Rand Morimoto, Ph.D., MCSE, CISSP, has been in the computer industry for more than 30 years and has authored, co-authored, or been a contributing writer for dozens of bestselling books on Windows 2008, Exchange 2007, Security, BizTalk Server, and remote and mobile computing. Rand is the president of Convergent Computing, an IT consulting firm in the San Francisco Bay Area that was one of the key early adopter program partners with Microsoft implementing beta versions of Windows Server 2008 in production environments over 3 years before the product release. Rand has spoken at more than 50 conferences and conventions around the world in the past year on tips, tricks, and best practices on planning, migrating, and implementing Windows 2008 Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.
Jeff Guillet, MCITP, MCSE, CISSP, has been in the computer industry for more than 25 years and has been a contributing writer and technical editor for several books on Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003, Exchange 2007, and Exchange 2003. Jeff is a senior consultant for Convergent Computing and participates in many early adopter beta programs. Jeff holds Charter MCITP: Enterprise Administrator and MCITP: Enterprise Messaging Administrator certifications for Windows Server 2008 and has maintained MCSE certifications since 1999. He maintains a popular technical blog at www.expta.com.
IntroductionIntroduction
Windows Server 2008 shipped with several server roles that provide application services such as Active Directory, web services, thin client Terminal Services, video streaming media services, server virtualization services, and many others. This book focuses on the services specific to server virtualization called Hyper-V.
Hyper-V enables an organization to consolidate several physical server systems into a single host server while still providing isolation between virtual guest session application operations. With an interest to decrease costs in managing their information technology (IT) infrastructure, organizations are virtualizing servers. Bringing multiple physical servers into a single host server decreases the cost of purchasing and maintaining multiple physical server systems, decreases the cost of electricity and air-cooling systems to maintain the physical servers, and enables an organization to go "green" (by decreasing the use of natural resources in the operation of physical server systems).
In addition to covering Hyper-V virtualization in this book, the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM 2008) product is also covered. VMM 2008 adds management capabilities to Hyper-V. VMM 2008 enables an administrator view and administer virtual guest sessions more easily, delegate administrative rights to others in the management of guest sessions, and use helpful tools to perform specific functions and tasks. Specific functions and tasks supported in VMM 2008 include the ability to take a production server and convert the server to a virtual guest image. In addition, VMM 2008 will take an existing virtual session and convert the image into a Hyper-V virtual guest session. These tools make managing, administering, and supporting a Hyper-V session much easier for the administrator.
The authors of this book had the opportunity to work with Windows Server 2008 for more than three years before it was released, and have been involved in the development and deployment of Hyper-V in production environments since the product inception.
It is our hope that we can provide you, the reader of our book, with a lot of really valuable information—not basic marketing fluff that talks about features and functions in Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, but to really dig down into the products and share with you best practices for planning, preparing, implementing, and supporting a Windows 2008 Hyper-V-based virtual environment.
The thing about being involved with a product so early on is that our first experiences with Hyper-V and VMM were without any documentation, without help files that provided guidance, and without any shared experiences from others. We had to learn the technologies from experience, usually the hard way, but that has given us a distinct advantage of knowing the products forward and backward, better than anyone could ever imagine.
So, the pages of this book are filled with years of experience with Hyper-V and VMM 2008, live production environment best practices, and tips and tricks that we hope will help you design, plan, prototype, implement, administer, and support a Windows 2008-based server virtualization environment!
This book is organized into five parts, each part focusing on key Hyper-V and VMM areas, with chapters making up each part. The parts of this book are as follows:
Part I: Windows 2008 Hyper-V Overview—This part provides an introduction to Hyper-V not only from the perspective of a general technology overview, but also to note what is truly new in Hyper-V that made it compelling enough for organizations to implement the technology in beta in a production environments. We also cover basic planning, prototype testing, and migration techniques. This part also covers running tools to assess physical servers for consolidation to virtual guest sessions and the process of architecting an enterprise virtual host environment.
Part II: Windows 2008 Hyper-V Host and Guest Installation—This part covers the installation of Hyper-V from the perspective of both the host server and the guest virtual sessions. The server installation includes the setup and configuration of Windows Server 2008 and the specific versions that support Hyper-V virtualization. The guest session installation covers the installation of both Microsoft Windows and non-Windows guests that are supported as virtual server sessions within a Hyper-V host environment.
Part III: Administering and Maintaining Hyper-V Host Services—This part covers the management, administration, optimization, and maintenance of the Hyper-V host with the tools that come out of the box with Windows Server 2008. As with any application, Hyper-V is best run when the system is properly installed and configured with specific focus on optimizing the memory, disk storage, and processing capabilities of the underlying hardware. Hyper-V distributes resources of a host server across guest sessions, and thus it is important to have the right hardware and system optimization in place.
Part IV: System Center Virtual Machine Manager in a Hyper-V Environment—Hyper-V and Windows Server 2008 provide administrative tools for Hyper-V, but the addition of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 product on top of Hyper-V provides significant enhancements for the management and operations of virtual guest sessions and host-level configuration options. VMM 2008 allows for the extraction of physical server configurations down to virtual guest sessions and for the management of virtual guest templates and ISO disc image files and the provisioning of guest session.
Part V: Maintaining Guest Session Uptime in a Hyper-V Environment—This last part of the book covers guest session uptime, debugging, and problem solving intended to help administrators maintain a reliable host and guest virtual environment. Disaster recovery and high availability of guest applications are addressed with regard to the clustering of hosts and guest sessions. In addition, this part addresses application-level high-availability and disaster-recovery technologies built in to common applications in use today.
We hope that our real-world experience with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtualization and our commitment to share that planning, implementation, and support of Hyper-V information will help get you up-to-speed on the latest in virtual server software!
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