Managing Virtual Box with PowerShell

Like Jeff Hicks, I rely on virtualisation for my work, and I too use Oracle’s Virtual Box. As Jeff mentions in a recent blog article, it’s light weight, has a pretty low footprint and works. In the office and classroom, I often use Hyper-V, but I have Virtual Box on my Windows 7 laptop and use it for demos, for writing and for the occasional short PowerShell chalk/talk class.

Now I discover that Virtual Box has a COM interface to enable management, and Jeff’s written a module to enable you to use it. You can get this module from Jeff’s blog site. I’ve downloaded it and will be putting it onto my Win7 laptop very, very shortly!

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,Virtual Box,Oracle,Hyper-V,Jeff Hicks

Lync Server 2010 and Virtualisation

With the Lync Server 2010 RC available, the details of what it will take to run Lync in production are emerging. One really nice change from OCS 2007 is that Lync is now fully supported when virtualised. With OCS 2007, only some roles were supported, although anecdotal evidence suggested OCS would work OK virtualised – the issue was more with the client.

This means that all major workloads, including presence, IM, conferencing and Enterprise Voice can be run in a virtual environment. This includes Standard and Enterprise editions. There are some restrictions on virtualisation platforms though, only VMware and Hyper-V are supported. For both virtualisation platforms, only Serve 2008 R2 is supported. And for Hyper-V, you must also run the host as Server 2008 R2.  Microsoft will support virtualisations using SE to support up to around 2000 users and Enterprise Edition pools supporting up to 40k users. Edge servers can also be virtualised.

For Hype-V at least, the hosting requirements will significant: 8 Core 2.27Ghz processors with 16GB+ of ram and fast disks (particularly for your back end SQL servers). With virtualisation, your overall consolidation ratio is around 3:1 A suitably speced out host machine will support around 4 Front End servers, or 4 A/V Conferencing Servers for a user base of up to 40k users. For full functionality, you’d also want at least Directors (2 Director roles can be co-located on a single Hyper-V host) and two Edge servers (also co-located on a single VM host). You can also co-locate your Monitoring and Archiving server roles.

You can also virtualise your SQL Server back end database, but in a large Enterprise environment, you may just want to keep your back end cluster as a pair of real servers. You can of course, co-locate two SQL Server VMs on a single host to serve as your fail over back end cluster. Although this only provides resilience in the case the guest OS or applications go down!

The total level of consolidation in such a scenairo would be from around 19 servers, down to around 6 or 7 large hosts machines. You’d then need to consider your Mediation Server requirements! To some degree, the number of mediation servers required will be based on your requirements (how many PSTN ingress/egress locations do you have and what sort of gateways are  you using). With Lync 2010’s Media Bypass facilities (and suitable PSTN gateways!) you could co-locate up to around 4 Mediation Servers on a single host. My guess, although I do not have the means to test it) is that you could probably support more Mediation Servers on a given host, depending on the Gateway architecture

Technorati Tags: Lync Server 2010,virtualisation

Office Communications Server 2007 Virtualisation Support

Earlier this year, Microsoft confirmed that it would now support OCS 2007 in a virtualised environment. This has been a big ask by clients pretty much ever since OCS was launched. Just about every time I’ve taught OCS in the past couple of years, as well as in the OCS newsgroups, the question of why it’s not supported comes up over and over again. Along with anecdotal evidence that it worked in at least a VMware ESX environment. And in the classroom, we see OCS working (well as least the server components) just fine.
The support Microsoft is providing caters for OCS server roles running in VMs hosted on both a single server (a typical classroom scenario) or hosted on a number of servers (a scenario more likely in corporate deployment). Support is limited to a subset of OCS Server roles, i.e. Front-End Servers, Back-End SQL Server 2008 (64-bit), Group Chat Channel Servers, Group Chat Channel and Compliance Servers, and Access Edge Servers. This means no support of other server roles - Microsoft say these roles are not supported due to “possible quality issues” with real time media.
It took MS a while after R2 was released to support this - I understand that part of the delay in announcing full support was testing. MS always wants (needs!) to test anything it offers to support, and OCS is no different. In announcing VM support, MS has tested a fully distributed topology with 40,000 users and 10,000 group chat users. This means, says Microsoft that: “audio/video/web conferencing servers, audio/video/web edge conferencing servers, dial-in conferencing, Communicator Web Access, enterprise voice, or Remote Call Control may not be deployed as part of the virtualized pool.” The impact of this means that you can not (at least in a supported fashion) virtualise a Standard Edition pool (or for that matter an EE consolidated pool), a consolidated edge server or a CWA server.
Microsoft also published an interesting whitepaper detailing the tested architecture. The white paper also looks at OCS performance and how you can use the Capacity Planning Tool.
This is a great move forward but it comes with some strings. Namely, the roles that are supported only work in an administratively complex environment. Or to put it another way, all the easy installations of OCS (SE, consolidated EE pool, consolidated edge) can not be virtualised in a supported way. And since, with R2, Microsoft has de-emphasised the distributed architecture, to deploy OCS in a virtualised environment, you would need to use the command line tools which makes the deployment potentially more work. I am hoping we’ll see a better story with the next wave of product.

Technorati Tags: OCS 2007 R2,OCS,Office Communications Server,virtualisation

Disk to VHD – Another Cool Tool from the Sysinternals Guys

Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell have released yet another cool tool – Disk2VHD (version 1.21) which you can download from here. As it turns out, I’m looking to convert one of my physical boxes to a VM – I use the system rarely but don’t want to chuck it. This tool would be just the business – I could easily run a VM of this system on my laptop when I actually need it. 

The VHD that this tool creates can be used as a VM for either Microsoft Virtual PC or Hyper-V. One important limitation – with Virtual PC, the largest volume is 127GB. And the tool is command line – but you could of course, run it from PowerShell!

Technorati Tags: Disk2VHD,VHD,Virtualisation