Join the MVP’s to discover what’s new in Windows Server 2019 and System Center 2019
As Microsoft release Windows Server 2019 and System Center 2019, you may want to get a grasp on the staggering amount of new features, improvements and updates included and hear from the Microsoft MVP’s and Windows Insiders.
On October 3rd, Microsoft MVPs Andy Syrewicze and Rob Corradini, alongside former Microsoft Senior Technical Evangelist Symon Perriman will be running an expert panel hosted by Altaro were you can get a full grasp of the both Windows Server and System Center 2019 and a closer look at some standout features that will have the biggest impact to organizations looking to upgrade to Window Server 2019.
What to expect from the webinar?
- Next-generation management with Windows Admin Center
- Windows Server 2019 Hyper-V enhancements and Failover Clustering
- Windows and Hyper-V Containers on the Windows platform
- Easy migrations using Storage Migration Service
- And much more!
Got any questions about Windows Server 2019? Of course you do. Get answers direct from the experts during the webinar Q&A!
With the knowledge gained in this webinar, you’ll be ready to take full advantage of the new possibilities Windows Server 2019 brings to the table, and in doing so, keep your organization ready for the next generation of IT workloads.
Key features of the new Microsoft Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner
Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner is now GA with support for both Hyper-V and VMware.
Disaster Recovery cost to Azure is now added in the report. It gives compute, storage, network and Azure Site Recovery license cost per VM.
ASR Deployment Planner does a deep, ASR-specific assessment of your on-premises environment. It provides recommendations that are required by Azure Site Recovery for successful DR operations such as replication, failover, and DR-Drill of your VMware or Hyper-V virtual machines.
Also, if you intend to migrate your on-premises workloads to Azure, use Azure Migrate for migration planning. Azure Migrate assesses on-premises workloads and provides guidance
Key features of the tool are:
- Estimated Network bandwidth required for initial replication(IR) and delta replication.
- Storage type(standard or premium storage) requirement for each VM.
- Total number of standard and premium storage accounts to be provisioned.
- For VMware, it provides the required number of Configuration Server and Process Server to be deployed on on-prem.
- For Hyper-V, it provides additional storage requirements on on-premises.
- For Hyper-V, the number of VMs that can be protected in parallel (in a batch) and protection order of each batch for successful initial replication.
- For VMware, the number of VMs that can be protected in parallel to complete initial replication in a given time.
- Throughput that ASR can get from on-premises to Azure.
- VM eligibility assessment based on number of disks, size of the disk and IOPS, OS type.
- Estimate DR cost for the target Azure region in the specific currency.
When to use ASR Deployment Planner and Azure Migrate?
- DR from VMware/Hyper-V to Azure
- Migration from VMware to Azure
Download the tool and learn more about VMware to Azure Deployment Planner and Hyper-V to Azure Deployment planner.
New Technical Preview for Microsoft Windows Server management experience Project “Honolulu”, released
Modernized, simplified, integrated, and secure experiences. Project “Honolulu” Technical Preview 1711 update is now available!
Some cool new features were release like the Windows 10 client management: You can now add Windows 10 client machines as connections in Honolulu, and manage them with a subset of tools in the “Computer Management” Solution.
For more information on new and removed features check https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/windowsserver/2017/12/01/1711-update-to-project-honolulu-technical-preview-is-now-available/
Shielded VM’s: Virtualization security is a major investment area in Hyper-V 2016
SECURITY – Protecting the company data should be a priority.
Protecting a Virtual Machine(VM) guest from a possible host compromised as well as the certain that on a 3rd party hosting environment your VM will be protected in addition to the protection applied to the hosts is a major investment area in Hyper-V 2016.
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Taking into consideration that a VM is a file, stored somewhere on a storage on locally in the Hyper-v host, it needs to be protected from attacks to the storage system, the network, while it is backed up or taken or copied to other systems.
To help protect against compromised fabric, Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V introduces Shielded VMs. A Shielded VM, requires a VM to be created as generation 2, which has a virtual TPM, is encrypted using BitLocker and can only run on healthy and approved hosts in the fabric. So, if someone copy either maliciously or accidentally the VM to a non-approved host, the VM (which is encrypted), won’t start and cannot be used to be mounted to allow access to it’s file system.
