With Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, it was impossible to back up running VMs with the built in NTBackup utility. Instead, Virtual Server 2005 SP1 introduces a VSS Writer that backed up virtual disks. However, NTBackup was still not supported in Virtual Server 2005.

With the introduction of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the NTBackup limitation is gone. However, the removal of the NTBackup limitation is not something that is automatically available. There is a trick to get NTBackup to work with Hyper-V virtual machines. You have to tweak the registry to register the Microsoft Hyper-V VSS writer with Windows Server backup. Note that there are some backup/restore limitations referenced in the Microsoft Support article. Virtualization.info gives us some more potential limitations including:

• WSB only supports volume based backups: if the VM configuration file and the actual virtual hard drive (.VHD) are stored in different volumes, all volumes must be selected.
  Conversely, when performing a recovery from backup, the entire volume or volumes must be restored.
• Live backup is not supported for those VMs that have dynamic disks. In such case only offline backups can be performed.
• If the VM has more than one snapshot the restore will fail
• Live backup is unavailable for those guest OSes that don’t support VSS, like Windows 2000 or XP, as well as those guest OSes that don’t have the Hyper-V Integration Services installed. In such cases WSB will put the VM in a saved state, backup the snapshot, and finally restore the VM.

Technorati : Backup, Hyepr-V, Microsoft, NTBackup, Virtual Server 2005
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Looking to get up to speed quickly on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V? No problem, Mark Wilson put together a cool 13 minute video that will help you get started using Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V with Server Core - start to finish. Mark shows you the Server Core commands you need to install the Hyper-V role, he explains what happens when you enable this role, and he steps you through creating and managing Virtual Machines using Hyper-V. This video is a very good resource to help you get started with Hyper-V in your environment today.

Continue at source…

Technorati : Hyper-V, Microsoft, Screencast, Server Core
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Most of the time when you talk about virtualization these days, you are talking about hardware virtualization (VMware, Hyper-V, XenServer), application virtualization (SoftGrid/App-V, Citrix, VMware ThinApp), or desktop virtualization (VDI). One topic I don’t think gets very much press is OS virtualization. OS virtualization allows you to have 1 copy of an OS (say Microsoft Windows Server) and create several “containers” that appear to be their own unique OS. Each container OS shares common resources with the host OS. You can even specify which hotfixes show up in which containers. What’s cool about this type of virtualization is the scalability factor. You can get quite a bit more virtual containers per physical server than you can with hardware virtualization. However, you are locked in to the same OS.

Currently, there are only 2 major players in the OS virtualization space - Sun (Solaris Containers or Zones) and Parallels (Virtuozzo Containers). Sun Containers is only for Solaris. Parallels does not have this limitation, so Parallels is pretty much the only player in this market. That is, until now. A new player named iCore Software has enter this space with iCore Virtual Accounts. Right now, this technology is only for Windows XP, so it is on a lower end than Parallels, but it may show some promise.

Continue at virtualization.info for more details…

Technorati : Containers, OS Virtualization, Parallels, iCore
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Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V has been out for several months now. Several people have started to implement Hyper-V on some level, which has spawned several support calls to Microsoft support. The people over at the AskCore blog put together a “Top Issues” list as well as resolutions. Here are some of the categories and issues:

Deployment\Planning

• How to migrate virtual machines from Virtual Server 2005 to Hyper-V

Installation Issues

• After the Hyper-V role is installed, a virtual machine fails to start with the following error:
  The virtual machine could not be started because the hypervisor is not running

Virtual Machine State and Settings

• When you attempt to create or start a virtual machine, you receive the following error:
  The requested operation cannot be performed on a file with a user-mapped section open. (0×800704C8)

High Availability (Failover Clustering)

• Virtual machine settings that are changed on one node in a Failover Cluster are not present when the VM is moved to another node

Hyper-V Snapshots

• Snapshots associated with a VM are lost.

Continue at the source for the complete list…

Technorati : Backup, Hyper-V, Integration, Microosft, Snapshots
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Unattended installs save a lot of time and potential for human error. It also makes environment setup highly repeatable. But, a VMware ESX unattended installation can also be considered a quasi recovery solution. Paul Shannon from VM-Aware explains a little more about this recovery solution in a recent blog post where Paul states he was tasked with creating unattended installation CDs for VMware ESX hosts in the case of a recovery. Paul took this information and created a very informative white paper that can be downloaded from www.vm-aware.com.

