Hyper-V Archives - Page 2 of 3

April 8, 2013

Building a Lab or Portable Demo VM Box Cheaply – Part 1

Last fall, I got my first new laptop in about 18 months which is an eternity for me. For a bit of my history see my blog post Laptops of Doom. The Panasonic CF-J10 served me well, but still wasn’t perfect. At 10.1″, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, 1 x USB 3.0 (albeit slow), a Core i7-2620M, and decent battery life with weight under 3lbs, you’d think I’d be happy as a clam. Even with the 1TB of SSD I had in there, it wasn’t enough room and the USB 3.0 was slow compared to other machines, which led me to believe it has to do with motherboard design (boo). It was starting to act up on me (trackpad not functioning right), so I knew I needed an interim solution. Enter the Sony Vaio Duo 11 (which I will do a review of at some point). I love the machine but its main weak link is only 8GB of memory, and it can’t be expanded since it’s basically soldered onto the motherboard. Welcome to 2013.

For the deliveries of my mission critical/high availability class last year in Australia, I took both machines with me – I was still well under 6lbs. I got an external mouse for the Panasonic and it was basically my demo box with Hyper-V and Windows Server 2012, and the Duo my main presentation machine. One nice thing about the Duo is the pen input for things like virtual blackboarding. Even with the Core i7 ULV, the Duo really seems snappier than my Panasonic. To date, I still haven’t yet sent the Panasonic back to Japan because I need a backup computer. The Duo only has regular Windows 8 (not Pro), so I’ve been using VMware Workstation a lot like I have in the past. I’ve been able to do my demos with an external USB 3.0 SSD drive, but they’ve been limited. Bottom line is I use both Hyper-V and VMware Workstation, and need a presenter machine. Sometimes one machine isn’t enough, so that got me thinking (and also because I want to be able to send my J10 in for repair) – what can I do?

My idea – crazy as it is/was – was to find a small, yet portable PC, connect it to my Duo via a crossover cable, and use Remote Desktop to get in.

Enter the small form factor (SFF) PC.

My weight requirements for schlepping still have not changed, and I am hanging out to see what happens once the Haswell-based laptops are introduced before even considering something new, but carrying around my Duo plus a small box running Hyper-V seemed somewhat reasonable if I can keep the solution portable. One reason I need this for some speaking engagements is that VMware Workstation allows me to show, say, Hyper-V and some scenarios like Live Migration easily. The problem is that you can’t easily run both Hyper-V and VMware Workstation at the same time under Windows 8 – you basically have to enable one and disable the other which you can’t really do mid-talk. The weight requirement has historically been difficult, since most SFF PCs with any power have been small by tower standards, but still kinda beefy and robust. That has changed recently.

Two boxes fit the bill: Foxconn’s AT-7000 series which you can get in Core i3 (AT-7300), i5 (AT-7500), or i7 (AT-7700) variants, and the Intel Next Unit of Computing (NUC), which currently only has a Core i3 (rumor has it they are going to introduce an i5 version soon). There are two main variants of the NUC – one that has ethernet built in (the DC3217IYE) and two HDMI outs, and one with one HDMI out and one Thunderbolt but no ethernet (the DC3217BY). With both, it’s basically a plug in your own RAM and storage and away you go.

There are some other technical differences between the AT-7000 series and the NUC, namely:

The NUC has 3 x USB 2.0 ports (boo) and you would need an adapter for HDMI to VGA if you wanted to hook it up directly to something if HDMI was not an option (and it often isn’t when presenting; VGA is still the defacto standard). The AT-7000 has 4 x USB 3.0, 2 x USB 2.0, DVI and HDMI out (and they include a DVI –> VGA adapter in the box).
Ethernet only comes with the DC3217IYE; you would have to get a USB one if you wanted ethernet for the DC3217BY. The AT-7000 series has it built-in, just like the DC3217IYE.
The AT-7000 series also has microphone, headphone, and line out if you want such things (unnecessary for portable use), as well as a card reader (SD/MS/MMC).
The NUC only has mSATA internally, whereas the AT-7000 can take a full 2.5″ drive.

You may be thinking that the AT-7000 is a slam dunk considering you can get your choice of processors and it has some better port options. On paper everything is always better.

