Monthly Archives: March 2013

Technology

VHD Management

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 The following is a primer on managing virtual hard drives using Hyper-V manager. Virtual hard disk files are stored as either .vhd or .vhdx files which use .avhd and .avhdx differencing disks respectively for snapshots. Both formats support either fixed size or dynamically expanding. The .vhdx format is new as of Server 2012 and provides some improvements over the previous .vhd format including increased storage capacity.

For a list of changes in the VHDX format, see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831446.aspx

All examples are performed using Hyper-V 3.0 on Windows Server 2012 (minimum version required).

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Technology

Physical to Virtual (P2V) Guide Using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1

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This guide demonstrates how to virtualize a physical machine running Windows. It requires a VMM server managing at least one Hyper-V host available for placement. The physical machine must be connected to the same network as the Hyper-V host and the VMM server for successful conversion. Additionally, local or domain administrative credentials are required. The process is initiated from the VMM console and is completed using the wizard. Powershell script included.

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Technology

Adding a Hyper-V host to a VMM Server

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For VMM to be useful, you need to add servers to a host group for management. The easiest method, involves adding servers in a trusted domain using a ‘Run As’ account different from the account you use to log in to VMM. You can also add servers in untrusted domains or on a perimeter network, although this is slightly more involved. You can even provision a bare-metal host through a baseboard management controller. This guide will outline the steps of adding a host in the same domain, on the same network.

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Technology

Migrate a virtual machine using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012

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Once you have gone through the lengthy and specific requirements to install and get VMM running (See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg610592.aspx for all the requirements), added your physical servers to a host group for management, and configured networking ‘fabric’, you can use VMM to perform live migration between your servers running the same version of Hyper-V.

Note that starting in Hyper-V 3.0 VMM is no longer needed to perform live migration; they can be initiated directly in Hyper-V manager.

This guide assumes a pre-configured VMM, server, and network infrastructure (see the technet article for more information).

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Technology

Configuring Replication for Failover in Hyper-V 3.0 and Windows Server 2012

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Here are some simple instructions on setting up your Hyper-V environment for failover. You will require at least 2 physical machines running Windows Server 2012 with the Hyper-V 3.0 Role installed. For this configuration they need to be members of the same domain and connected within the same subnet.

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