It's been a while... Let's talk for a minute about... Everything.

So it's been a really long while (about 4 months) since my last blog post. My apologies for not getting updates out there more frequently...

Since late April when I talked about what I saw at the MMS conference and what's been in the pipeline with Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V, I was working in the background with my company (NJVC) and Microsoft on their 2012 Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) on the IP Address Management (IPAM) service offering that will be natively offered in Server 2012. Additionally, I have attended EMCWorld 2012, Microsoft TechEd, and VMworld 2012. The commonality of these three conferences has been primarily focused on the following areas, big data, desktop virtualization, and cloud computing. Don't get me wrong, there are still a lot of topics covering Virtualization and infrastructure modernization and data center centric services.

Focusing on Big Data, EMC (among other storage centric companies) are looking at how big data requirements can be met using their product offering. This means looking at functions like MapReduce and Hadoop as well as deduplication technologies to help try and get these different types of expanding data sources stored on these platforms as effectively and efficiently as possible. This drives down costs by reducing your storage footprint while still being able to accommodate these larger data requirements.

A couple of links on the topics can be found here

MapReduce - http://www.business2community.com/strategy/what-is-mapreduce-0264794

Hadoop - http://hadoop.apache.org/

EMC Big Data - http://www.emc.com/microsites/bigdata/index.htm
Moving on to desktop virtualization, both VMware and Microsoft are running neck and neck trying to obtain a market share from Citrix which arguably leads the market in this particular service offering.

VMware View 5.1 will be released in the relative future and the capabilities to include persona management of physical desktops, operations management capabilities, as well as support for new devices and languages. Microsoft's RemoteFX in Server 2012 has been the talk of the town regarding 3D rendering and graphics capabilities offered to desktop sessions without the need of high end dedicated graphics processing units (GPU's).

More information on RemoteFX and VMware View 5.1 can be found here.

RemoteFX - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff817578(v=ws.10).aspx

VMware View 5.1 - http://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2012/05/vmware-announces-general-availability-of-view-51.html

Regarding cloud computing, it seems that every company and their brother is going to have a public/private cloud offering (including NJVC). At VMworld 2012, VMware, Savvis, Terremark, CSC, AT&T, and many more were showcasing their offerings. VMware took the most interest because it showcased the utilization of the vSphere infrastructure stack in addition to vCenter Operations manager, and vCloud Director's suite of products allowing VMware to effectively showcase both private and public cloud designs and offerings based on best practices and use cases of many reputable organizations to include VMware, Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Energy. This interests me highly as we support a similar customer base and we would more than likely design a similar offering to our customer based on comparable government requirements.

In addition to all this, VMworld had a great lab environment showcasing vSphere 5.1 and View 5.1 products and features as well as speaker sessions that highlighted cloud services, data center services, enterprise application virtualization designs and best practices, as well as desktop virtualization and a myriad of hardware and software products.

Lastly, I'm going to be studying for my VCAP-DCA5 exam again. Hopefully, I do better this go around compared to last time. Also, I'll do a better job at posting updates... Four months is way too long to go between updates... :P

Thanks for reading.

2012 is going to be a good year... for Microsoft...

I've been somewhat silent on the blog for the past couple of months mainly for two reasons. 1. Work has been keeping me too busy to take the time to update the site, and 2. I've been reading and researching into this little known gem called Windows Server "8".

After this weeks MMS 2012 Conference hosted by Microsoft at the Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Microsoft has announced that Windows Server "8" will now be known as Windows Server 2012. Not a huge shocker with regards to the name but the feature sets and workloads in comparison to Windows Server 2008 R2 are exponential.

NJVC (my company) was fortunate to be invited to participate in the rapid deployment program (RDP) which myself and another colleague were equally fortunate to travel to Seattle and see first hand what the hype was all about.

From a virtualization standpoint, Microsoft is going to be doing just about everything that VMware is currently doing with their Enterprise Plus licensing model out of the box with their Enterprise and Datacenter licensing model. To recap, a previous post. Microsoft Datacenter licensing is about $5,000 per processor and VMware Enterprise Plus is about $4,500 a processor. However, if you want to host large quantities (four or more) VMs, you need to buy Datacenter Licensing in addition to VMware. This is where costing always tend to sway in favor of Microsoft but before 2012, the feature-sets couldn't compete with VMware.

Server 2012 has two additional features that their Hyper-V role can do that I am really excited to learn more about Shared Nothing Live Migration (SNO Live Migration) and Virtual networking.

• SNO Live migrating is simply a process that doesn't require any shared resources to migrate a VM between hosts. i.e. the only thing that is needed is a comms connection between hosts. It works pretty well in demonstrations, and I think this will really go well with SMB sized organizations and even large enterprises that service numerous regional based infrastructures as well.

•  Virtual Networking is not the same as what virtualization gurus call virtual networking. This feature allows VMs to share the same IP space and the VMs still communicate over the wire between resources. They've essentially taken the vSwitch model where you can use an adapter as a virtual switch and extended that concept to the IP that is assigned to that adapter and uses that IP as a shared switching source (how I'm not sure) and allows VMs spun up on that adapter to share the same IP.while avoiding collisions and other issues that you would otherwise encounter when housing duplicate IPs.