I ordered both the DC3217IYE and the AT-7700 with the intention of returning one of them (we’ll see if that happens …) with 16GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM (DDR3 1600 MHz [PC3 12800]), a Mushkin 480GB mSATA SSD, and for the AT-7700, a StarTech mSATA –> 2.5″ adapter enclosure. I got the DC3217IYE and RAM from Amazon (they had better prices at the time, and with the NUC, a better return policy), and the 480GB SSD and the adapter enclosure from Newegg. Let’s look at my costs:

DC3217IYE – $292.49
RAM – $99.99
Crossover cable – $2.52
SSD – $439.99
AT-7700 – $489.99
mSATA adapter – $30.99

The NUC solution costs $834.99 and the AT-7700 solution $1063.48. Now, you may not need a 480GB SSD, and standard 2.5″ SSDs are cheaper than mSATA ones; I didn’t want to buy two sets of storage so here it really is the same thing for me. If you went down to the i3 ($339.99 at Newegg) or i5 ($399.99 at Newegg) and used a different SSD or even a standard platter-based drive, the NUC and AT-7000 series are basically parity cost-wise. Let’s say you pick the i3 AT-7300:

AT-7300 – $339.99
RAM – $99.99
Crossover cable – $2.52
500GB 2.5″ SSD (Samsung 840; not the Pro which is about $130 more) – $335.09 on Amazon now

The total is $777.59 – cheaper than the equivlent NUC solution. If you splurged and spent the extra $60 on the AT-7500 to get an i5, it would be only a few dollars more than the NUC solution. Crazy!

The thing about these solutions is that I’m looking at them as portable hypervisors and that’s how I’ll largely talk about them, but they’re so cheap and cost effective that they can work for a lab solution for your own personal use or where you work – and they’re tiny. That can’t be underestimated.

In Part 2, I will cover some differences that may make a difference for some (including myself) such as size and weight, and talk about the process of configuring these little wonderboxes. The third part of this series will concentrate more on usability and how they work in conext of my workflow.

November 4, 2011

SQL Server 2012 High Availability and Editions: Basic vs. Advanced

It was hard to miss the licensing and edition announcements for SQL Server 2012 yesterday. This post won’t touch on those too much. Others (such as Denny Cherry’s blog post or Geoff Hiten’s blog post as examples) cover that pretty well. I will say these three things, though:

Anyone who is surprised by the license by core and not socket should not be. It’s been a long time coming. Am I shilling for MS here? Not at all. I’m shocked MS hadn’t changed it years ago based on the way the industry itself has been going. I will still argue that if you do the math, in most (if not all) scenarios you’ll still be cheaper than competitor solutions. SQL Server does give you really good bang for the proverbial buck with a lot of features “in the box” no matter what edition you choose.
In terms of cores, understand this and you’ll be in better shape to understand cost: there is a minimum of 4 cores to purchase for each individual processor. What that means is that if you have dual core processors (i.e. a physical processor with 2 cores), you are still paying what you would pay today. 4 cores in SQL Server 2012 is the equivalent of a single processor in SQL Server 2008 R2 and earlier. After 4 cores, you buy licensing in 2-core “packs”, so if your intended server has processors with 6 cores, it winds up being 1.5x what you pay today.
I know some folks liked all the different variations of SQL Server. I mean, who wasn’t looking forward to SQL Server 2012 Titanium Edition (available only for a limited time)? All kidding aside, Microsoft isn’t a camera manufacturer that can just change its shell to another color or textile and charge you more as much as some camera companies (*cough* Leica *cough*) do. I think simplifying down to three editions (Standard, Business Intelligence, and Enterprise) keeps things much, much cleaner and easy to understand. Enterprise vs. Datacenter did confuse some, so I’ll say this one is a big net positive.

The one thing which some may have noticed is the line on the bottom of the chart linked above for editions: Enterprise has “Advanced” for high availability and the other two have “Basic”. What exactly does that mean? Thanks to MS for helping me to clarify. The list below is as things are today. Things may or may not change between now and whenever SQL Server 2012 RTMs.

