so I just wanted one that would work. So I thought I would check out ebuyer and found a socket 1155 motherboard that supported 32GB, was reasonably cheap, had onboard NIC, video, support for 6 SATA drives so I thought, that’ll do. 

• Asus P8Z68-V LX Socket 1155 Motherboard  - £62.90 (six month ago)

Processor

I wanted to stick with Intel and just needed one that supported Hyper-V really, I don’t think I am going to hit a bottleneck here. I went with an i7 which was a bit extravagant really, an i5 I am sure would be fine.

• Intel Core i7 2600k 3.4GHz Socket 1155 - £205.72 

Memory

I have had issues with cheap memory in the past but found 32GB of memory on Amazon for under £130. Now I don’t normally buy cheap memory but you guys never donate so I am loathed to spend double that on crucial memory. So,

• Komputerbay 32GB (4x 8GB)  - £129.00 

Storage

For storage I was pretty sure with the use of differencing and dynamically expanding disks I probably wouldn’t  use more than 500GB so I thought I would use a solid state drive as I had recently changed jobs and had a crucial 256GB used in my old work laptop, Add a couple of 250GB SATA drives from the old server

• Crucial CT256M4SSD2BAA 256GB SSD Cost: £179
• 2 x 250GB SATA 7200RPM drives

First Impressions

So after putting it all together, I am immensely happy and think I have acheived my goal of creating a nice speedy demo lab server for not much money really. You may get to actually see it run if Su-Fay actually edits next podcast. I now have the following servers running, you can guess what they are from the name I am sure

That’s 9 and still more capacity!  Oh, and here’s how the storage is getting on.

I have loads of junk on the D drive but all the VMs are on the SSD drive with the exception of the ConfigMgr distribution drive which is on a separate vhd on the D drive. 

It’s all good, but I really need to think of a backup solution. To be honest I have had an SSD drive fail on me before, but the responsiveness of these VMs are worth the risk.

Hyper-V Dynamic Memory

Finally Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 is here, wow what a mouthful. Anyway besides RemoteFX a really cool feature to improve the experience of remote users, there is Dynamic Memory which is what this video is about. Dynamic Memory aims to improve server consolidation by injecting and removing memory from the VM depending on demand, and available resources. Sound confusing? Well watch this!

Episode 78: SAN Essentials Part III

In this instalment in our SAN Essentials series Mark takes us through performance and performance testing. Using Iometer we look at the performance of an EqualLogic(Dell) and HP EVA SAN  by presenting disks from each, over iSCSI and Fibre, to a VMWare host. Now the results may shock you, I mean surely fibre has got to be faster it just seems far more futuristic for a start, but it seems there are far more factors than that to consider, join us to find find out more…