You can read more about the background of this white paper here…

You can download the white paper here…

Technorati : Backup, ESX, Installation, Unattended Install, VMware
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So, VMware View 3.0 has been out just shy of a month. There are several new and exciting features in this release but, how do these features play out in the real world? Al Solorzano was kind enough to put together a very detailed article titled “Lessons Learned: VMware View Manager 3.0” explaining his experiences with these new features. Al explains the new features such as View Composer, Enhanced Policies, some of the “fit and finish”, etc. This is a great resource to learn more about VMware View 3.0 and some of the “gotchas” you might run in to when setting this up in your own environment.

Continue at source…

Technorati : VDI, VMware, VMware View 3.0, View Composer
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Citrix and Microsoft have always had a unique relationship with Terminal Services (walking a very fine line of pure Terminal Services and Citrix XenApp added functionality). It seems that Microsoft and Citrix are taking that same strategy/relationship to the hardware virtualization environment as well. There will be several exciting new features in Windows Server 2008 R2, but Citrix is delivering some of those features early for Hyper-V according to SearchServerVirtualization.com. Citrix plans on releasing “Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V” that will most likely include features like Live Migration, multi-server management and resource pools - all for Hyper-V.

Continue at source…

Technorati : Citrix, Hyper-V, Microsoft, Xen, XenServer
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At the beginning of December, VMware launched their complete VDI product called VMware View 3. With this release, VMware is aiming at offering the complete VDI stack without 3rd party vendors. So, what is in this release to make it more “complete”? Brian Madden wrote an article explaining the big new features including:

• RDP Enhancements including:
  • Multimedia redirection
  • USB support for non-isochronous devices (flash drives, printers, scanners, etc.)
  • OEM’d ThinPrint printing platform.
• View Composer - allows many users to share the same master disk image
• ThinApp - from the acquisition of Thinstall
• Extended Desktop Support
• Tighter integration

Continue at source…

Technorati : Desktop Virtualization, ThinApp, VDI, VMware, VMware View
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Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is a really hot topic right now. Several vendors have entered this space with an array of technologies to address the functional areas of VDI. Citrix entered the VDI space with the introduction of XenDesktop. Many people argue that Citrix has the most complete VDI solution due to the technologies bundled in XenDesktop (a special version of XenApp, XenServer, Provisioning Server, etc.) Ruben Spruijt wrote a very nice white paper titled “Centralization Alone Is Not the Answer” VDI detailing all the pieces of XenDesktop in a very easy to understand manner. Each functional area is described as well as how the pieces fit together.

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Technorati : Citrix, Desktop Virtualization, VDI, XenDesktop

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 will offer some very promising virtualization improvements (among other things). Keith Comb put together a Top 10 list of tasks made easier by Windows Server 2008 R2. Some of the virtualization specific features mentioned are:

• Migrating Virtual Machines without service interruption - Live Migration

  Windows Server 2008’s Quick Migration was an adequate feature, allowing administrators to move VMs between physical hosts with only short downtime. Trouble is, even that delay was long enough to drop any currently connected users or applications and that tends to arouse help desk ire. Windows Server 2008 R2 meets this challenge with Live Migration. Live Migration leverages Windows Clustering Services and the Cluster Shared Volumes technology to transfer VMs in milliseconds. That means no dropped connections and a much more dynamic data center management environment. We’ve also added Live Migration features to System Center Virtual Machine Manager, including the ability to perform migrations based on policy. It’s a brave new virtual world.

• Hyper-V management improvements such as PowerShell cmdlets
• Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) via Remote Desktop Services

  The Hyper-V™ server virtualization feature is only half of the virtualization message in Windows Server 2008 R2. Desktop and application management has always been a troublesome task because of the distributed nature of its targets. With R2, however, Microsoft presents a centralized solution to many of these difficulties via presentation virtualization. The new Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) in Windows Server 2008 R2 figures largely in this vision, and builds on the solid presentation virtualization foundation we built into Windows Server 2008’s Terminal Services. With the advent of Window Server 2008 R2, this is now called Remote Desktop Services under which VDI encompasses a centralized desktop delivery architecture that allows customers to centralize the storage, execution, and management of a Windows® desktop or application in the data center. This capability gives desktop and application administrators a whole new toolkit for better enablement of flexible work scenarios, including work-from-home and hot-desking as well as increased data security, compliance, and more efficient management of the desktop operating system and applications.

Continue at source…

Technorati : Hyper-V, Live Migration, VDI, Virtualization, Windows Server 2008
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