Basic

Synchronous database mirroring (same as it is now in current Standard)
2-node failover cluster support for an instance (same as it is now in current Standard)
Log shipping (same as it is now in current Standard)
Replication (same as it is now in current Standard)
Mobility limitations removed for Standard/BI, so Live Migration now really a good option for VMs if you have Software Assurance (so not new, but kinda new)
Support for Server Core deployments (new to SQL Server 2012) – both clustered and standalone

Advanced (which includes everything you get in Standard/BI plus …)

AlwaysOn availability groups and everything that comes with it like readable replicas, backups from replicas, PowerShell cmdlets, etc. (new feature in SQL Server 2012)
Faster failover for clustered instances (new to SQL Server 2012 – talked about this in my PASS Summit preconference)
Peer to Peer replication (same as it is now in Enterprise and Datacenter)
> 2 node failover clustering (same as it is now in Enterprise and Datacenter)
All modes of database mirroring with automatic page repair (same as it is now in Enterprise and Datacenter)
The various online operations such as index rebuilds (same as it is now in Enterprise and Datacenter)

In essence, outside of the new AlwaysOn availability groups feature exclusively in Enterprise, the split is pretty much what you get now: a more feature rich high availability set in the top edition, and less in the others. Don’t let the names Advanced and Basic fool you – it’s just marketing terminology (much like AlwaysOn [with no space] is a branding thing).

The only slight bit of disappointment I have to be honest is twofold:

While I thought availability groups would be Enterprise only, I was hoping they would do something akin to what they did with database mirroring and put a more limited form in Standard and everything in EE. That didn’t happen. Let’s hope in a future version after 2012 it will.
Along the same lines, if availability groups were going to be EE only, I hoped that Standard would get the full database mirroring implementation. There’s precedent for that (see: log shipping [EE only in 2000, all in 2005] and backup compression [EE only for backups in 2008, all in 2008 R2]) as newer features get introduced or times go on. That also didn’t happen here. That’s more of a disappointment to me than AGs not being in Standard/BI.

These are not things to start a letter writing campaign to Microsoft. I’m just expressing my own personal opinion as someone who is obviously close to the HA feature set. I still think SQL Server 2012 has a compelling offering for most that if you are starting to consider upgrades or new implementations, seriously start evaluating it in its current form (CTP3).

Do I Need the Enterprise (or Datacenter) Edition of Windows for SQL Server 2012?
The answer to this one is “it depends”. If you plan on deploying AlwaysOn availability groups or failover clustering, yes. I know I haven’t talked about availability groups much but I’ve been working with them for awhile and some of what I know is still under NDA and I’d rather be able to tell everything. Anyway, availability groups require that the OS is clustered but SQL Server does not need to be (but you can cluster it if you want). Based on what I said above for Basic vs. Advanced, if you are not using SQL Server Enterprise, you won’t need to worry about choosing EE or DC for Windows anyway since you won’t be getting the availability groups feature.

The need for at least Windows EE has been a bit of a controversy for some as they want to, say, do clustering with SQL Server Standard but need a higher edition of Windows since Windows Standard does not support failover clustering – it’s not a 1:1 ratio (so-to-speak). Is there a cost difference? Absolutely. However if you look at the cost of the Standard vs. Enterprise editions of Windows, it’s not the same difference at all as it is with SQL Server in terms of price. I know that even a minor difference in the amount could be a huge one for some companies; I’m not blind to economics. But if you plan on implementing SQL Server 2012 EE, it would be almost silly not to deploy at least the equivalent edition of Windows since you wouldn’t be able to take advantage of a great new feature like availability groups.

Supported Platforms
Now is as good a time as any to remind you about the blog post I wrote back in June which talks about the intended platforms you can deploy on. My thoughts there haven’t changed either, especially around supporting (or not) 32-bit.

That’s it for now … hope everyone has a great weekend!

October 10, 2010

Upcoming Webcasts and Appearances

I’ve got two webcasts this month that I’m doing with Quest:
Pain of the Week: Mission Critical SQL: High Availability – From Amateur to Aficionado in Less Than an Hour
October 14
8 AM Pacific/11 AM Eastern/4 PM UK/5 PM Central Europe
Click here for more information and to register

and a followup

Pain of the Week: Mission Critical SQL: High Availability Part 2
October 21
8 AM Pacific/11 AM Eastern/4 PM UK/5 PM Central Europe
Click here for more information and to register

The first one is more chat/info, the second one pretty much all demo. I think by now

SQL Saturday in New York City
I’ve also confirmed that I’ll be speaking at SQL Saturday #59 in the Big Apple. The session times are a bit shorter than I’m used to (just under an hour), so it’ll be a unique opportunity to see how much I can cram in your heads in that hour! Right now I’m tentatively going to be doing two different talks.

