Cloudtidings.com

With the release of the SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2. Microsoft will be releasing the new feature for Hyper-V : Dynamic Memory.

But what Dynamic Memory will do?

Dynamic memory is an enhancement to Hyper-V in R2 and allows IT administrators to pool all the memory available on a physical host and dynamically distribute it to virtual machines running on that host as necessary. That means based on changes in workload, your VMs will be able to receive new memory allocations without a service interruption.

At a high level, Hyper-V Dynamic Memory is a memory management enhancement for Hyper-V designed for production use that enables customers to achieve higher consolidation/VM density ratios

To be Clear : Dynamic memory is allocating ram automatically among guest depending on usage. You still can’t allocate more RAM than what you have physically

During the MMS 2010, Microsoft demonstrated the Preview of System Center Virtual Machine Manager V-next, and System Center Operations Manager V-next both of which are planned to be available in 2011. Check out the demos.

Some Notes :

• System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R3, which includes power management capabilities that could reduce your power bills by tens of dollars per PC, per year – a capability we’re already using internally at Microsoft.
• The RTM versions of System Center Data Protection Manager 2010, System Center Service Manager and the new Compliance Pack for Service Manager—all designed to enable you to manage your complete IT environment in a more cost-effective way.
• Windows Intune, a new desktop infrastructure solution that delivers security and management from the cloud. This is the evolution of the System Center Online concept I shared at last year’s MMS. Using Windows cloud services and Windows 7, Intune is designed for mid-sized businesses, who want to operate at great performance, from anywhere.

One of the greatest features of SCDPM 2010 is the ability to backup machines that are in a workgroup/DMZ/untrusted domain. This is good for example because some of my Hyper-V serveres are in the workgroup mode.

1.  Install the DPM agent on the server you want to protect. Copy the agent folder to that server and double click the EXE and wait for the message to tell you that the agent was installed successfully.  You then might need to reboot.  

• x86 : <installation drive>Program FilesMicrosoft DPMDPMProtectionAgentsRA3.0.7558.0i386DPMAgentInstaller_x86.exe
• x64 : <installation drive>Program FilesMicrosoft DPMDPMProtectionAgentsRA3.0.7558.0amd64DPMAgentInstaller_x64.exe

Also, copy the SetDPMServer.exe from <installation drive>Program FilesMicrosoft Data Protection ManagerDPMbin

Once the agent is installed it needs to be configured.  This is done using SetDPMServer.exe 

2. Run SetDPMServer.exe with following arguments, you need to specify the DPM server name and a user name for a new local account to be created.

SetDPMServer.exe -DPMServerName <DPMServerName> -IsNonDomainServer -UserName <NewUserName>

You will be prompted to give a password for the new user account and to confirm it, once done the agent is configured and the relevant changes have been made to the Windows firewall.

 

3. Now the agent needs to be attached to the DPM server.  Attaching DPM agents to a DPM server can be done through the DPM GUI .  

• To attach a non-domain server agent:
• Open the DPM console 
• Select the Management Pane
• on the Actions menu, Click Install   
• Select Attach agents,  when the Protection Agent Installation Wizard opens.
• Type the name of the untrusted computer that the DPM agent is installed on
• Type the user name and password specified when running SetDPMServer.exe.  
• Click "Add >" to add the computer to the selected computers list.
• Click Attach

 

Now, you can create a protection group to protect the data on the machine. To do that, click on Protection Pane and select Create Proection Group, as usual

In a recent update of the phase II of Project VRC, VMware was behind Hyper-V R2 and XenServer.

Although XenServer and  Hyper-V R2 performed nearly identical, Vmware get behind by 10%-30%. VMware responded to the findings  and wrote a fix for VMware vSphere 4.0 to try to close the gap :

 "…What we discovered led us to create a vSphere patch that would allow users to improve performance in some benchmarking environments."

There are three specific conditions that can excite this condition:

1. A Xeon 5500 series processor is present with Hyper-Threading enabled,
2. CPU utilization is near saturation, and
3. A roughly one-to-one mapping between vCPUs and logical processors.

In this scenario, VMware vSphere favors fairness over throughput and sometimes pauses one vCPU to dedicate a whole core to another vCPU, eliminating gains provided by Hyper-Threading