With regards to the RDP, I will be working closely with Microsoft on the RDP effort and another neat feature of Windows Server 2012, IP Address Management. Prior to 2012, you had to use third party products and solutions to manage your IP space (i.e. Bluecat or InfoBlox), with 2012, that is also a native in-the-box role that can be enabled and managed via Windows. I can't speak to many of the details barring our NDA with Microsoft but as details develop (and I can share them), I will.

So back to MMS 2012. This year is also a big year for System Center. Microsoft has also announced System Center 2012 launches and that includes extensions into their orchestration, runbook automation, patch management, image provisioning, deployment, operations management and virtualization management products. These products coupled with the use of Hyper-V has allowed Microsoft to be one of the very first vendors to offer a scalable (and somewhat affordable) software stack that allows companies to easily provision and scale their own private cloud infrastructures.

I look forward to researching into this more and more (especially as cloud computing gains in popularity by the day in the IT world). Information on these products can be found below. Thanks for reading.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/readynow/ - Both Windows Server and System Center 2012

Active Directory Domain Controller Virtualization - The Do's and Dont's...

Over the past year I've been involved in many discussions regarding domain controllers (DCs) that have been virtualized or plan to be virtualized... From this point, I am bombarded with a myriad of concerns from my Windows administrators responsible for maintaining the consistency and operation of Active Directory (AD). With those concerns comes a laundry list of problems they have encountered in the past that they feel that virtualization (particularly on VMware) is the root cause...

Now before I get into a large debate on why you would want (or not want) to virtualize DCs. Keep in mind that DCs are not like other typical Windows servers (i.e. web, proxy, file, print, etc...). DCs are very finicky and don't respond well to hardware changes very easily and they are certainly heavily dependant on time synchronization across all the other DCs and global catalog (GC).

With that in mind, leverage the following ideals when virtualizing DC's onto a VMware platform...

• Time Synchronization - Control clock drifting by synchronizing with a reliable source (NTP to a root source that is shared across the domain) - This is due to the fact that idle VM's aren't granted the necessary CPU cycles necessary to ensure clock synchronization with the host. This also means you want to NOT synchronize the time with the host in VMware Tools. NTP is the way to go here and use a very reliable time source that controls time for all domain joined resources.

• Optimize network performance - This generally means ensure you have a reliable connection but also leverage teamed network interfaces on your virtual switch and set your link status to beacon probing so that if your links go down, you can ensure that you always have a reliable connection to the DC in the event of a network related event.

• DNS Optimizations - This can vary on the size of your organization but is more for large enterprises. Modify the weight and priority levels of your SRV records in DNS to ensure that the PDC Emulator FSMO role isn't inundated with requests which can result in slower application performance where they are specifically designed to contact the PDC.

• Database Replication - This simply means know how your sites/services are setup and where your replication connection points are at. This may mean using the AD Replication Monitor (replmon) to outline that information but it's vital to have (in a virtualized or physical AD environment).

• Establishing Appropriate Access Control - This is a no brainer, only Domain Admins or Enterprise Admins can login to a DC. Don't give everyone and their brother access to the console of a DC. vCenter permissions are very granular now with releases 4.x and up. Just be sure to exercise least privileges.

• HA and DRS - There are arguments on DCs in a vCenter cluster that has HA and DRS enabled. Some prefer affinity rules to ensure that the DC doesn't leave the physical host. In that case, don't specify a DRS aggressiveness that will vMotion the DC. However, HA restart priorities are a good idea to migrate the DC in the event of a host failure. Just specify a very high restart priority and set your isolation response to leave on (to avoid SYSVOL versioning mismatches due to time lapses)...

• Disaster Recovery - This is more process oriented than anything and should be in place regardless of whether you deploy virtual or physical DCs. This boils down to having a good backup plan and ensuring frequent backups of the DCs system state information. When doing a restoration, leverage Microsoft's best practices using both the authoritative and non-authoritative techniques.

Now with these best practices in mind we also want to avoid a few things as well. Here are the DON'TS on virtualizing DCs.

• Don't do snapshots. Leverage system state backups when needing to backup the system. This will capture/set the appropriate IDs and USNs of the appropriate areas where as a snapshot simply captures the data into memory and won't make the necessary preparations on the AD levels. The result could be SYSVOL mismatched versions which will significantly impact replication of policies and services like NETLOGON.

• Try not to suspend VMs for a long period of time. The result could be the same as previously mentioned regarding SYSVOL mismatched versioning.

• Never attempt to recover an Active Directory database from a backup copy of an old virtual disk. This is looked at as a significant hardware change and possible replication issue. Leverage the system state backups of the VM operations and Microsoft best practices for authoritative and non-authoritative techniques.

 At the end of the day, proper engineering, planning, and coordination will successfully prepare an organization on virtualizing DC's. As a best practice, Microsoft recommends that you maintain at least one physical DC for consistency purposes in the event your virtual infrastructure were to encounter any catastrophic failures. As always, failover sites and COOP capabilities are key when designing any AD environment.

For more detailed information, please refer to the VMware white paper on Active Directory Virtualization below.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/Virtualizing_Windows_Active_Directory.pdf