Innovative Technology Weblog

A few months ago my beloved colleague Walter gave me the Beta version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Unfortunately I haven’t had the time to play with it until now. While most people enjoy their well earned vacation, I’m playing around with SCVMM.

There are definitely things to be excited about:

• Ability to manage both Hyper-V and VMware farms
• Migrate virtual machines between Hyper-V hosts (maybe not a live migration, but a migration none the less! )
• But the main thing to be excited about is the future integration within the System Center family.

And their are also some irritating things:

• Hyper-V has just RTM’ed and SCVMM is still in beta. This means you got to install update after update to make everything work.
• When I try to install the integration services on Windows Vista it comes with the message: “Unsupported Guest OS – An error has occurred: The specified program requires a newer version of Windows.” Unfortunately I’m not yet in the possession of Windows 7… 
• I created a new library share. But when I try to mount an ISO file to my virtual machine it fails and the only thing you can do with your virtual machine from that point is remove it and repair it. Through the repair option you can save him by the way.

I properly can go on and on with these things but I can rather posts these on connect.microsoft.com. It is still a beta and I believe eventually these ‘minor’ issues will be solved.

There is one very interesting feature I found in SCVMM and I’m still not sure if it’s a brilliant or stupid thing. When you create a new virtual machine you got to choose your processor type. Not just the number of virtual processors or the clock rate, no actually the processor type. Like the 1.2 Ghz Athlon, the 3.0 Ghz Pentium 4 (HT Technology) or the 2.8 Ghz Xeon MP.

It states that it uses this info to determine the processor requirements of the virtual machine. That’s being used when calculating host ratings and when setting CPU resource allocations.
You can view the host rating when you create a new virtual machine. The host rating helps you to choose the best host for your virtual machine. Based on free resources.
CPU resource allocation is something we know from VMware ESX. VMware uses shares to do this. A plain number like 1000 or 2000. The virtual machine with 2000 shares gets twice the amount of CPU cycles (when needed) in comparison with the machine that has 1000 shares.

I understand that SCVMM should use his own system that can be plotted on all the different virtualization platforms it’s going to manage (Hyper-V, XEN, ESX). But I don’t understand how a 2.4 Ghz Opteron relates to a 2.4 Ghz Xeon.
So if I just want my production server to have a 50% preference over my test server which should I choose? And what’s worse, if I’m in doubt with this option, how about a self service user that’s got the option to create a new virtual machine? I can imagine it would properly mean that this user got the advise to skip it.

But there is one more thing confusing about this. When you use the Virtual Machine Manager snap in, there is another way to set the processor weight and you can use a simple number!

So if I change the processor type in SCVMM of a virtual machine, you would suspect something to change within this screen. But it doesn’t… Neither does it the other way around.

I’m going to investigate some more but if you got some tips or hints, please post them!

I actually ran into more problems with the PKI after the installation. Although SCCM detects your Site Server Signing certificate during setup, the process of dragging and dropping the certificate from the current user branch to the local machine branch may (not sure if there are situations where this does not happen) corrupt the private key in the certificate. To fix this, you have to change the template for the Site Server Signing certificate. On the ‘Request Handling’ tab, check ‘Allow private key to be exported’. Then go through the process of requesting the certificate as usual, and don’t drag and drop as I described in my previous post, but export from the current user certificates and import in the local machine certificates. That should fix the Site Server Signing certificate.

I also had a problem with the Web Server certificate, don’t know if it’s related to having a Windows Server 2008 Certificate Authority or not. In the Microsoft walkthrough they tell you to duplicate the normal Web Server template. When I did this, SCCM kept reporting the Management Point giving problems; a test http request would return an error. After a little Googling I found the solution: on the new template (I named it SCCM Web Server) add Client Authentication on the ‘Extensions’ tab. Don’t forget to re-enroll and re-assign the certificate to your website.

I hope that’s all I have to say about this.

The last couple of days I’ve been playing around with the SCCM 2007 SP1/R2 beta. I wanted to try out the NAP (network access protection) features, which require Windows Server 2008 on the SCCM server. So I went ahead and created some virtual machines, a domain controller and a SCCM server. I wanted to do it right, so I decided to install Windows Server 2008 on the domain controller as well. To build the PKI required by native mode I followed the excellent walkthrough at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb694035.aspx. And then I ran into trouble…..
There are two issues with getting the Site Server Signing certificate on the SCCM server. First, because the CA is running on a Windows Server 2008 machine, when you duplicate the ‘Computer’ certificate template, you get the choice which versions of Windows should support this template. Considering the fact that all servers in my environment are running Windows Server 2008, I went with that. And that was my mistake. If you select “Windows Server 2008, Enterprise Edition” the certificate template will not show up while enrolling it from the web interface, so you should select “Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition”.
The second issue I ran into was related to the requesting client being a Windows Server 2008 machine. When this is the case, the web interface no longer shows the option to store the certificate in the local computer certificate store. Just continue as you normally would and after that, open an MMC on the SCCM server. Add two certificates snap-ins, one for the current user, the other for the local computer. All you have to do is drag the certificate you just enrolled from the web interface from the Personal/Certificates store under the current user branch to th Personal/Certificates store under the local computer branch.
After this, in my case the SCCM installation automatically detected my certificate and installation went smoothly.

 Please note that I have posted a follow-up to this post, because although installation will go smoothly, you will have some errors if you do it the way I descibed above. Here’s the correct way to do it:  http://www.buit.org/2008/05/22/installing-sccm-2007-sp1r2-in-native-mode-on-windows-server-2008-part-2/

On MMS Day 1 the keynote was opened by Bob Muglia (VP Server & Tools Business)

This keynote was all about Dynamic IT, the 10 year vision of Microsoft in how to operate dynamic datacenters. Currently Microsoft is in year 5 of this vision and realy showed some cool stuff in the keynote compared to how we managed our environments 5 years ago. I realy like the vision Microsoft is having on a Dynamic Datacenter using virtualisation, not only on the OS layer but also on the application layer.

In a Dynamic Datacenter all services are devided in 4 layers:

• Hardware
• Hardware Virtualisation
• Application Virtualisation
• Models

The hardware layer can be managed with System Center Configuration Manager, during the keynote Microsoft did a demo on how Dynamic IT is working for server deployment. Just by using Server 2008 Server Roles en Features, a Configuration Manager Task Sequencer and a special plugin from Dell in this sequencer Microsoft was able to install a domain controller unattende on a Dell server. During this unattende installation it was possible to do the RAID settings, BIOS settings and other hardware based setting needed to roll-out the server to be compliant with the rest of the infrastructure. This way there is no need for an administrator to be present in a datacenter and still you will be able to roll out servers.

On the Hardware Virtualisation Layer, Microsoft did a demo of Virtual Machine Manager 2008 beta that was anounced during the keynote. A cool feature of VMM2008 is that it is able to manage VMware ESX servers, so in the near future it will be possible to manage your Virtual environment from 1 tool. This tool also supports Live migration of VMware machines. Like other Microsoft tooling VMM2008 also gives the output of the tasks you perform as an PowerShell script, so administrators that do not master PowerShell still have the abbility to automate repeating tasks.

Microsoft also announced the beta of SCOM Cross Platform Monitoring, that Walter described in last post.

So if you are interested in the slides of the Keynote on day 1 you can watch the here :

Slidedeck Keynote Day 1