Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012

Enterprise IT managers and techs all over have become increasingly familiar with names such as Xen, Open Xen, KVM, Virtual Box, VMWare and Hyper-V as the virtualization revolution swings in. With buzz words floating around like Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, IaaS and PaaS, it is no wonder that many professionals don’t know which way to turn for their virtualization needs. In the past, VMWare was definitely the dominant player in the data center whereas the market share for SMB’s has been fragmented with those very same names above. While Hyper-V has always had a good reputation, their has been a fierce battle for supremacy in the virtualization market and the stakes are high. Not unlike a Bill O’Reilly vs. Jon Stewart debate, advocates of both platforms come out swinging when the virtues of either is questioned.  I have never hidden my preference for Hyper-V and with Server 2012 the *LOVE* only grows stronger.  Read on for all of the goodness.

So what is it exactly that now puts Hyper-V at the front of the pack? Quite simply the most convincing of all arguments is the economics one. Hyper-V now offers a built-in feature set that is robust enough for the data center and flexible enough for even a small business at a cost that is significantly less than VMWare. The bang-for-the-buck factor is undeniable and frankly has brought a new level of fervor and excitement to the virtualization realm. Going with Hyper-V means you might have an extra 20K in your pocket for that IT department barbecue, camp out and paintball weekend you always wanted, or if you are in one of those countries where extra money in the budget means a real party – knock yourself out!

While I don’t want to sound like I am the script writer for the latest ShamWow commercial, I can say honestly that there is likely not a business in existence that couldn’t benefit from some of the new features that have been bought to the table with Hyper-V’s latest iteration.

At a glance, we have:
-multiple and simultaneous VM migration and failover
-live migration of storage
-Hyper-V Replica for entire site replication and failover
-Hyper-V extensible switch
-Support for high availability using non-shared storage and notably SMB
-Improved NUMA memory management

...and many many more under-the-hood improvements to make Hyper-V more performant, robust, and reliable. All of this is essentially included with your Windows server licence and with the Windows Server 2012 Datacenter edition you get unlimited virtualization rights. No longer is Hyper-V just cheaper, it is often a cut above VMWare. It is also something that is designed according to Windows style guidelines and is intuitive and easy to manage for IT support staff already familiar with Windows server. (If they turn this into a Metro App, I will pull the article immediately. Please tell me why we need the ability to play Angry Birds on a server designed to be managed remotely from Powershell?) Anyway, the switch to server 2012, even in a data center environment, is compelling for sure.

Anyway, as I play with more of these features in the lab, you can look forward to more insight on each. I look forward to sharing this all with you in the form of writeups and training videos.

Cheers!

Matt

APC BR1500LCD: This Is the UPS You Want

You do have a UPS, right?

If so, skip this paragraph.  If not, give your head a shake, and listen to this: if you’re reading this site, you probably have at least $2,000 worth of computer equipment.  Your time and your data is worth far, far more.  And you do NOT want your system attached directly to the same power grid that serves every other light bulb, motor, and heating element in your house.  And your neighbor’s house.  And the rest of your neighborhood.  And you certainly don’t want to be directly attached to the constant lightening strikes, transformer explosions, bird explosions, and a long, long list of other stuff that goes wrong on a daily basis.  We’re pretty good at keeping the power on, and relatively consistent, most of the time.  But consistent means somewhere between 100 and 150 volts.  Good enough for your oven.  Not good enough for your shiny new XPS.  Whether you know it or not, this matters.  Remember that hard drive that died on you?  The flaky video card?  Those weird blue-screens you were having a few months back?  The old Pentium-4 that died on you?  Bad power eats away at electronics, and eventually, destroys it.

And if you do have a UPS, is it worth the grief?  If you spent less than $100, it probably isn’t.  Sure, it’s going to be better than that power bar with the ‘Surge Protected!’ sticker and the glowing orange power switch.  It’s probably even better than your $1,500 Monster Cable PowerCenter.  And it even has enough of a battery to keep a small computer running for a few minutes when the power goes out.  But let’s face it: these sub-$100 models are kind of like the disposable inkjet printers of similar cost.  They usually get the job done, kind of, for a year or two.  But they’re not a pleasure to use.  They’re not exactly equipment you’d trust your life to.  And they’re not a particularly sound investment.  Cheap, sure, but not good value.