Shielded VM’s use several features to make it harder for Host administrators and malware on the host to inspect, tamper with, or steal data from the state of a shielded virtual machine. Data and state is encrypted, Hyper-V administrators can’t see the video output and disks, and the virtual machines can be restricted to run only on known, healthy hosts, as determined by a Host Guardian Server.
A configured Shielded VM has:
- BitLocker encrypted disks
- A hardened VM worker process (VMWP) that helps prevent inspection and tampering
- Automatically encrypted live migration traffic as well as encryption of its runtime state file, saved state, checkpoints and even Hyper-V Replica files (from 2016 TP5)
- Blocked console access
- Blocked PowerShell Direct
- Blocked Guest File Copy Integration Components
- Blocked services that provide possible paths from a user or process with administrative privileges to the VM.
With the release of Windows Server 2016 TP5, the Hyper-V team at Microsoft made shielded virtual machines compatible with Hyper-V Replica. As with copying/moving the VM, to replicate a shielded VM, the host you want to replicate to must be authorized to run that shielded VM.
The Host Guardian Service supports two different deployments of a Guarded fabric (attestation modes): TPM-trusted attestation (Hardware based) and Admin-trusted attestation (AD based).
I hope you walk away with a better understanding of the Hyper-V Shielded VM solution from this post.
Hyper-V. CSV Volumes pause states 5120: Workaround
Microsoft is aware that after installing KB3126593 (MS16-014) there may be an issue that causes loss of network packets.
This may cause Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) on the nodes Failover Clusters to going into a paused state with an event ID 5120 in the System event log what indicates “Status c000020c – STATUS_CONNECTION_DISCONNECTED”.
You will also find that, on the node that owns the CSV volume(s), there will be an event 7031 with the source: “Service Control Manager”, which indicates “The Windows Firewall Service terminated unexpectedly”.
Troubleshooting Cluster Shared Volume Auto-Pauses – Event 5120. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/clustering/2014/12/08/troubleshooting-cluster-shared-volume-auto-pauses-event-5120/
Microsoft is aware of this problem and are working on a fix. But until it is release here is what you could do to get around this issue:
Option 1: Disable the Firewall LOGGING for all profiles (domain, private, public). (just the logging, not the firewall . You don’t want to be un-protected)
1. Start the Windows Firewall with Advanced Security management console (wf.msc)
2. Right-click Windows Firewall with Advanced Security on Local Computer and select Properties
3. For all profiles (Domain, Private, Public), under Logging, click Customize. Set Log Dropped Packets and Log Successful connections to NO.
Option 2. Uninstall https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3126593 from the systems.
I will post an update once Microsoft releases the Hotfix.
Overcome the challenges of Managing IT in a hybrid cloud world – FREE WHITEPAPER
– What are the different forces that are driving adoption and deployment of hybrid cloud architectures?– What are the major trends that make today the most innovative environment ever for business, and also the most challenging IT management environment?– What is the current state of hybrid cloud management offerings?
Azure ASR’s SLA-backed enhanced VMware to Azure solution is now ready to replicate your on-premises workloads to Azure
You heard right. Microsoft has launched an enhanced version of its Azure Site Recovery (ASR) targeted especially for VMware customers.
The concept of ASR is very simple: organisations will be able to replicate their VMware virtual machines (VMs) to Azure, update and then run them in Azure as a disaster recovery option. They will be charged a small amount by VM but won’t have to pay for compute or storage until the VM is up and running in Azure.
To note, Azure Site Recovery, as part of Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS), enables your organisation to gain control and manage your workloads no matter the source: Azure, AWS, Windows Server, Linux, VMware or OpenStack.
Some of the key ASR characteristics:
- With non-disruptive recovery testing, you can easily test the failover of your VMware virtual machines to Azure within minutes, and validate your workload’s performance in Azure, without impacting on-going replication or the production workload.
- With ASR-integrated failback, start replicating your Azure virtual machines back to your on-premises ESXi environment, and failback to the original or an alternate location when your on-premises site is once again available for use.
