Hyper-V R2

I attended a Windows User Group session on Hyper-V R2 this morning. New features include:

Live Migration / Clustered Shared Volumes
Hyper-V leverages MSCS which operates on a shared nothing basis. Clustered Shared Volumes have been introduced to facilitate Live Migrations (only). Dave did a live demo which worked well: he set up a ping -t to the VM for the duration of the Live Migrations, which proved that it worked.

Core Parking
More of a W2k8 feature than Hyper-V per se. Essentially W2k8 can park unneeded CPU cores to reduce power consumption, waking them when they're needed again.

Second-Level Address Translation (SLAT)
SLAT essentially improves VM memory access. It's hardware based. "On Intel-based processors, this is called Extended Page Tables (EPT), and on AMD-based processors, it is called Nested Page Tables (NPT)" Source: What's New in Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2

Dave also touched on booting from VHDs which is pretty cool.

One thing I like about Hyper-V is that VMs are treated as cluster resources. Anyone familiar with MSCS will get their heads around VMs running as a cluster resource in no time.

One point I want to pick Dave up on is his statement that Microsoft "gives" you HA without an additional licence cost, whereas with VMware you have to pay for it. Well, that's not entirely true - HA requires Windows Server Enterprise Edition - which costs more than Standard Edition. In my book, that's not much different than VMware's licensing model i.e. you pay more for HA.

IMHO
The new features in Hyper-V are welcome and Hyper-V is certainly worth considering. However, VMware has the edge over Hyper-V e.g. you don't need a LUN per VM, and vSphere will provide fault tolerance as a feature. Microsoft are catching up on VMware, but they're not quite there yet.

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The Parameter Is Incorrect

When SysAdmins are troubleshooting the last thing they need are unhelpful error messages. I had one of those situations today. I was copying a 13GB file to an external drive on a Windows Server 2003 machine. On starting the copy I got the following error message:

Cannot Copy [filename] The Parameter is Incorrect.

Marvellous. Thankfully I came across this one before and remembered that it occurs when you try to copy a file >4GB onto a volume formatted with FAT32 i.e. the maximum file size on a FAT32 volume is approximately 4GB.

For curiosity's sake, this evening I fired up a Windows Server 2008 virtual machine on VMware Workstation, created an 8GB FAT32 volume and tried to copy a 5GB file to it. Thankfully the error message in Windows Server 2008 is much more informative i.e. "The file [filename] is too large for the destination file system.":



As for the original problem, a quick convert f: /fs:ntfs solved the problem.

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New Job

I'm starting a new job with Hosting365 as a Professional Services Engineer working primarily with Microsoft server technologies on VMware Virtual Infrastructure. I'm joining a number of talented engineers with skills including but not limited to networks, Linux, storage and virtualisation. This enables us to design, build and manage open or closed source systems - anything from simple single server solutions to HA multi-tier systems with firewalls, load balancers, web servers, application servers, database servers, clustered servers and high performance storage according to customer requirements.

We're busy, and there's plenty of work for me to get stuck into right away. From a Microsoft perspective, the role is certainly more TechNet than MSDN (as Dave Northey might put it), but I'll certainly have occasion to delve into MSDN from time to time e.g. IIS Logging. In terms of MOF, I'll be working across all three phases i.e. Plan, Deliver and Operate. I also hope to improve my non-Microsoft skills over time e.g. Linux and Cisco.

I'm delighted to be joining the team.

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PS I'd like to wish my predecessor, Mark Dunne, best of luck in his new job

RTÉ Player

RTÉ have launched their player service. Programmes are topped with a short ad, which I've no problem with. (I haven't watched a full programme yet, so I don't know if there are ads during the programme as well.) The really cool thing is that it's Flash based, so nothing to download (as long as you have the Flash player installed). Cool! Check it out here.

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Hell Boy aka Paul O'Connell

I'm a fan of Paul O'Connell's, and have always reckoned he's really Hell Boy. (That's a compliment Paul - please don't eat me for breakfast!) Ron Perlman will definitely play him when they film his life story.

I'm probably the last one in the world to have received this email, but it made me laugh out loud, so I'm reproducing it here...

Paul O'Connell can assemble the entire contents of an IKEA store without instructions or an allen key.

When Paul O'Connell was a child, he made his mother finish his vegetables.

Every mathematical inequality officially ends with < Paul O'Connell.

If you wake up in the morning, its because Paul O'Connell spared your life.

Paul O'Connell won the Tour de France on a unicycle to prove to Lance Armstrong it wasnt a big deal. He thinks yellow wristbands are gay.

What colour is Paul O'Connells blood? Trick question. Paul O'Connell does not bleed.

Paul O'Connell once forgot where he put his keys. He then spent the next half-hour torturing himself until he gave up the location of the keys.

When Paul stares into the sun, the sun flinches.

If it tastes like chicken, looks like chicken, and feels like chicken, butPaul O'Connell says its beef. Then its beef.

James Bond has a licence to kill. Paul O'Connell don't need no licence.

Paul O'Connell's calendar goes straight from March 31st to April 2nd - no one fools Paul O'Connell.

1.6 billion Chinese are angry with Paul O'Connell. Sounds like a fair fight.

Paul O'Connell played Russian Roulette with a fully loaded gun and won.

Paul O'Connell once won a game of Connect 4 in 3 moves.

You can lead a horse to water. Paul O'Connell can make him drink.

Paul O'Connell once ate an entire bottle of sleeping pills. They made him blink.

When you open a can of whoop-ass, Paul O'Connell jumps out.

Killing Paul O'Connell doesnt make him dead. It just makes him angry.

Paul O'Connell does the Sunday New York Times Crossword Puzzle in ink.

