tudy .ro – Tudor Damian
I plan to live forever. So far, so good.
The 2010 MVP Summit experience
Feb 21st
I’ve just returned from this year’s MVP Summit, and it’s been quite an experience! Got the chance to talk with a few fellow MVPs, and most of all, got to spend a couple of amazing days with Ben, Mike and the rest of the Virtualization team in the Microsoft Campus over in Redmond (or the “NDA Campus”, as people ended up calling it on twitter, due to obvious reasons). We were among the few “privileged” MVPs that got a good load of “super duper secret special NDA” material. But all I can say right now (while still under NDA) is that really cool things are coming, and they’re well worth the wait! 
The Sheraton in Bellevue was also a very nice location to stay in, and Bellevue in itself is quite a treat. The flight to New Jersey wasn’t as pleasant as I would have expected though, but hey – you win some, you lose some, I guess.
I’ll be staying in the US for another 2 weeks or so, getting to go to New York, Miami and Las Vegas. Should be fun!
Windows 7 – academic launch
Nov 5th
After last week’s Microsoft Academic Program opening in UBB Cluj, this week is time for the official academic launch of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. I’ll be the one talking a bit about the latter (Win 2008).
More details on the launch announcement page.
Online webcast: Enterprise Virtualization
Oct 12th
On Wednesday (October 14th, 11:00am Romanian time), I’ll be holding I held an online webcast on Enterprise virtualization. I will be discussing I have discussed the main differences between the current virtualization platforms (Hyper-V R2, ESX(i)/vSphere, XenServer & Virtuozzo/OpenVZ), and I’ll be going I went a bit in depth on System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 and it’s newest features.
See you there!
UPDATE: Here’s the presentation:
RECORDING HERE (the recording should be available roughly 24 hours after the broadcast)
Using a Wireless connection in Hyper-V
Oct 10th
If you’ve ever installed Microsoft Hyper-V on a server that has a wireless network card and has the Wireless LAN feature enabled, you have probably noticed Hyper-V does not support connecting virtual machines to wireless network adapters (it only lists the existing wired physical adapters when offered the option to create the Virtual Adapters).
The technical reason for this is really simple: in order to perform the virtual networking required by Hyper-V, Microsoft implemented an OSI layer 2 filter driver that creates network packets with the MAC address of the appropriate virtual machine. Unfortunately the wireless networking standard explicitly forbids the creation of network packets with different MAC addresses to that of the physical computer (for obvious security purposes).
As a primarily server-focused product, this is a reasonable limitation for Hyper-V. But all is not lost, as it is actually possible to setup an internal virtual network and use Internet Connection Sharing to make this work. The first thing to do is to create a new internal virtual network switch:
- Open the Hyper-V Manager and select your server.
- Select Virtual Network Manager… from the action pane (on the right).
- Select New virtual network and choose to Add an Internal network.
- Give the new virtual network the name you want and then click OK.
Now, onwards to setting up Internet Connection Sharing:
- Open the Control Panel and open Network and Sharing Center.
- Select Manage network connections (or Change adapter settings in Windows 2008 R2) from the list on the left.
- Locate the icon for your wireless network adapter, right click on it and select Properties.
- Go to the Sharing tab.
- Check the Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection option.
- If you have multiple network adapters, you will need to select the specific entry for the internal virtual network switch you’ve created earlier, and click OK.
You will now be able to connect virtual machines to the internal virtual network and allow them to access the Internet through your wireless network adapter.
Hope this helps!
Live webcast: Virtualization Security
Sep 7th
This Wednesday (09.09.09) at 10am EEST, I’ll be the main speaker in a Virtualization Security live webcast held by Microsoft Romania.
I will be talking about the new security challenges that virtualization brings along, and also about the security enhancements that virtualization solutions can provide to the existing IT infrastructure.
Note that the webcast will be in Romanian. Without further ado, here’s the registration link. 
See you there!
UPDATE: Here’s the presentation:
SCVMM 2008 R2 review
Aug 31st
As I was announcing last week, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 has been released. A SCVMM 2008 R2 evaluation version is available here.
Building on the new and (much) improved Hyper-V that comes with Windows Server 2008 R2, SCVMM 2008 R2 also comes with a few significant feature improvements, such as:
- Live migration between Windows Server 2008 R2 clustered hosts. With live migration, you can migrate a virtual machine from one node of a Windows Server 2008 R2 failover cluster to another node in the same cluster without any downtime and with a barely noticeable impact on application performance. Because the virtual machine does not experience any downtime, the move is completely transparent to the users that are connected to the virtual machine.
- Network optimization detection during virtual machine placement. VMM 2008 R2 supports both Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ) and TCP Chimney, which are Windows Server 2008 R2 features that improve network performance for virtual machines.
- Network adapters that support the VMQ feature are able to create a unique network queue for each virtual network adapter and then connect that queue directly to the virtual machine’s memory. This connection routes packets directly from the hypervisor to the virtual machine, bypassing much of the processing in the virtualization stack.
- Hot addition and removal of virtual hard disks (VHDs). In Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V allows users to add and remove VHDs from a virtual machine while it is running. Microsoft also added storage enhancements to SCVMM to accommodate changes in the way that VMs can now use CSV (clustered shared volumes) and for provisioning changes to speed up VM deployments.
- Network adapters that support the TCP Chimney feature are able to offload the processing of network traffic from the networking stack. Both of these features increase network performance and reduce CPU utilization.
Also, it’s worth noting that since the first version of SCVMM 2008 was launched, VMware released the current virtualization platform, vSphere 4. Testing brings another great piece of news about SCVMM 2008 R2, in that it is able to work just fine with vSphere 4, although Microsoft officially supports only VMware Infrastructure 3 environments at this time.
All in all, I find SCVMM 2008 R2 to be one of the best Virtualization Platform Managers out there, especially due to it’s ability to manage multiple virtualization environments (Hyper-V, MSVS and VMWare for now, with Citrix/Xen support announced to be implemented later as well), and – of course – due to it’s other particularly useful features.
SCVMM 2008 R2 is RTM
Aug 24th
Just got this:
Dear SCVMM R2 Beta Testers,
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 has released to manufacturing (RTM’d) and will be generally available (GA) via volume licensing is October 1.
This is great news and we’d like to sincerely thank all of you who assisted us in our SCVMM 2008 R2 Beta program.
A 180-day evaluation version is now available on the Microsoft Download site. You can access it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=292de23c-845c-4d08-8d65-b4b8cbc8397b&displaylang=en. We encourage everyone to continue to explore the new System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 and its new features such as quick storage migration, live migration, and many others. We even offer support for vSphere 4.
Finally, to learn more on the new features and capabilities of VMM2008 R2, please try to attend our upcoming TechNet session ‘Technical Overview of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2’. Presented by our Technical Product Manager Kenon Owens, it will be chocked full of new and cool VMM 2008 R2 items. Go here: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032423216&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US to register for this Wednesday, September 09, 2009 (10:00 AM Pacific) event.
Thanks! The SCVMM Team.
