Adam Fazio

If you are interested in this feature, it’s assumed you are familiar with the basic concept of a VLAN. Therefore I’ll focus just on using VLAN IDs with Hyper-V here. A VLAN ID is the integer which uniquely identifies a node as belonging to a particular VLAN. As per the 802.1Q specification, the VLAN ID itself is encapsulated within the Ethernet frame, which is how multiple VMs using the same physical NIC can communication on different VLANs simultaneously.

Firstly, you need physical NICs which support VLAN tagging and you need to enable the feature. However, you should generally not set the VLAN ID at the physical NIC, it should be set on either the Virtual Switch or the individual Virtual Machine’s configuration. The VLAN ID on the Virtual Switch is what the Host or Parent Partition uses. The VLAN ID setting on the individual Virtual Machine’s settings is what each VM will use.

VLAN ID setting at the Host’s Virtual Switch

VLAN ID setting at the Virtual Machine

When creating an External network in Hyper-V, a virtual network switch is created and bound to the selected physical adapter. A new virtual network adapter is created in the parent partition and connected to the virtual network switch. Child partitions can be bound to the virtual network switch by using virtual network adapters. The diagram below illustrates the architecture.

In addition to the above scenarios, Hyper-V also supports the use of VLANs and VLAN IDs with the virtual network switch and virtual network adapters. Hyper-V leverages 802.1q VLAN trunking to achieve this objective. To utilize this functionality, a virtual network switch must be created on the host and bound to a physical network adapter that supports 802.1q VLAN tagging. VLAN IDs are configured in two places:

·         The virtual network switch itself which sets the VLAN ID the parent partition’s virtual network adapter will use

·         The virtual network adapter of each guest which will sets the VLAN ID the guest will use

The diagram below illustrates an example of using a single physical NIC in the host which is connected to an 802.1q trunk on the physical network carrying three VLANs (5, 10, 20). The design objective in this example are:

·         An 802.1q trunk carrying 3 VLANs (5, 10, 20) is connected to a physical adapter in the host

·         A single virtual switch is created and bound to the physical adapter

·         The VLAN ID of the virtual switch is configured to 5 which would allow the virtual NIC in the parent to communicate on VLAN 5

·         The VLAN ID of the virtual NIC in Child Partition #1 is set to 10 allowing it to communicate on VLAN 10

·         The VLAN ID of the virtual NIC in Child Partition #2 is set to 20 allowing it to communicate on VLAN 20

The expected behavior is that there is a single virtual switch, the parent and two children can only talk on their respective VLANs, and they can’t talk to eachother. 

Ok, at this point I'm honestly impressed with the dedication Microsoft has shown for interop in the past couple years. Ever wonder how to get Macs working on your Windows network? Ever want to have your *nix boxes authenticating with Active Directory? This is for you.

The December 2008 issue of TechNet
Magazine is now available online. And
it's filled with information about interop.

Find out how to integrate Linux clients
with Active Directory, Manage Macs in
a Windows environment, and more.

Since it's October 1st, I thought this may be a timely post. Not-so-coincidentally, I'm one of the authors in this issue. :-)  (please forgive the shameless self-promotion)

Virtualization: An Introduction to Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008

Virtualization: Manage Your Virtual Environments with VMM 2008

Virtualization: Getting Started with Microsoft Application Virtualization

Virtualization: Achieving High Availability for Hyper-V

Virtualization: Backup and Disaster Recovery for Server Virtualization

Virtualization: Essential Tools for Planning Your Virtual Infrastructure

(last updated 9/26/08 - THIS LIST IS NO LONGER BEING MAINTAINED - please check TechNet for the latest proudct documenation) 

My current project involves being the only dedicated technical resource on the Virtualization RDP Team. While this is fun, it's also pushes the limits of my organizational skills (if you can call them that). Maybe the most time consuming daily activity is researching and dispensing information both internally to MS folks and to RDP customers and partners. I thought it would be useful to organize and maintain this list of resources online. Particularly with first and second revision products, such as Hyper-V & SCVMM, formalized documentation is slow to trickle out, but the closer to RTM we get the faster it comes.

These resources are not to help form an opinion or make a decision, they are focused on helping people with planning, development, and deployment of their Microsoft Virtualization initiatives.

Please let me know of anything valuable I'm not aware of, broken links, etc.

I was browsing the blogoshpere today and ran across some posts that erked me. So I emailed the below to Bink over at HyperVoria and he posted it, and I figured I may as well post it too.

The Virtualization RDP (Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program) has over 100 customers running Hyper-V & SCVMM 2008 in production. Some of these are very large enterprises. The evidence produced from these deployments will be available at the Virtualization Launch event. https://www.getvirtualnow.com/main.aspx

A couple early public case studies

•       Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center
•       Kentucky Department of Education
•       HP Finland

One question that bubbles up around any product’s v.1 RTM is “is it (Hyper-V) ready for the enterprise”? In addition to the case studies produced by RDP program, here are just a couple examples if you’re ever faced with this question, or if you’re just curious about how far Hyper-V can be pushed.

