Azure Data Box

Azure Data Box is Microsoft’s answer to AWS snowball.

Basically this is a secure, hardened “box”/Storage for transferring large amounts of data to Azure.

The basics are simple. The box plugs directly into your network and supports standard SMB/CIFS protocols.

You copy your data to the box, which supports up to 100TB, and ship it back to Microsoft where it will be offloaded to your Azure storage.

There is also integrated support for 3rd party products such as Commvault, Veeam. Veritas & more.

You can read the official statement here

Issues when running a mixed mode Active Directory with 2003 & 2012R2 Domain Controllers

The Windows Active Directory team have just relased a blog post regarding issues with mixed mode windows 2003 & 2012R2 Active Directory envirmoents.

Now lots of people are upgrading to Active Directory 2012 and many of those are from 2003.

The known symptons seem to be:

1. When any domain user tries to log on to their computer, the logon may fail with “unknown username or bad password”. Only local logons are successful.

2. Operating Systems on which the issue has been seen: Windows 7, WS2008 R2, WS2012 R2

3. This can affect Clients and Servers (including Domain Controllers)

4. This problem specifically occurs after the affected machine has changed its password. It can vary from a few minutes to a few hours post the change before the symptoms manifest.

The suggested workaround is to restart the computer that is experiencing the issue. This recreates the AES key as the client machine or member server reaches out to the KDC for Salt. Usually, this will fix the issue temporarily. (at least until the next password change).

My advice would be not to doodle around with the migration and remove all 2003 Active Directory servers as soon as possible. Granted in some enviroments this is not always that simple to perfrom.

For the full article read the Active Directroy teams blog over here.

 

Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter 2.0

A friend of mine just pointed out to me that Microsoft have released a new version of Virtual Machine Converter.

As you may recall I mentioned Virtual Machine Converter in a previous post – Migrating VMware to Hyper-V

The new version includes the following features:

• Converts virtual disks that are attached to a VMware virtual machine to virtual hard disks (VHDs) that can be uploaded to Windows Azure.
• Provides native Windows PowerShell capability that enables scripting and integration into IT automation workflows.
• Supports conversion and provisioning of Linux-based guest operating systems from VMware hosts to Hyper-V hosts.
• Supports conversion of offline virtual machines.
• Supports the new virtual hard disk format (VHDX) when converting and provisioning in Hyper-V in Windows Server® 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2012.
• Supports conversion of virtual machines from VMware vSphere 5.5, VMware vSphere 5.1, and VMware vSphere 4.1 hosts Hyper-V virtual machines.
• Supports Windows Server® 2012 R2, Windows Server® 2012, and Windows® 8 as guest operating systems that you can select for conversion.

Standard MVMC Features
In addition to the new features previously identified,MVMC provides the following functionality:

 

• Converts and deploys virtual machines from VMware hosts to Hyper-V hosts on any of the following operating systems:
• Windows Server® 2012 R2
• Windows Server® 2012
• Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
• Converts VMware virtual machines, virtual disks, and configurations for memory, virtual processor, and other virtual computing resources from the source to Hyper-V.
• Adds virtual network interface cards (NICs) to the converted virtual machine on Hyper-V.
• Supports conversion of virtual machines from VMware vSphere 5.5, VMware vSphere 5.0, and VMware vSphere 4.1 hosts to Hyper-V.
• Has a wizard-driven GUI, which simplifies performing virtual machine conversions.
• Uninstalls VMware Tools before online conversion (online only) to provide a clean way to migrate VMware-based virtual machines to Hyper-V.
  Important MVMC takes a snapshot of the virtual machine that you are converting before you uninstall VMware Tools, and then shuts down the source machine to preserve state during conversion. The virtual machine is restored to its previous state after the source disks that are attached to the virtual machine are successfully copied to the machine where the conversion process is run. At that point, the source machine in VMware can be turned on, if required.
  Important MVMC does not uninstall VMware Tools in an offline conversion. Instead, it disables VMware services, drivers, and programs only for Windows Server guest operating systems. For file conversions with Linux guest operating systems, VMware Tools are not disabled or uninstalled. We highly recommend that you manually uninstall VMware Tools when you convert an offline virtual machine.
• Supports Windows Server and Linux guest operating system conversion. For more details, see the section “Supported Configurations for Virtual Machine Conversion” in this guide.
• Includes Windows PowerShell capability for offline conversions of VMware-based virtual hard disks (VMDK) to a Hyper-V–based virtual hard disk file format (.vhd file).
  Note The offline disk conversion does not include driver fixes.

You can download the new version of Virtual Machine Converter here.

