Jonathan Cusson dot Com

Once again this year I will have the opportunity to present a session at Tech Days 2010 in Montreal. Microsoft allowing IT people from different regions to present at one of their event is a nice thing. It is a great experience with some challenge but that’s what makes it exciting. Last year was the first time I was presenting to an audience and believe me the stress level was high. It was a good challenge and I even if it wasn’t my best presentation(your first one can’t be) I couldn’t pass on the chance of doing it again.

This time however I will be better prepared to deliver my session. There are several steps in preparing to give a presentation in front of a large, tech savvy audience. The most important thing to remember(and it helps to lower your stress) is that people in the room are there to learn and gain knowledge on your subject, and you are in front because the organizer(Microsoft in this case) believe you know your stuff. Another important step in getting ready: Rehearsal! If you commit yourself to do a presentation or conference, you must put as much time as possible rehearsing and do it in front of people, even if they don’t have a clue what you are talking about. 

Also if you don’t feel nervous even 5 minutes before it starts, when the lights turns on you, your stress level is going to go up for sure. If you master your subject and are well prepared it will go down after the first few minutes when you see that people are listening to you. However if you want keep their attention you must be dynamic and have some short stories related to your subject to catch back their concentration. If you don’t have enough stories or examples, they will start thinking about other things and that’s what you must avoid.  Oh, after doing a presentation ask for critics from people you know who attended it and keep an open mind. You will make mistakes and to improve your skills you must build on those and any suggestion you get.

This year I will be presenting the following session on a subject you really like (and that is another keep point, you MUST be passionate about what you talk), Hyper-V:

INF307: Getting the Most out of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V with the Integration of the System Center Suite

I was deploying System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 on clustered RMS for a client when we had a failure/corruption of the Windows cluster. After creating a new Windows cluster and reinstalling my RMS cluster I had an other issue. Agents already install were showing up in the console but the status was Not Monitored even after several hours. I tried to do a repair and also tried to do a Modify on some servers but nothing. After seeking on Internet I found a solution but it was for removing the agent on one server using command line. Unfortunatly I needed to remove over 250 agents! I noticed other were also looking for a way to remove agents on several servers so here it is.

The easiest way to remove SCOM agent from a machine is to use one of the following command line (if you are not sure which version you got, follow the procedure here):

Uninstall R2 Agent
msiexec /x {25097770-2B1F-49F6-AB9D-1C708B96262A} /qn /norestart
Uninstall SP1 Agent (slipstream only, not RTM upgrade)
msiexec /x {E7600A9C-6782-4221-984E-AB89C780DC2D} /qn /norestart

Uninstall SP1 Agent (RTM > SP1 upgrade)
msiexec /x {768DB8BD-CB3A-43F4-9A4C-BA2921D27AD3} /qn /norestart

Now if you have to remove the SCOM agent from several servers, you can use PSexec to do it. You will need the list of servers on which you want to remove the agent. Copy it in Note Pad, add the command line for each one and save the file as .cmd file. Each line should look like this:

psexec -d MachineName msiexec /x {25097770-2B1F-49F6-AB9D-1C708B96262A} /qn /norestart

or

psexec- d MachineName “msiexec /x {25097770-2B1F-49F6-AB9D-1C708B96262A} /qn /norestart”
Note: It has occcured a few time that putting ” ” gave an error.

Putting -d tells psexec not to wait for application to terminate. This is useful if you are running this for a very large number of machines. Otherwise it might take a long time to run on all servers.
Hope this helps!

A lot of people want to build themself a server at home for testing or learning. There is a lot of choice out there to fit any need or budget but most of us are looking for a PC with enough power to run apps and virtualization. You could always buy youself a real server for 5000$+ or build a system but if you are like me, you want a box ready for use for a good price. So, I was looking for a new system to build a Windows 2008 R2 machine with Hyper-V and I came across a system by Dell that really gives you a lot for your money. So, I got this new Dell XPS 8000 with Intel i7-860(a Quad Cord with HT giving 8 logical processors) which support virtualization, Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O and 8GB of RAM for under 1000$.  Forget about the i7-920, benchmarks show that you won’t get better performance and it’s not as fast. One key feature that I was looking for and that works well on the XPS 8000 is the RAID support. The first thing I did was to had 2 disks in RAID-0, having an other drive for the OS and some data.

 As soon as I got the system, I installed Windows 2008 Server R2 and like Windows 7 the installation is very fast. All my devices were recognized and drivers had been installed. Than, I added the Hyper-V role and some features. From that point on I was ready to create and deploy new VM’s but there is an application that I wouldn’t work without, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2. If you want to learn more about it, you can go on the official site or come and see some very good people present it to you at Microsoft Tech Days 2009 in Montreal or one of the other city near you.

