Many times I was asked for the way to exceed the limitation of 4 virtual processors assigned to a virtual machine for Windows Server 2008 R2.
I guess there is still many Windows Server 2008 hyper-visor running on a physical server which has much more cores, Although It is very limiting, but I will not recommend you to modify productions VM’s setting to exceed the limit.
Private cloud is a computing model that uses resources which are dedicated to your organization/department. A private cloud shares many of the characteristics of public cloud computing including resource pooling, self-service, elasticity.
I will walk you through the steps for configuring the System Center VMM and Create Microsoft private cloud.
Microsoft Private Cloud?
Microsoft private cloud relies on System Center components to create and use Private Clouds. You can use these technologies to offer traditional IaaS services, such as VMs on demand. Also provides support for deploying multi-tier applications, monitoring and updating applications, and automation.
Cloud computing allows self-service access to an elastic pool of IT resources.It’s important to realize that a private cloud isn’t just a technology change; it also requires new attitudes and behaviors. The benefits can be significant.
You should have a central storage like SAN in order to play with the VMware advance feature like HA, vMotion, FT…Etc, but that is not always possible for Lab or evaluation.
In my previous posts, I showed you how to install and setup HPLeftHand P4000 on ESX and provide a shared storage for VMware.
In this blog I will show you how to use Microsoft windows 2012 ISCSI solution as a shared storage for VMware.
I will not walk you through the step to setup iSCSI Target; if you are interested in step-by-step iSCSI Target setup take a look in to Microsoft iSCSI Solution.
You may planning to stretch your datacenter network to Windows Azure by setting up a Site to Site VPN where the VMs up in Azure are effectively connected to the Enterprise Datacenter. The Site to Site VPN just extends the datacenter to allow for VMs to be created in the cloud With VMs both on-premise and up in Azure.
You’ve probably read guidance requiring you to have two network adapters, one for internet facing traffic and the other for internal facing traffic. You may have also read that you must assign a static public IP address on the Internet facing network adapter as you cannot NAT the traffic.
Modern Network infrastructure designed for virtualization and the cloud
“Deploy flatter Two-Tier Network and Leaf-Spine Architecture”
As cloud architectures and multi-tenancy capabilities continue to develop and mature, here is an economy of scale that can be realized by aggregating resources across applications, business units, and separate corporations to a common shared, yet segmented, infrastructure.
Elasticity, mobility, automation, and density of virtual machines demands new network architectures focusing on high performance, addressing portability, and the innate understanding of the virtual machine as the new building block of the datacenter.
Virtualization technologies from VMware, Citrix and Microsoft encapsulate existing applications, and abstract them from the physical hardware.The network access layer formed by virtual switches is now inside the server.
The characteristics of networks that support virtualization and cloud computing demand that legacy network practices be abandoned in favor of modern cloud networking architectures, flatter two-tier leaf-spine architecture over a legacy, enterprise
three-tier design.
July 14th 2015 is the End of support for Windows Server 2003, many organizations started to plan for migration from Server 2003 to Server 2012 R2
I hope this link will help you during migration process
Distributed File System Replication
The Distributed File System Replication (DFSR) service is a new multi-master replication engine that is used to keep folders synchronized on multiple servers.
DFS Replication is an effective way to replicate data between servers across a LAN or WAN (remote sites).DFSR uses a new compression algorithm called Remote Differential Compression (RDC).
Memory optimization is the most important feature of virtualization, especially for cloud computing and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) implementation where PCs are replaced by virtual machines running in the data center. This brings the necessity of using hardware resources more efficiently and host more VM’s.
Memory optimization is handled in a different method in each hypervisor. For example, Hyper-V uses a hot-add and ballooning technique and guest operating system is fully aware of memory amounts; while VMware uses over commitment technique.
Dynamic Memory is Hyper-V memory optimization techniques. That came with Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1.
Dynamic Memory is really just an extension idea of hot-add memory ability feature of Windows Server Enterprise and Data-center editions. Memory is added to virtual machines while they run. But instead of plugging in large amounts, tiny amounts of memory are added to the virtual machine. This is done on an on-demand basis from the pool of available memory on the host.
IT mug 