- Heterogeneous workload support, automated VMware vCenter Server discovery
- Continuous data protection (CDP), one-click failovers with ASR Recovery Plan
- Rich health monitoring and e-mail notifications.
I’ve been working with ASR for a while and I definitely recommend it.
Ready to start using ASR? Check out additional product information, to start replicating your workloads to Microsoft Azure using Azure Site Recovery today. You can use the powerful replication capabilities of Site Recovery for 31 days at no charge for every new physical server or virtual machine that you replicate.
You can read the announcement at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/ga-enhanced-migration-and-disaster-recovery-for-vmware-virtual-machines-and-physical-servers-to-azure-using-asr/
Technologies that work together to create Microsoft’s SDN solutions
With the upcoming Windows 2016 and System Center 2016, there will be many technologies that will work together to create Microsoft’s Software Defined Networking (SDN) solutions and the best part is that you can already check them by downloading and deploying Windows 2016 and System Center 2016 Technical Preview.
- Hyper-V Network Virtualization, which enables virtualization of tenant networks on top of a shared physical network infrastructure. , which are being performed by hardware appliances (such as load balancers, firewalls, routers, switches, and so on) are increasingly being virtualized as virtual appliances. Microsoft has virtualized networks, switches, gateways, NATs, load balancers, and firewalls.
- Network Controller, which provides a centralized, programmable point of automation to manage, configure, monitor, and troubleshoot virtual and physical network infrastructure in your datacenter.
- RAS Gateway for High Availability and failover, which can be deployed in multitenant mode to provide network traffic routing to and from virtual and physical networks, including the Internet.
- Software Load Balancing (SLB) for SDN, which can be used to evenly distribute tenant and tenant sub-networks traffic among virtual network resources. The Windows Server SLB enables multiple servers to host the same workload, providing high availability and scalability.
- Datacenter Firewall. A new service. It is a network layer, 5-tuple (protocol, source and destination port numbers, source and destination IP addresses), stateful, multitenant firewall. When deployed and offered as a service by the service provider, tenant administrators can install and configure firewall policies to help protect their virtual networks from unwanted traffic originating from Internet and intranet networks.
- Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) and Switch Embedded Teaming (SET). When you use a converged NIC to combine both RDMA and Ethernet traffic using a single network adapter, it will help you reduce the capital expenditures that are associated with each server in your datacenter, because you need fewer network adapters to manage different types of traffic per server. The converged NIC allows you to use a single network adapter for management, Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA)-enabled storage, and tenant traffic. SET is a NIC Teaming solution that is integrated in the Hyper-V Virtual Switch. SET allows the teaming of up to eight physical NICS into a single SET team, which improves availability and provides failover.
- Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). When configured Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) provides you with the ability to manage the routing of network traffic between your tenants’ VM networks and their remote sites. BGP reduces the need for manual route configuration on routers because it is a dynamic routing protocol, and automatically learns routes between sites that are connected by using site-to-site VPN connections.
- System Center. VMM can be used to deploy Software Defined Networks
Source: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt590952.aspx
Microsoft released System Center 2016 TP4
Microsoft today announced the release of Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 Technical Preview 4.
This new build includes new features that enables hybrid datacenter solutions.
Running at cloud scale also produces technology innovation for management. System Center 2016 brings cloud learnings to the datacenter, enabling seamless management of complex environments. Moving into the hybrid world, System Center 2016 combines with Microsoft Operations Management Suite to provide an integrated, 360-degree view across any cloud, any operating system, from infrastructure to applications. Management anywhere means IT has the ability to take robust data about system performance, security, and emerging issues and turn that into action as rapidly as possible. With management tools designed to handle complexity, IT can allow for more agility in the environment as a whole. Core enhancements in System Center 2016 Technical Preview 4 include:
- Advanced software-defined datacenter support for Windows Server 2016 including new technologies such as patching of hosts while provisioning, simplified logical network creation, scale-out file server with Storage Spaces Direct and SAN storage automation, and improved storage monitoring.
- Protecting customer IP through shielded VM’s and Guardian Host deployment and management
- Easy to use monitoring improvements in Operations Manager through data-driven management of alerts and enhanced visualization
Download Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-server-technical-preview
Download System Center 2016 Technical Preview 4: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-system-center-technical-preview