 After setting up everything, I now have 7 VM running on 8GB of RAM. Make sure you put your VM’s on a different physical disk and not on the same you use for the OS. You will get better I/O performance and since HDD are cheap, buy 2 drive to do some RAID. If you have another system with Hyper-V that’s where SCVMM will make your life easier. You can manage all your hosts and you can even manage VMware and convert them to Hyper-V VM’s.

Windows 7 beta is now available and I could not wait to test it. I already have 3 installations of Windows 7 for intensive testing. I have decided to put Windows 7 trough a really good test.

When Vista came out people complained that it took too much resources and that you needed a powerful computer to run it. Well, I just tested Windows 7 with a 6 years old computer and believe me the performance are surprisingly good even on old PCs. Here is the hardware setup of that machine:

As you can see the system global score is 3.0 but keep in mind this is a 6 years old computer with slower CPU, memory and video card. What is also amazing is that all the hardware was detected and Windows Update to care of installing latest drivers. I have installed Office 2007, Norton 360 version 3(beta), Photoshop CS and Nero 9. Well the performance are good enough to work on it. I am used to very good performance on my main computer (Dual Core T9300, 4GB RAM & Quadro FX 1600 512MB) and I can say that Windows 7 performs well even with older configurations. I even went to a slower configuration with a Pentium 4 2Ghz, 1GB of RAM and a very old ATI R92LE 32MB video card. (don’t ask me how I got this card, I can’t remember) With that, the system got slower but would still be enough to use for Internet navigation, Word and Excel.

The most amazing is that so far I did not get any errors or crashes on that old PC. All of those waiting for a new Windows that offers stability, compatibility and performances are served!

This post was written with Live Writer on Windows 7.

Jonathan

Here is the direct link to download Windows 7 and get a CD Key. You must register with your Live Profile to access the downloads.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-download.aspx

Windows 7 beta is here for TechNet and MSND members. For those of you that don’t have access to these, here is a link for public download. No CD Key but you don’t need it……30 days trial!

http://snipurl.com/9psn8

Jonathan

For those of you already using Hyper-V, you know it’s a great product. Since Hyper-V is stable and offers very good performance – I recently had the opportunity to do a migration of our production and development environment, from Windows 2003 with Virtual Server to Windows 2008 Enterprise with Hyper-V. (Note that this migration was done without SCVMM or other migration and management tools. At the time of migration I did not have access to SCVMM which would have allowed me to migrate VMs in less steps.

Let me give some details on our environment. In the production and the development environments we have servers with dual Intel quad core processors and 16GB of memory. We also have a production server with two dual core and 8GB of memory. Storage for the servers is direct attached storage configured as a RAID 5 on each server.

The first thing I needed to do was to move the VM’s from Virtual Server to the Hyper-V environment. If done correctly, you shouldn’t have any issues. The best way to do this is:

Uninstall the Virtual Server Addition Tools before moving to the Hyper-V host
Move the VHD to the new host server
Create the VM in Hyper-V using the VHD you just moved
Once you boot the VM, you will need to install the Hyper-V tools. You will have to reconfigure your virtual NIC since Hyper-V uses a different driver but this should not create problems. Just make sure you have the configuration(IP, Gateway, DNS) written down before removing Virtual Server Additions tools.

In the production environment we have 8 VM’s per server with space remaining for more VM’s. Some of you might question the performance of the VM’s but as surprising as it might sound everything is running smooth. We have SQL 2005 & 2008, SharePoint 2007, OCS, Dynamics CRM, Operations Manager 2007 and other applications running on the VM’s. Some of the servers are Windows 2003, other Windows 2008 and both in 32 bits and 64bits.

However the most impressive is the development environment. The hosts have the same specifications but we are running up to 12 VM’s per server and the performance are up to the needs of the development teams. Hyper-V offers surprising performance and really allows you to optimize the use of physical machines.

Now that the migration is complete – I’ve had time to install and configure System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. In a world where virtual servers are spreading at high speed and with Hyper-V adaption growing rapidly, the new System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 is more than welcome.

I’ve recently installed it to centralize the management of all our Hyper-V and VS 2005 servers. Installation and configuration is simple and Microsoft did a great job putting useful tools and options to make managing VMs and hosts easier and faster.

Our development teams frequently requires new VMs for testing and preparing solutions for clients and that required me to do manual deployment very often. Microsoft SCVMM 2008 now makes it easy to deploy VMs using templates, hardware and OS profiles saving me valuable time.

In the coming months I will be installing some new servers and maybe a SAN. Here’s to more room to grow our environment!

Microsoft has released System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. SCVMM is aimed at centralizing and simplifying the management of VMs running on Hyper-V, Virtual Server or even VMware virtualization solutions. I had the chance to deploy SCVMM 2008 at work and so far it has proven to be very useful and efficient. I now have a central point to manage both the production and development environments that includes VS 2005 and Hyper-V hosts.

SCVMM 2008 has several great features and is well designed. Some features include creation of VM templates, OS and hardware profile, moving VMs from one host to an other one, physical to virtual and also converting VMwares VMs to Hyper-V.

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