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One of the biggest new features in Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V users is the new Dynamic Memory functionality. Instead of partitioning physical memory into separate silos for each virtual machine, Dynamic Memory basically allows the Hyper-V hypervisor to allocate a pool of memory to be used for various virtual machines and then allocate that memory based on needs. I have heard claims of 40% or better improvements in virtualization density (number of virtual machines on a physical machine) with Dynamic Memory, but in the past week I have only been able to increase density on my test machine by 25%. This of course varies by VM type and workload, but that is a respectable gain nonetheless. This guide will cover the basics to Dynamic Memory in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 with Hyper-V installed. Read the full story

It has been a long time since I have posted about The Big WHS. At the last update in May 2010, the machine occupied 8U using two 4U enclosures, and was topping 60TB of raw storage capacity. Since then there have been quite a few developments that I thought I would write about. Read the full story

Many users are familiar with Windows networking and browsing shared folders over a local network. For constantly accessed shared folders, a simple way of accessing the same folder immediately is to simply create a shortcut. The other, and potentially better way to regularly access information from a server is to map the shared folder as a network drive. When Windows is started, it will automatically re-connect to this network location. The network location will have a drive letter instead of a potentially long path.. Mapping network drives also tends to make saving documents and other tasks faster. Read the full story

Microsoft Hyper-V, which is a very common virtualization platform for Windows based servers especially with the Windows Server 2008 R2 role, utilizes a different method of networking virtual machines than Microsoft’s VirtualPC (or XP mode on Windows 7 operating systems.) With VirtualPC the VMs hardware calls are sent to the host operating system, and then to the underlying hardware. With Hyper-V, virtual machines can communicate directly with the hardware. Read the full story

After the recent article on passing controllers through to ESXi virtual machines, I did get some questions around pass-through in Hyper-V. First off, it works a bit differently in Hyper-V, but you can still expose raw disks and RAID volumes to Hyper-V virtual machines, and this does not require Intel VT-d. This is an important feature of Hyper-V because it allows for the virtual machines to get raw disk access which is important when you have a storage operating system controlling the drives. Read the full story

One of the slickest things that one can do with a Windows Home Server machine is run it virtualized in a Hyper-V Virtual Machine. Windows Home Server frankly uses very little power itself leaving CPU cycles sitting idle. Of the CEOs, CIOs, and CFOs of companies with more than 10,000 employees I have talked to recently, all of them are looking at application virtualization to keep costs in the data center versus on user desktops. Perhaps I have heard the words “thin client” more times in the past six months from these folks than I have since the 1990′s. For Windows Home Server users, there is a really practical, and important thing that they can do to increase security at home, and that is use a dedicated, disposable, virtual machine for things such as banking (and for the more conservative online shopping). Read the full story

Intel’s 3400 chipset for its socket 1156 platform accepts CPU’s from the cheap Intel Pentium G6950 and Core i3-530 to the higher end Xeon X3430 to X3470 CPUs. Both Clarkdale and Lynnfield based CPU’s offer outstanding power consumption (for early 2010) at relatively low costs. After reviewing the Supermicro X8SIL-F, I purchased a competing (price wise) Intel motherboard to review, the Intel S3420GPLC. As I soon found, Intel also makes a good board, however it lacks some of the Supermicro’s features.

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If one browses this site they will quickly see that I am a fan of Hyper-V virtualization and also Windows Home Server. On April 26, 2010, Microsoft released the public preview of the long awaited Windows Home Server V2 codenamed VAIL. Of course, I did have a test system lying around, but the WHS V2 code base is supposed to be Windows Server 2008 R2 which is why it requires a 64-bit CPU. Now, I could have installed the VAIL preview onto a physical machine, but there are probably editors at 30 sites doing that right now. So how about something interesting, and more appropriate for software labeled beta and preview, a Hyper-V installation!

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In previous articles we have shown how to set up a basic Hyper-V virtual machine that works with FreeBSD and FreeNAS as well as how to configure the Hyper-V VM and boot FreeNAS in it. The next step of course is to install FreeNAS to a vhd, so it no longer needs to run off of the LiveCD. This is primarily important so you can configure FreeNAS and save that configuration through reboots. Also, as FreeNAS seems to only work with drives attached to the IDE controllers, installing FreeNAS to a vhd allows one to free up one IDE channel for another drive (by removing the default DVD drive).

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To install FreeNAS in a Hyper-V virtual machine one needs to do some configuration of the virtual machine, just as one would with a physical machine. Allocating hardware resources is much easier in Hyper-V versus physical machines because you can do it remotely through screens instead of physically taking a box offline and installing hardware. This guide will show the basic Hyper-V virtual machine setup for installing FreeNAS, an open source NAS appliance based on FreeBSD.

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