When Google cant find something, it asks Paul O'Connell for help.

There is the right way, the wrong way, and the Paul O'Connell way. It's basically the right way, but faster and with deaths.

When Paul O'Connell watches a pot, it boils immediately.

Paul O'Connell once killed a group of Samurai Warriors with only a ball point pen. This lead to the phrase "The pen is mightier than the sword".

Paul O'Connell has been to Mars. That's why there's no life on Mars.

Before the boogie man goes to sleep, he checks his closet for Paul O'Connell.

Classic!

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Edit - Here's another couple:

Superman wears Paul O'Connell's pyjamas.

Paul O’Connell doesn’t do push-ups, he pushes the world down.

- Courtesy of Gerry Thornley's article in The Irish Times

NAT Woes

I had a fairly simple job to do today - set up some NATing on a new ZyWall firewall. I've done similar in the past, but it beat me this time. Everything looked OK, but the firewall failed to play ball. All I wanted was to NAT one (for now) public IP from the WAN to the DMZ. I called the ISP and they confirmed that everything was OK on their end. So I upgraded the firmware - still no joy. I called local ZyWall support. They talked me through what to do, which was what I had done (with one exception - I had done something extra which wasn't required but wouldn't cause a problem) and gave me a couple of workarounds. The workarounds failed drastically - seemed like the ZyWall got its knickers in a twist. So, factory reset and build from scratch (yes, I had a backup of the config, but I was advised to build it from scratch in case there was a problem with the config). Still no joy .

So, I put back in the old solution (always have a backup plan), tested it and took the ZyWall away with me for further analysis. Next step is verification that I wasn't having finger trouble. Thereafter, escalation with ZyWall and perhaps hooking up a sniffer to see what's going on. Unfortunately it's just one of those two hour jobs which is going to take something more like two days!

I'll post an update when I get to the bottom of it. Grrrr.

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VI to vSphere

VMware launched vSphere 4 today with great fanfare and lots of smiley people in blue shirts. There were no major surprises for anyone who's been following VMware closely for the past while. Big emphasis on (improved) cost reduction through (vSphere's) virtualisation technology - which is no surprise given the current economic environment.

The big push that I got from the launch event was "100% Virtualisation" i.e. now VMware claim you can virtualise every workload including your (demanding) DBMSs and OLTP applications. VMs can now have 8 vCPUs with 256GB RAM and can yield 30Gb/s and 300,000+ IOPS. That's pretty good, and may even suit analysis applications that need to run just such machines for hours (or even days) to process TBs of data - think large telcos mining their data. (As I'm on the subject, if you want to learn more on data mining, here's a good introduction to data mining that was given at a seminar I attended in Dublin some time ago.)

Other features in vSphere include zero down time with fault tolerance i.e. a VM runs on one ESX host with a shadow copy "lock stepped" (VMware's words - not mine) on another host. If the primary host dies, the VM fails over instantaneously to the other host. They demo'd this with a BES Server. It's been around for ages though - I viewed a more technical demo months ago. Check it out if you want more detail on VMware's (then pre-release) fault tolerance. It's great to see this feature finally making it to an end product.

Another feature is "thin provisioning" - and they did a Storage vMotion demo where a VM was migrated (live) from one datastore without thin provisioning to another datastore with thin provisioning. This reduced the size of the VM from 4GB to 3GB - pretty good, but it'll be interesting to see what real world yields will be. It's the like of these features that (still) gives VMware the edge over the competition.

If you want to see the complete hour and a half webcast, it should be available here soon.

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Oracle Buys Sun

I was as surprised as anyone to hear that Oracle bought Sun after the IBM talks collapsed. This gives Oracle the ability to sell systems from the application layer right down through the OS to the hardware. CRM / ERP / DBMS in a box anyone?

But who knows, maybe this model won't appear, or if it does appear, maybe it won't work. Look at Salesforce.com and the number of servers they sell.
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Right != Legal...or is it?

Unless you've been living under a rock over the weekend, you'll no doubt have read that Carl Lundström, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg (the guys behind The Pirate Bay) were found guilty "of being accessories to breaching copyright laws". It looks like they're being made an example of. They're appealing the verdict. No surprise there. What might be surprising is that hundreds of supporters protested in Stockholm over the weekend. I'm no lawyer, so I can't speak authoritatively on the case. Nevertheless, I could see the appeal upholding the original verdict as equally as I can see it being overturned.

A Pirate Bay blog entry states that "what we do is right" - an interesting choice of words. Legal? That's a matter for the courts to decide.

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The Early Worm Caught The Bird

As you may have heard, Twitter was hit over the Easter weekend by a worm. This wasn't some generic worm that just happened to hit Twitter - it was a targeted attack. Some technical detail is here. While the fallout appears to have been relatively benign, it certainly caused the guys at Twitter some headaches. It appears to have been a clickjacking attack, one of the vulnerabilities that Robert Hansen specifically mentioned at NITES this year.

Needless to say, the Wintel mantra of running up to date antivirus software, patching systems and running properly configured firewalls is completely useless in this scenario. Twitter's developers will probably be sent on a security refresher course pretty soon.

The "victims" of this attack are lucky that it wasn't particularly malicious. That might not be the case next time.

No Sun in the Big Blue

Well, it looks like IBM aren't buying Sun after all, and Sun's lead chip designer has resigned. Whether this is the death knell for the SPARC platform remains to be seen.

One thing's for sure, there'll be no Deep Purple after all.

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Conficker Stops Big Ben

Conficker stops Big Ben, if you believe The Washington Post story. Seriously though, there hasn't been any noticeable payload - yet. But don't forget, Conficker will still be around once this day is over. Londoners - keep an eye on Big Ben, just in case.

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