PASS Update
Here is the session information and time:
Advanced SQL Server Deployment Techniques for Virtualization
Tuesday, November 9
1:30 – 2:45 PM
Room 4C3

Check the final guide for any changes.

May 5, 2010

SSDs Just Keep Getting Better

I really like my new laptop, the Panasonic CF-S9 from Japan (i5-540, 8GB of memory, 12.1″ widescreen, 8 – 12 hour battery life, under 3lbs – yes, under 3lbs). I don’t always say that as I fall out of love with laptops pretty quickly. Is it perfect? No. I’ve definitely got some gripes with it. Disk speed is not one of them. Stock, it came with the new Toshiba 256GB 2nd generation SSD that supports TRIM (THNS256GG8BBAA). The Toshiba R600 I bought last year has the Toshiba 1st generation 512GB drive (THNS512GG8BBA) which does not support TRIM. One of my concerns in the switch was overall capacity – taking a step back since I have a lot of VMs. The 512GB SSD was pretty fast, and truth be told, all of my laptops since about 2005 or 2006 have all had SSDs. But the one thing anyone who runs VMs knows is that I/O is king. The 256GB that came with the Panasonic was pretty quick, but not the fastest. I say that knowing it gave me a Windows Experience of 6.7 for disk, which is nothing to shake a stick at.

So to expand capacity, my original goal was to add USB 3.0 externally via an ExpressCard on the Panasonic. Unforuntately, Panasonic put a PCMCIA (cardbus) slot in the CF-S9, and even with an adapter, I couldn’t get my USB 3.0 ExpressCard to work. I tried an eSATA PCMCIA card and I got worse than USB 2.0 speeds, so Panasonic’s PCMCIA controller officially sucks. The lack of ExpressCard support and the poor PCMCIA implementation is my biggest disappointment with the Panasonic.

Why all the fuss? I bought the 256GB Crucial C300 CTFDDAC256MAG-1G1 – the new king of the SSD speeds in 2.5″ drives. It would be a waste of money cripple it with USB 2.0 speeds. Thankfully Panasonic didn’t make it near impossible to get the internal drive out (like Sony does with many of their models … speaking from experience, I have a very love-hate relationship with higher end Sony laptops). Just unscrew two screws, and carefully get the drive out.

I used Paragon Partition Manager 10.0 Professional (bought; not a freebie) to clone the Toshiba to the Crucial (4 hours since I was using an external USB 2.0 enclosure), popped out the Toshiba, put in the Crucial, and with fingers crossed, powered on the Panasonic. Success!

I re-ran my Windows Experience, and disk went up to a whopping 7.6. 7.6! Not too shabby. I can tell the laptop has a bit more snap to it as well. The increased write speeds do make a difference. Check out my CrystalDiskMark scores now:

It is not a drive for those who are on the fence about SSD – there are much cheaper options if you want SSD. With SSDs it’s not only about SLC vs. MLC, but it has nearly everything to do with how the SSD manufacturer has optimized its controller. Compared to the original SSDs I was using in the 32GB sizes back on my old Vaio VGN-G1 from Japan, the speeds are amazing to see how far the technology has come.

And I will tell you this as someone with a history with SSDs in laptops – they don’t significantly add to your battery life. Maybe 30 minutes, or at most, an hour, but I’d say about 30 minutes. What you do gain is a lot of silence, have less heat, and I love the fact it has no moving parts so if you accidentally jar your laptop, the drive head won’t fail. The only SSD failure (knock on wood) I had was on my Sony Vaio VGN-Z90 from a couple of years ago which had a proprietary RAID system, and this Crucial is pretty much faster than that.

Hope this helps some of you wondering about SSDs and whether they are worth it. Like anything, it depends. You do get what you pay for. Just because you may get an SSD doesn’t mean it’s going to be better than that traditional hard drive. Like many do in the SQL Server world, they go for capacity over speed and/or reliability. Know what your tradeoffs are.

October 23, 2009

Consolidation Using SQL Server 2008 Whitepaper Now Posted to MSDN!

I’ve been talking about it for awhile, but it’s finally here – my update of the old SQL Server 2000 consolidation whitepaper. It just went live less than an hour ago.

The basic info including the link to the download of the Word document can be found here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee692366.aspx

or you can just download the Word doc from http://download.microsoft.com/download/D/B/D/DBDE7972-1EB9-470A-BA18-58849DB3EB3B/SQLServer2008Consolidation.docx.

I hope you find it useful!

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