The Technology Chronicle

Virtual fibre channel option in Hyper V allows the connection to pass through from physical  fibre channel HBA to virtual fibre channel HBA, and still have the flexibilities like live migration. Pre-requisites: VM should be running Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012 Supported physical HBA with N_Port Virtualization(NPIV) enabled in the HBA. This can be enabled using any management utility provided by the SAN manufacturer. If you need to enable live migration, each host should be having two physical HBAs and each HBA should have two World Wide Names(WWN). WWN is used to established connectivity to FC storage.When you perform migration, the second node can use the second WWN to connect to the storage and then the first node can release its connection. Thereby the storage connectivity is maintained during live migration Configuring virtual fibre channel is a two step process Step 1: Create a Virtual SAN in the Hyper-V host First you need to click on Vir...

Now that we have had  a look at how to do the Installation and initial configuration of Hyper V Server 2012 in my previous blog post , lets start on the management part. In this blog, I will explain how to manage your Hyper V installation from a Windows 8 machine Remote management: Since Hyper V Server 2012 server core machine, you may want to manage it remotely using the familiar GUIs and MMC consoles. You can do so remotely, but before that you need to set the firewall rules to allow that.In the command prompt windows of the server, get a poweshell prompt by typing in "powershell". Now you can execute the following powershell command Enable-NetFirewallRule -DisplayGroup * Note: I used this command since it is my test network, you may want to lockdown the firewall rules a bit if in case of production network Inorder to connect to the Hyper V server using MMC from my PC, I had to run the following command in the PC command prompt cmdkey /add:<ServerNam...

Having heard a lot about the latest free virtualization from Microsoft, Hyper-V server 2012 , I coudnt resist giving it a whirl.. After all, it is not daily that Microsoft comes out with "free" offerings ;) Let us admit it..Ever since the advent of virtualization, we have few physical servers lying around.All of them have joined the virtualization bandwagon. My case was no different, so I decided to try out  Hyper-V server 2012 as a virtual machine in VMware Workstation 8 installed in my PC. Installation preparation: Few things to be taken care before you start the actual installation 1)Download the Hyper V Server 2012 ISO from Microsoft site: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/evalcenter/dn205299.aspx 2)VMware workstation 8 does not have Server 2012 in the Windows OS list.Hence you need to select the option "Windows Server 2008 R2 x64" when you create the Virtual machine 3) There is a small tweak to the Processor settings that should be d...

vMotion is the process of moving running virtual machines from one ESXi host to another.The disk files are not migrated(they stay in the shared storage), only the VMs memory and CPU processing moves from one server to another. In fact if you ping the VM while it is moving, you may at the most loose at most one or two ping packets. vMotion happens in three stages: -vCenter server verifies that teh VM is in a stable state -VM state is copied over to the destinatiom. State includes the memory, registers and network connections -VM is resumed in the destination host vMotion can happen due to any of the following reasons: - Balance the load on ESXi hosts using DRS -When the VMs are being moved off from a host so that the host can be shutdown by DPM(distributed power management) -You need to intsall patches using update manager or do a hardware maintenance, the VMs are migrated using vMotion and host is put into maintenance mose vMotion requirements: -You will need vSphere E...

In the latest update of Azure PowerShell commandlets, there is an option to set network ACLS for VM end points. Using this option, you can Allow/block access to an endpoint based on the IP address range Maximum of 50 ACL rules are possible per VM Lower numbered rules take precedence over higher number rules If you create a permit ACL, all other IP ranges are blocked. Similarly, if you define a Deny rule, All other Ips are permitted  If no ACLs are defined, it is permit all by default Steps for setting a permit ACL for a particular IP is given below. Before executing the same, make sure that you have set the subscriptions correctly as per my previous post. Create a new acl object $acl=New-AzureAclConfig Create the permit rule and add it to the acl Set-AzureAclConfig -AddRule -ACL $acl -Order 50 -Action Permit -RemoteSubnet "110.124.37.30/32" -Description "Test-ACL confguration" Here I am explicitly permitting access from a public IP ...

vSphere 5 components and features; Vmware ESXi : Well, this is the physical part of vSphere. The virtualization OS installed in  in physical servers and bastracts the physical resources of the server and distributes them across VMs. VMware vCenter : It is the vsphere centralised management software. It is essential for configuring and managing the full potential of vSphere say HA, DRS etc vSphere client: A client software that lets users connect remotely to Vmware ESXi and vCenter vSphere web client: A web interface that allows users to connect remotely to vCenter client or ESXi vSphere SDKs: Provides standard interfaces for VMware and third party solution to access VMware vSphere VMFS : A high performance cluster file systems for ESXi virtual machnes vSphere virtual SMP: Enables single virtual machine to use multiple physical processors simultaneously vMotion: Enables migration of virtual machines from one datastore to another without service interruption* vSphere HA: If the ...