Migrating VMware to Hyper-V

Over the last few weeks I have been involved in multiple migrations of VMware to Hyper-V. It’s actually quite amazing how many people are migrating systems to Hyper-V.
The main reasons I hear our better Pricing on Hyper-V and improved backup speeds and stability.
There seem to be issues of VM’s with heavy I/O disconnecting in VMware during backups.

I’m often asked how to perform VMware to Hyper-V migrations and what tools are available, so I’m going to list the tools here that I have used followed by an explanation of what each one can achieve.

SCVMM – Virtual to Virtual Conversion

Disk2VHD v2 – Converts Disks to VHDX

Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter

StarWind V2V Converter

Vision solutions Doubletake – Doubletake MOVE V2V replication

Netapp Shift

First of all we have System Center VMM. Now using VMM for migration is quite simple. You connect VMM to your Virtual Center therefor allowing VMM to see all VMware VM’s. VMM will then allow you to perform a conversion of any powered off VM. The main drawback being that the VM has to be powered off during conversion, which equals a couple of hours+ of downtime depending on the size of the VM that you are migrating.
If for some reason you don’t want to connect the VMM server to your VCenter you can copy your VM’s to the VMM library and perform the conversation directly from the library.

Another nice free tool we have is Disk2VHD. Now Disk2VHD is a sysinternals project (now part of Microsoft). It is a standalone self executable that when run from a source computer can convert the computers/Servers hard drives into VHDx files.
So you can use it to convert both physical or virtual servers. The tool is extremely fast at converting disks, however take into account that the server is online and any changes made from the point that the conversion starts will not be recorded into the conversion. So if converting File, Database, Exchange servers and so on make sure to stop any services that will allow the server to function during migration. Also a thing to note is that Disk2VHD will creat a VHDx file, you will have to manually create the VM and attach the newly created VHDX files to the VM.

Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter is similar to SCVMM but is a standalone tool that is also fully scriptable VIA CLI and can be used in conjunction with System Center orchestrater.

Starwind offer a free V2V converter which can basically convert VMDK Files to VHDX Files. It works fone, however is completely standalone and has no integration for creating the VM’s automatically.

Now when it comes to large-scale migrations Doubletake offer a fantastic solution. Doubletake moves allows you to replicate VM’s from VMware to Hyper-V. You can migrate the VM’s online with zero downtime. Now just before the failover from VMware to Hyper-V you power off the source VM perform one final replication of the changes and then power on the VM in Hyper-V. Average downtime for the VM is under 15 Mins. This is a fantastic solution for near zero downtime migrations.

The final solution I’m going to mention is Netapp shift and I have to admit that I haven’t had hands on experience with it but it looks totally awesome. Netapp claim to have the ability to migrate a whole LUN of VMware VM’s to hyper-V and attach the newVM’s to the hypervisor in under 10 Mins. Check out the Video on YouTube. If you have a Netapp array this seems like the way to go.

Happy migrating.

How to migrate to Hyper-V 2012 R2

With the release of Windows 2012R2 and with it Hyper-V 2012R2 many of you are probably wondering how to migrate your existing environments to 2012R2.
For the first time Microsoft has issued that migration (from 2012) can be achieved with zero downtime. Now while this is possible there are certain requirements to be able to achieve this.
There are basically three ways in wich you can migrate to Hyper-V 2012R2 so I’ll outline them for you.

The first is and easiest way is you can live migrate the VM’s to the new server. However live migration is only possible between VM’s using shared Storage. Now you can’t add a windows 2012R2 server to a 2012 cluster so the only way you can achieve this is if you’re using SMB share as your storage.

Pros:

• Extremely fast migration
• No downtime

Cons:

• requires you to be using SMB storage

The second option is to perform a shared nothing live migration. In this scenario all VM’s are basically replicated the new server and after replication they are “live migrated” in the background.

Pros:

• No downtime

Cons:

• Time consuming as all VM’s have to be replicated to new server.
• If using Block Level Replication, requires a new Lun for the new server, existing Lun can’t be connected concurrently to new and old servers running different version of hyper-v.
• If using block level shared storage (Iscsi, Fiber) each VM is temporarily going to require double the space during initial replication.

The third and final option is to perform a cluster migration. This option is of course only valid if you have a cluster and are moving to a new cluster.
You basically perform a copy cluster role operation using Windows failover clustering and run the wizard.

Pros:

• All Cluster resources and settings are transferred to new cluster.
• Does not require additional Luns, or space provisioning

Cons:

• Requires downtime of the VM’s while transferring the Lun to the new server.

These are the three options for migrating VM’s to a new server. There is also a fourth option where you could just manually copy (or export) all VM’s to the new server and then import them via Hyper-V manager, but that isn’t really a migration.

Hope this helps you understand the basics of how to migrate your VM’s to Windows Hyper-V 2012R2 and again we see the benefits of using SMB shares as Hyper-V storage.
Happy Migrating.