Acropolis - Installing a Windows VM

Check out Sean Watkins in our newest TechTopX - installing Windows as an Acropolis VM!

Tech TopX: Live Migration

As a compliment to my previous posts on the topic, we now have the a Tech Topx to explain it as well!  Check it out for  a detailed overview!

Live Migration Overview Post
Live Migration Configuration Script

Tech TopX: Configuring Remote Sites

In our first 2 part Tech TopX we cover Remote sites, a critical component for our DR configuration.  Check them out!

Get Ready for .NEXT!

So as many of you know, .NEXT is coming up fast!  June 8-10th in Miami - we're going to have a ton of really cool products and announcements so I hope to see you there!

Hyper-V Cloning a VM in 4.1.2

In NOS 4.1.2 we introduced an easy way to clone VMs from Powershell.  There's a couple of advantages of using our cmdlet:

1. No need for SCVMM.  No more messing around with libraries and ODX!
2. Since we have native access to the data, we can very quickly clone VMs
3. Better space utilization.  Once again, since we have native access to the VMs we don't need to replicate everything, only keep track of the changes.  In VMware this is known as a VAAI clone

When I say very quickly, I mean QUICKLY.  I'm talking 100 VMs in 2 minutes.

Here's the command we used (pulled from the docs)

New-VMClone -VM vm_name -CloneNamePrefix  clone_name_prefix`

-CloneNameSuffixBegin clone_name_suffix_begin -NCopies n_copies`

-ComputerName computer_name -DestinationUncPath destination_unc_path -PowerOn`

-Credential prism_credential -MaxConcurrency max_concurrency

So as a test, I took a windows 2012 machine, and then ran:

New-VMClone -VM clone-base -CloneNamePrefix  clone -CloneNameSuffixBegin 1 -NCopies 100 -ComputerName cbms-1 -PowerOn -MaxConcurrency 10

It then popped up a window asking for my prism creds.  I logged in and off it went!  10 copies were made at a time, and after 2 minutes I had 100 VMs running!  Other advantage of this?  The VMs were perfectly deduped so all 100 VMs used up hardly any more then the space of a single windows install.

Next step?  Properly sysprep the VM and see how long it takes to get my VMs running at that point.  I'll even record it so keep an eye out here!

Live Migration Configuration Script

In one of my previous posts I went over how to configure live migration (for all three types).  One of the biggest pain points there is setting up the Constrained Delegation and Live Migration Authentication (needed for Hyper-V Manager Migration/move-vm), so I've written up a script to simplify the setup.  Take a look below the break for more!

Tech TopX: Navigating Server Core

In this episode of Tech TopX we will be covering how to get around Server Core and the tools that are available to you.

This is a continuation of a previous Tech TopX, so make sure to check it out!