NetApp for Microsoft Environments

Streamlined Backups + Integrated Storage Monitoring for Hyper-V

Lee Gates, Senior Manager – Microsoft Solutions Engineering

This week at TechEd Europe NetApp announced two new products for Microsoft virtualized environments that integrate with existing Microsoft technologies and management frameworks.

SnapManager for Hyper-V enables streamlined, policy-based management of backups, restores, and remote replication in a Microsoft virtualized environment. It uses VSS integration to create application-consistent backup copies and will be one of the first backup products (if not the first backup product) to support Cluster Shared Volumes with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V on Windows Failover Clusters. Nick Triantos wrote a great blog post (Sneak Preview: SnapManager for Hyper-V) with loads of screenshots plus details on protection policies, SnapMirror integration, and available Powershell cmdlets.

Another area where we’re streamlining management for Hyper-V environments involves centralized storage monitoring via System Center. ApplianceWatch PRO 2.0, NetApp's next-generation management pack, has been designed to allow high-level monitoring frameworks to easily interpret SNMP traps from NetApp controllers. This means that your standard event classification and response rules can be applied to NetApp controllers while you can see alerts or drill down into storage components from System Center Operations Manager interface.

ApplianceWatch PRO 2.0 includes a separate management pack for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 integration with PRO Tips. The MP issues a PRO Tip for VMs when a volume that hosts VHDs for the VMs exceed 95% space utilization. This Tip offers auto-remediation, which is to grow the volume such that its space utilization is lowered to 85%.

Both SnapManager for Hyper-V and ApplianceWatch PRO 2.0 are two great examples of how NetApp’s alignment with Microsoft enables our joint customers take full advantage of Hyper-V R2 capabilities as they virtualize their server environments.

Extreme Makeover, the NetApp Way

Chaffie McKenna, Reference Architect – Microsoft Solutions Engineering

Okay, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to blog about this.  The last time one of my friends posted a video, I let you know about it.  Well, he’s gone and done it again, appearing as a central character in NetApp’s “Extreme Makeover: Data Center Edition”.  Talking about needing his 15 minutes of fame or something. ;-) Okay, so I was joking about that, but more serious now…

If you’ve ever worked at NetApp, you know that it’s pretty laid back here.  We don’t mind having a laugh at our own expense or trying some creative marketing.  It’s fun, possibly something that could go viral, but also to get folks thinking, “Hey, NetApp folks seem like really good people” and hope they want to work with us.  We want folks to want to work with us because we’re “good people” as they say back in my hometown of 3000 folks in Wisconsin.

Should Everything be Virtualized?

Chris Lionetti, Reference Architect – Microsoft Solutions Engineering

This posting is actually a response to a recent blog entry that I read. the question is coming up over and over. The question of the day is ‘should I virtualize everything’?

I would submit that yes you should indeed virtualize everything that is possible to virtualize. Virtualization gives you something much more valuable than server consolidation or even resource utilization. it buys you the ability to define a lifecycle for a physical server that would be otherwise be impactful to your business. Forget Information Lifecycle Management, Think Hardware Lifecycle Management. You as the customer should be careful what you let into your datacenter, but more importantly you should have a plan for how you are going to get it out of your infrastructure without an outage.

You can use a virtual machine to divorce your hardware from your applications. When a physical server has outlived its usefulness, but the application it hosts is business critical, wouldn’t it be nice to more that application to a current physical server platform? In fact, you can change all kinds of infrastructure beneath a Virtual Machine without affecting the virtual machine.

NetApp Deduplication with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

Abrar Y, Technical Marketing Engineer – Microsoft Solutions Engineering

Deduplication is probably one of the hottest technologies making its rounds in the industry right now, which promises in delivering significant space savings.

Deduplication, by definition, is a technology eliminates redundant or duplicate blocks of data, which results in storing only a single instance of the data blocks. Deduplication results in sharing blocks of data between files without affecting the accessibility of these files. Deduplication therefore reduces the space required to store files by storing only unique blocks of data and eliminating the duplicate ones.

Acceleration at NetApp Insight

Lee Gates, Senior Manager – Microsoft Solutions Engineering

This has been an incredible few weeks for the Microsoft Alliance Engineering team at NetApp.  I’ve been a little busy quiet lately but wanted to highlight what’s been happening since the team is presenting a lot of sessions at NetApp Insight.

Chaffie McKenna has been super busy responding to questions and comments on her Hyper-V series two weeks ago.  Much of this information is coming out in our TR-3702 update due next week in the tech library.  The reader comments and questions shows how interested NetApp customers are.  Chris Lionetti is joining her at Insight to present a 3 hour Hyper-V Bootcamp for our field and partners.

