virtualization.info

So far the Microsoft customers that wanted to convert their physical boxes into Hyper-V virtual machines had to buy and use System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and its physical to virtual (P2V) migration tool.
Or buy and use a third party P2V migration tool like the ones offered by Novell/Platespin or Quest/Vizioncore.

Other less expensive (free in some cases) tools allow to perform the P2V migration as well but they usually don’t permit to convert the machine while it’s running.
Now there’s a free tool that performs a live migration: Disk2VHD.

The tool was released by the worldwide popular Mark Russinovich, founder and former Chief Software Architect at Sysinternals/Winternals and now Microsoft Technical Fellow, a couple of weeks ago.

Disk2VHD runs on any Windows system starting from XP SP2 and Server 2003 SP1.
It performs the live migration leveraging the Volume Shadow Service (VSS) like most commercial software do.
The converted VHD can be booted with a Hyper-V or Windows Virtual PC virtual machine. Or you can mount it inside the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 file system.

Like most Systinternals tools it’s a stand-alone executable that can you can even launch online.

It doesn’t have many options but it’s the perfect companion for Hyper-V if you are in evaluation.
And with some PowerShell help it probably can do a lot more.

Labels: Microsoft, P2V/V2V Migration, Tools

Tim Mangan, a well-respected application virtualization expert, just released an interesting tool to monitor the system performance of a Hyper-V infrastructure.

Rather than relying on the Task Manager inside each Windows virtual machine, HyperV_Mon connects to Hyper-V through its WMI interface and retrieves the physical and virtual CPUs consumption data from hosts and guests.

The tool is able to recognize when a vCPU is descheduled and thus provides more precise information compared to the guest OS Task Manager.

HyperV_Mon is available for free here.

Labels: Microsoft, Tools

How many virtualization.info readers remember Massimiliano Daneri?

Daneri was the brilliant creator of VMKB, the free Perl script able to perform live backup of ESX virtual machines (released in 2004), and VMTSPatchManager, the precursor of VMware Update Manager (released in mid 2007).

VMware hired Daneri in October 2007 and since then only few customers had the opportunity to see him in action.

He reappeared last week during the VMworld Europe 2009 (see virtualization.info live coverage of day 1 and day 2), where he presented his new work during a breakout session: PXE Manager for vCenter.

Basically the tool is Windows service that comes with a vCenter management plug-in to:

• automate the provisioning of new ESX and ESXi hosts
• backup and restore the host state
• select the ESX/ESXi build to deploy and its installation mode (diskless, unattended or manual)
  

The product supports multiple vCenters and multiple network segments but has some limitations: it can’t automate the VMware Tools installation, it can’t provide the host web access interface, and doesn’t include the vCenter Client package for remote download.

PXE Manager is not an official VMware tool so the company doesn’t endorse it or provide support for it.
But the things may change if several customers ask for it.

Unfortunately at the moment there’s no way to download the tool.

Labels: Tools, VMware

Andrew Kutz, the man who did reverse engineering of the VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 (now vCenter) plug-in system, creating a number of tremendously helpful unofficial plug-ins, is back.

This time Kuts launches a more ambitious project: a management interface for mobile devices (yes, including the iPhone and Google Android phones) that supports multiple hypervisors.

Dubbed Virtualization Manager Mobile (VMM) the product is currently in beta and already supports VMware Infrastructure 3.5, Microsoft Hyper-V 2008, Citrix XenServer 5.0 and even VMware Server 2.0.

VMM allows to turn on and off any virtual machine and control its resource consumption (vCPU and vRAM).

To make this possible Kutz developed a Unified Virtualization API (UVAPI) that can even be extended by 3rd party developers.

VMM, which is developed as an Apache Tomcat 6 web application, will be available in two editions, Full and Lite.
The only difference between the edition is that the former is a fully-featured AJAX web application while the latter is a static HTML one.
A demo of both is available here: Full demo - Lite demo (in both cases logon with the username and password: vmmdemo)

During the beta VMM is free, then it will turn into a commercial solution.

Labels: Tools

After a long beta, the popular (at least in Europe) Login Consultants last week released the first version of their Virtual Session Indexer (VSI).

VSI 1.0 is a free benchmark platform to measure the remote desktop performance in a Terminal Server  farm or in a VDI environment.

To run the tool it's required to have a 4 tiers infrastructure: a domain controller for the authentication a file server for logging user sessions, a server to host the TS/XenApp/VDI service and a workstation to launch the user sessions.

Here a video of the product in action:

Download it here.

Labels: Tools, VDI

At the recent Xen Summit 2008 in Tokyo a specially interesting project finally reached version 1.0: Kemari.
The project was presented for the first time in April 2007 but only now it reaches a version stable enough to be marked as GA.

Developed by Yoshiaki Tamura, Kemari is a patch for Xen 3.3 that brings host fail-over.
It works with both Linux and Windows guests OSes.

A briefly description tells enough to understand how it works:

Kemari in VMM taps event channel, pauses the guest (not suspend), prepares for transfer, and Kemari in userland transfers the guest. On failover, Kemari on the secondary restores the guest, and the backend drivers in dom0 set up the backend rings from the state of the shared rings in the guest

Here a video where a Windows XP virtual machines survives the shut down of one node in a hardware cluster of two:

The exiting news is that Kemari is now part of the Xen roadmap, and this means that the open source hypervisor may offer out-of-the-box fault tolerance as soon as it hits version 3.4.
Citrix will be probably very happy. We wonder if Marathon Technologies will be happy as well.

Labels: Tools, Xen

The Hyper-V Senior Program Manager John Howards recently released a small program to simplify the configuration of the Microsoft new hypervisor: HVRemote.

The tool allows to complete the configuration of Windows Server 2008 (both Full Installation and Server Core edition), enable the Hyper-V role and configure the hypervisor with just two commands in place of the many steps required.

Note that while Howards works at Microsoft, this tool is a personal work and the company doesn’t provide any support for it.

Download it here (source code is included).

Labels: Microsoft, Tools