Enter the APC Back-UPS RS 1500VA LCD 120V, affectionately known as the APC BR1500LCD (catchy names).  This UPS isn’t really cheap, but you can probably track one down for under $200.  And once you drop that extra $100, you’ll never again spend any less on a UPS.

 

The first thing you’re going to notice when you pick this up is that it’s really big, and really heavy.  This is a good thing.  Small and light is fine for cell phones, but when it comes to handling power, it’s either big and heavy or it’s cheap and crappy.  The guts of this beast will do exactly what the marketing says they do: provide clean, uninterrupted power.  All the time.  The usual features are there, of course: phone line protection for your ADSL modem, co-axial protection for your cable modem, a USB port so your computer can talk to the UPS, a bunch of fancy software you’ll never install, and plenty of pure, sweet, power outlets!  Of course, you can expect pretty good battery life: I get about 20 minutes of backup for my big, honking tower (with two power-hungry video cards and more hard drives than I can count), three large displays, and all the usual accessories.  A second unit, powering only some vital (but low power) networking and telephone equipment at the moment, reports estimated battery life of over 8 hours, but I haven’t actually tested it to verify.

The second thing you’ll notice is that there’s a screen!  You may think this is a gimmick, but once you work with it a while, you’ll understand that rather than a gimmick, the screen is what turns this device from a big, heavy, beeping power strip to something a bit worthier:

 

As you can see, you’ll always have access to the three most important bits of data: power status, battery status, and load status.  This alone is a big deal.  It means you’ll never have to worry about overloading your UPS, you know exactly how your battery is doing, you know exactly what your UPS is doing, and you know why it’s doing it.  This information is presented in a way that even grandma can understand.  But there’s also a numeric component, which can be switched between different fields:

• Current load, in watts: How much power your equipment is sucking down.  This is good information to have, even in a general sense, but becomes vital for working with a UPS.
• Current load, in percent: A UPS can only provide so much power.  This shows you how close to the limit you are.  As a rule of thumb, it’s probably a good idea to keep this under 50%.
• Output, in volts: Okay, this is a bit useless.  Hopefully this is pretty close to 120V, since that’s the entire purpose of this device.
• Output, in hertz: And this is entirely useless.  Again, this is what the device is for; so long as it’s on and working, you can assume this is going to be 60.0 Hz (or damn close to it).
• Input, in volts: This is a bit more helpful.  In theory, this number should be 120V, but it won’t be.  Input voltage will constantly change a bit, and often it will change a lot.  This reading lets you know exactly what your power company is delivering to you at any given moment.
• Event counter: This is my favorite.  It’s a running count of the number of times the UPS has had to jump into action to save your equipment from a power surge, brownout, or blackout.  This doesn’t include the continuous massaging of more ‘normal’ power fluctuations to keep the output exactly where it should.  Since I last reset this counter a few weeks ago, this UPS of mine has dealt with 31 power events.  I noticed about 3 of them.
• Estimated run time: Another really useful bit of information.  This tells you how long the UPS expects to be able to keep things running on battery.  You can get this information whether you’re running on battery or not, and it takes the current load, battery charge level, and battery health into account.  When the power is actually out, this acts as a countdown timer.

With all this information, your UPS becomes more than an annoying box that beeps mysteriously at you: it becomes a trustworthy addition to your system that you can understand and depend on.  And since power is the lifeblood of all your computer equipment, healthy power means healthy systems.

You need a UPS.  And this is the one you want.

Netgear WNDR3700: This Is The Wireless Router You Want

For years, I’ve been complaining about the sorry state of consumer-grade wireless equipment.  It never works properly.  Every product I’ve ever used – and believe me, I’ve used a lot of them – is slow, buggy, and lacking in even the most basic of features.  Originally, this was to be expected.  Wireless was new, it was complicated, and it was expensive.  Consumers wanted it, but they didn’t want to pay hundreds for it.  Shortcuts had to be made.  These days, though, when wireless chipsets are practically free and we’ve had years to refine the technology, there’s really no excuse for it.

