Monday, June 08, 2009

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 (VMM) Release Candidate

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM) is now available for download on Microsoft Connect, http://connect.microsoft.com

VMM 2008 R2 now complements Windows 2008 R2 and Hyper-V R2 by supporting the following features.

• Live migration between Windows Server 2008 R2 clustered hosts. With live migration, you can migrate a virtual machine from one node of a Windows Server 2008 R2 failover cluster to another node in the same cluster without any downtime. Because the virtual machine does not experience any downtime, the move is completely transparent to the users that are connected to the virtual machine.
• Network optimization detection during virtual machine placement. VMM 2008 R2 supports both Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ) and TCP Chimney, which are Windows Server 2008 R2 features that improve network performance for virtual machines.
• Hot addition and removal of virtual hard disks (VHDs). In Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V allows users to add and remove VHDs from a virtual machine while it is running.

Quick Storage Migration
For a Windows Server 2008 R2 host or a Storage VMotion-capable host, you can migrate a running virtual machine’s files to a different storage location on the same host with minimal or no service outage. If you use a wizard to migrate a virtual machine to a host that is running Windows Server 2008 R2 and you use a network transfer, VMM 2008 R2 now gives you the option to specify separate storage locations for each virtual hard disk (.vhd) file for the virtual machine.

Maintenance Mode for Hosts
In VMM 2008 R2, you can start maintenance mode for a Windows-based host anytime you need to perform maintenance tasks on the host, such as applying updates or replacing a physical component.

When you start maintenance mode on a host in a Windows Server 2008 R2 cluster with highly available virtual machines, you can do one of the following:

If the option is available, use live migration to evacuate all virtual machines to other hosts on the same cluster. If the migration fails for any virtual machine on the host, maintenance mode is not started on that host and VMM does not migrate back the virtual machines that have already migrated.
Place all virtual machines on the host into a saved state.


Clustered Shared Volume (CSV) Support

VMM 2008 R2 supports the Windows Server 2008 R2 clustered shared volume (CSV) feature. CSV enables all hosts on a Windows Server 2008 R2 failover cluster to concurrently access virtual machine files on a single shared logical unit number (LUN). Because all nodes on the cluster can access a single shared LUN, virtual machines have complete transparency with respect to which nodes actually own a LUN. This enables live migration of virtual machines within the cluster because all nodes in the cluster can access any LUN.

For anyone who has been running the beta of SCVMM 2008 R2 and doesn’t want to go through the pain of having to install from scratch with the release candidate version Microsoft have release a upgrade utility for the Beta to the RC version . This is also available on connect.

UpgradeV2R2Beta Utility
4258 Utility This is the Beta to RC upgrade utility refered to in the Deployment Guide. Use this if you want to upgrade your VMM 2008 R2 Beta deployment to the Release Candidate.



Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Microsoft Lab Extreme 2009

Lab Extreme

IT Pros has been doing Hands-On-Labs. In spirit of community sharing and to let you experience how is it like to create Hands-On-Lab, you will CREATE Hands-On-Labs. We will put your names as creator of the contents. Push yourself in 8 hours, to learn about the technology you will write on, put them into instructional labs, and test the concepts.

Intended Audience

IT Pros who are can endure the stress, learn and has the willingness to share and stand out.

Photos
http://cid-457ba7c60060614f.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Lab%20Extreme%20%7C5CTU%202009%7C6