Brad on NetApp Communities has been heads down with Exchange 2010 now that it has been released.  He is in the process of drafting an update to our Best Practices Guide.  It is due in late November.  I invite our readers to join us in the Messaging and Collaboration section in our communities.  We are close to publishing the update, and we want to know the product features our customers have already started to use in their Exchange 2010 testing.  He’s presenting this week at Insight on both 2007 and 2010 best practices, methodology, and sizing.

Script your Tasks: Task 1 – Rapid Virtual Machine Provisioning

Ravi B C B, Technical Marketing Engineer – Microsoft Solutions Engineering

As I sign in to put up my first Blog Post, I intend to start off with one of my favorite topics; scripting the tasks. You guessed it right; I was a System / Network Administrator and in to Technical Support in my previous job roles. With this background, I bring in a good amount of experience and expertise to the team for Server Virtualization on leading Hypervisor products.

As time passed by, I was probably falling in to that monotonous feel which got me in to the habit of writing scripts for the routine tasks. However, it turned out to be a fun to play around with these commands and see them do your job.

For the day, I’m presenting the script logic for Rapid Virtual Machine Provisioning in a Microsoft Hyper-V environment connected to a NetApp Storage System. The tools that have been used for this scripting task are Windows PowerShell, NetApp SnapDrive for Windows and Windows Management Interface (WMI) Calls.

Free Hyper-V Tools

Chaffie McKenna, Reference Architect – Microsoft Solutions Engineering

I am a big fan of scripting, I mean they allow the “little folks” to make the big differences.  By that, I mean, that the people behind closed doors who application users and those attached to desktops, whether physical or virtual, never know how much effort is put forth, let alone know the people who make the effort to make their jobs easier.  And we, the IT folks behind closed data center walls or 70’s cubicle walls that were hand me downs from executive row, score big when we don’t have to rely on the bells and whistles that the big app developers push out.

While those flashy GUIs and list of features make our jobs 90% better*, let’s face it, they are made for everyman’s environment.  They aren’t made for mine.  So when I am empowered to create solutions that meet my needs exactly… That make me invisible to the end user, because I have the tools I need to do my job so well, that they have no idea that I even exist to do it, let alone know how I do it… I am all over that.

Prepare for Hyper-V Exam – Part 2

Sri Gangoor, Technical Marketing Engineer – Microsoft Solutions Engineering

Continuation to previous blog, I would like to help you start focusing on topics and tips to prepare for the Hyper-V exam (Microsoft 070-652).

As mentioned in my previous blog, Hyper-V exam 070-652 expects the candidate to know about the following four major sections.

1. Install Hyper-V

2. Configure and Optimize Hyper-V

3. Deployment of Virtual Machines

4. Manage and Monitor Virtual Machines

Today, I will talk about ‘Installing Hyper-V’ section. Experience makes a person perfect or at least leads in that direction. It is true even with Hyper-V topic. If you are planning to take Hyper-V exam, start looking for servers that are capable of running Hyper-V.

More TechNet Webcasts on Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint

Chaffie McKenna, Reference Architect – Microsoft Solutions Engineering

I was almost too late on this… Gasp!!!  Microsoft is hosting some additional webcasts in addition to the TechNet Virtual Conference I blogged about earlier this week.

It looks like these webcasts will cover Virtualization Best Practices for Exchange, SQL Server, and SharePoint.  These should be extremely important events for all NetApp customers planning to virtualize Microsoft Apps, most importantly when deployed with Microsoft Virtualization, such as Hyper-V, SCVMM, App-V, MDOP, et al.  However, the recommendations associated with the general practice of virtualizing these Microsoft Applications can benefit those customers also deploying with VMware and Citrix to some degree.

Microsoft TechNet Virtual Conference

Chaffie McKenna, Reference Architect – Microsoft Solutions Engineering

I wanted to let folks that Microsoft TechNet is hosting a Virtual Conference this week on October 30th.  They have put together 5 sessions that will allow folks to learn more about Microsoft products and solutions, including new ones!  Some of the content will possibly be a repeat of content shared at previous events this year, such as TechEd and Microsoft Webcasts, but the majority of the content promises to be fresh.  this includes presenters for these sessions that don’t make the usual circuits, also providing a fresh perspective on all the topics.

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009

John S. Parker – Reference Architect with Microsoft Alliance Engineering

Last week I was privileged with attending the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009.  This years MPC was held at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas, NV.  The conference highlighted the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010.  The theme that I detected through out the conference as about providing the user with the tools they need to get the job done so that IT can focus on the high value operations and development, not on writing reports.  The functionality of PowerPivot (“Gemini“ has a name now) gives the power user the tools to build reports and charts that can be consumed by others without wasting IT resources.  PowerPivot is an extension of Analysis Services and Excel on steroids allowing for more rows now than ever to be in an Excel spreadsheet.  Then the integration between Reporting Services and SharePoint that allows users to subscribe to data feeds seamlessly keeping all those pesky reports automatically up to date with out rerunning the report.  It is simply fantastic.  I came away from the conference with the sense that this is really just the tip of the iceberg for a Business Intelligence revolution. 