Well, enter the Netgear WNDR 3700 Wireless Router.  This little beast sits very nicely between the crappy consumer-grade hardware and the ridiculously overpriced and complex enterprise-grade hardware.  It’s not cheap – at $160 to $200, this is one of the priciest routers you’ll ever see in a retail store.  But let’s face it: you get what you pay for.  If cost is your primary concern, you might as well quit reading this now and go buy that $30 Linksys model you found on Craigslist.

So, what do you get for your money?  Well, three things, really: you get features, you get performance, and you get reliability.

Reliability is a huge deal for me.  You know how nice it is to work with a system that has a good, old fashioned Ethernet connection?  You don’t have to worry about drop-outs, slow downs, or other grief.  You just get your work done.  Well, that’s what this router brings, except now you can get your work done on the couch without tripping over wires.  Through all my testing, this router didn't even hiccup.  It works flawlessly, ceaselessly.  There's not much more to say about this, but it's a really, really big deal.

And it's fast.  Very fast.  This is something that's often overlooked, because most consumers don't really push much data over home networks.  But when you're copying ISO images, watching movies, using VOIP, working through RDP, opening big files, and doing all the other stuff us technical people do with networks, it really starts to matter.  Perhaps the best way of summing up the performance of this router is by comparing a couple of quotes from SmallNetBuilder.com.  Here are some (conveniently trimmed) excerpts from their preview article:

…the claim of "350 Mbps real-world maximum wireless throughput" definitely smells like "creative" marketing to me.

…the highest speed I have measured from any wireless router is 111 Mbps…

…it's highly unlikely that you'll see anywhere near 350 Mbps of "real world" TCP/IP wireless throughput from the WNDR3700, or any dual-stream draft 11n router, for that matter.

And then, their thoughts after reviewing the unit:

…it turns out that the WNDR3700 actually manages to deliver the goods and will get NETGEAR seriously back into the N router game…

…routing speed well above what most of us can use, plenty of simultaneous sessions and steady throughput…

Yes, the WNDR3700 really can deliver 250 - 300 Mbps…

Sure, there’s a bit more to the story than that, but the point is: this router is fast.  Very fast.  Oh, and did I mention the gigabit Ethernet ports?  And not only is this router fast, it offers very impressive range on the 2.4 GHz radio – and remains fast at long distances.  In fact, this router allows me to get great performance in places where other routers wouldn’t even connect (or would constantly drop the connection).

But perhaps the most interesting difference between this router and the rest of the crowd is the long list of well-implemented features it offers.  All of the basic stuff is there, of course – and well implemented.  DHCP reservation, static routing, a detailed log, great status reporting, good port forwarding and triggering, support for dynamic DNS services, and all the other stuff you hope to find (but often don’t) is right where you’d expect it to be.  There are a few other nice touches, as well: automatic notification of new firmware (with one click to download and install right from Netgear’s server, if you want), very customizable tools to block certain sites or protocols (always, or according to a schedule), the ability to have the routers log e-mailed to you on a regular basis (or immediate notification of blocking activity), SPI firewall, great QOS support (by MAC address, port number, or physical LAN port), and a traffic meter.

But there are a few things that really set this router apart.  Each of the two radios (one for 2.4 GHz and one for 5.0 GHz) can be configured separately, and each radio also supports a separate guest SSID that allows clients access to only the Internet while (optionally) preventing access to the local network or restricting access to the current SSID.  Each of these connections can be configured with different SSIDs and security settings.  This means this router can actually expose up to four different SSIDs and up to three isolated networks.  Wireless repeating is supported, and can again be configured independently for each radio.  And, there’s a USB port on the back for rudimentary NAS support.  This is a very nice way of adding storage to your network, and while it might not be powerful enough to use as a primary storage device, it’s ideal for storing movies and music.  It even runs a DLNA media server.

There are a few problems: the web GUI could be better (the router only lets you connect to the administration site from one IP address at a time), the NAS performance isn’t stellar, and the 5 GHz radio’s range could be better.  But I haven’t come across anything really significant.

All in all, this is one fantastic device, so whenever you can possibly justify replacing your router, I highly recommend you invest in Netgear’s new baby.  Finally, we have a ‘prosumer’ grade wireless router.

Go ahead.  Treat yourself.  Your network deserves it.