One of my friends saw a status update of mine on Facebook saying that I was excited about SharePoint 2010 and was wondering what kind of people I was hanging out with.  Well it was folks like Burzin Patel and Donald Farmer both from Microsoft who gave great presentations at the conference.  I am really looking forward to the time when CTP3 goes public and I can start playing with PowerPivot. 

Windows 7 VHD and Native VHD Boot

Chaffie McKenna, Reference Architect – Microsoft Solutions Engineering

While many folks are rushing to install Windows 7 now that it is generally available to the public, few know that there is a new option available to install Windows 7 (and Windows Server 2008 R2).  This is probably of most interest to tech folks and geeks, especially those road warriors.

With Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, you can install both into a VHD, rather than the local hard disk itself.  Microsoft has made improvements with Fixed-Size VHDs, such that they offer within 3% of native performance of the underlying disk.  Therefore there is almost no reason why anyone technically inclined shouldn’t be installing their desktop, workstation, and laptop Operating System of choice into a VHD rather than onto the local hard disk.  This is called Native VHD Boot.

Along these lines, Microsoft has long offered most of their OSes on VHDs, but now Microsoft finally published Windows 7 on a VHD, which is available for download by everyone.  It includes Windows 7 pre-configured on a VHD, with a 90-day evaluation license. If you wish to use it longer that that, simply enter a license code.

New Windows Server 2008 R2 E-Book

Chaffie McKenna, Reference Architect – Microsoft Solutions Engineering

Microsoft has just released a new E-Book for Windows Server 2008 R2, which covers Hyper-V and Microsoft VDI (via RDS), as well as AD, IIS, File Services, and a few other lightly covered features.  I downloaded it this weekend and it’s not too bad, especially for those new to Microsoft Virtualization...  The section on Hyper-V is pretty high level, but useful to those who are new to Hyper-V, as I said before.  The section on VDI is much more useful however, covering the terminology and different tools that make up Microsoft VDI, with some screenshots along the way, and it even covers licensing to a degree, which is often the most confusing part about Microsoft VDI.  The other sections of the book are fairly high level too, but provide a thorough introduction to the features/solutions in each chapters.

Download the new Windows Server 2008 R2 E-Book from Microsoft here.

Chapter 1  What’s New in Windows Server r2 
Chapter 2  Installation and Configuration: adding r2 to Your World
Chapter 3  Hyper-V: Scaling and Migrating Virtual Machines 
Chapter 4  Remote Desktop  Services and VDI: Centralizing Desktop and application Management 
Chapter 5  Active Directory: Improving and automating Identity and access 
Chapter 6  The File Services role
Chapter 7  IIS 7.5: Improving the Web application platform
Chapter 8  Direct Access and Network policy Server
Chapter 9  Other Features and  enhancements

Please follow me @virtualizethis and check out my team as they begin to pop-up on Twitter too!

Prepare for the Microsoft Hyper-V Exam (70-652)

Sri Gangoor, Technical Marketing Engineer – Microsoft Solutions Engineering

IDC predicts that the new market segment for virtual server management software and expects to grow by a compounding 21%. With the introduction of Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 product, Microsoft has entered the leadership role in the virtualization space. Microsoft Hyper-V offers enterprise ready solution to solve business requirements from small to enterprise level customers. For IT professionals, it is good to know the future technology growth area. IT professionals are expected to meet the required skills and expertise up-to-date. Hence, it is critical to study virtualization technology and get certified to seek further career growth and opportunities.

Hyper-V is attracting the much needed attention of all types of customers. I want to blog about the efforts required to study Microsoft virtualization technology in the context NetApp storage solutions.

Assuming that the reader is interested to know more about Hyper-V certification, I would suggest visiting Microsoft certification website.

Microsoft expects the students to focus on sections while preparing to take Hyper-V certification tests (70-652).

Microsoft Hyper-V: Data Center Ready?

Sri Gangoor, Technical Marketing Engineer – Microsoft Solutions Engineering

The concept of converting the hardware into software was introduced several decades ago by IBM. It was a great idea. Now, customers are hungry to save datacenter resources. Virtualization has become the mantra.

Microsoft entered the virtualization market behind others. Microsoft has made huge progress in providing solid and stable virtualization solutions to customers. With the availability of Hyper-V R2, Microsoft has hit the road, on the freeway this time, going at a full speed. Windows 2008 R2 is a feature rich, entirely new Windows platform.

Now the main concern or the question is – Is Hyper-V capable of providing solutions in a customer’s production environment? Among all of these, highly available solution stands out from Hyper-V R2 product.