·         Collectively, the TechNet and MSDN websites handle over 4 million hits per month and have been running 100% on Hyper-V since April 2008. Read about the implementation at Microsoft.com Operations Virtualizes MSDN and TechNet on Hyper-V.

·         Microsoft.com is one of the heaviest traffic websites on the internet, at 15,000 requests per second, 1.2 billion page views per month, and 280M worldwide unique users per month as well as supporting ~5000 content contributors from within the company. On June 5th the Operations Team turned up a full sixteen VM cluster hosting www.microsoft.com on Hyper-V. Read more at Microsoft.com Powered by Hyper-V

Here's a simple script for moving mailboxes, I talked about how to schedule an Exchange 2007 script in the last post. Here's what it does:

• Reads user aliases from a text file in the local directory (MoveMbx1.txt)
• Moves the mailboxes to a specified Server & Mailbox Store using 10 threads and suppressing the annoying "are you sure?" prompt
• Puts today date in a variable in format YYYYMMDD
• Get Exchange Migration Logs that have the above date in their name
• Emails the logs in plain text

Yes, we could certainly do more sophisticated things, such as find the smallest Mailbox Store and move users there, or format the XML logs better, but hey, I ran out of time. :-)  Just copy the below to a .ps1 file.

#############################
#                           #
#  Exchange 2007 Migration  #
#  Move-mailbox script      #
#  Date & Author            #
#                           #
#############################

# NOTE: to run PowerShell scripts, you need to set the PS execution poloicy "set-executionpolicy unrestricted"

# load the list of users - this must be 1 user alias per line
# the user list file must be in the same directory as this script

$users = get-content MoveMbx1.txt

# move em to a specific target database using 10 threads

$users | move-mailbox -TargetDatabase "MailboxServer\StorageGroup01\MailboxStore01" -MaxThreads 10 -confirm:$false

# put today's date in a variable

$date=get-date -uformat "%Y%m%d"

# read today's migration log and store it as $EMailBody

$EmailBody = get-content "C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Logging\MigrationLogs\*$date*.xml"

# when done, send us an email with the log text

$SmtpClient = new-object system.net.mail.smtpClient
$MailMessage = New-Object system.net.mail.mailmessage
$SmtpClient.Host = "smtpserver.domain.com"
$mailmessage.from = ("<emailaddress>@domain.com")
$mailmessage.To.add("<emailaddress>@domain.com")
$mailmessage.Subject = “MoveMbx1.ps1 script has completed”
$mailmessage.Body = $EmailBody
$smtpclient.Send($mailmessage)

Because this information was so unbelievably hard to track down I thought I'd post this. This is so strange to me, I mean, isn't the idea of most scripting to run jobs unattended at specific times? Whew!

Basically, the process is you have to call powershell.exe, then load the Exchange extensions, then pass it the command that calls the script. You're supposed to be able to use -noexit so you can watch it run, and call exshell.psc1 directly via the run line -psconsolefile "C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Bin\exshell.psc1", but I could not get it work using either of these. SO, we run the task starting in the Exchange bin directory as below.

Run: powershell -psconsolefile exshell.psc1 -command "& {c:\yourscript.ps1}"

Start in: "C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Bin"

Run as: <account with rights to do whatever is in your script>

Adam’s unofficial Exchange 2003 troubleshooting tips

All items are listed in the order in which I usually reference/perform them. This is general guidance based on my 8 years working with Exchange, not prescriptive Microsoft Guidance.

As always, for the fastest, most methodical approach to fixing a problem and finding the cause, call Premier Support! Those guys do nothing but troubleshoot all day & night, we’ll never be as good as them!

Exchange troubleshooting

·         Always consider the most basic things first - networking, name-resolution, AD, services running, databases mounted, etc.

·         Turn on Diagnostic logging for the suspect component

·         Look in the Event Log (Exchange uses the Application Log) (lookup events in the KB or eventide.net, search the Exchange Newsgroups or your favorite forum)

·         Setup a Perfmon to capture historical & real-time performance data (see Troubleshooting Microsoft Exchange Server Performance doc)

·         Cmd-line: netstat -na  to view all active connections to/from the server

·         Look at mail-flow using Message Tracking Center in ESM - for example look at the last hour of message flow, is it extremely higher than usual?

·         Look at active POP/IMAP/MAPI sessions via Virtual Servers in ESM & EXMON

·         Most client performance problems are Exchange being Disk I/O bound or Memory bound. CPU & Network are very very rarely the cause.

·         Use ProcessExplorer by sysinternals to see a particular process and/or thread’s CPU, disk I/O, network sessions, etc.

Documentation  (there are dozens more, but these I use most often)

Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Technical Reference Guide

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3768246d-c9ed-45d8-bece-a666143cba4e&DisplayLang=en

Troubleshooting Microsoft Exchange Server Performance

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=8679F6BD-7FF0-41F5-BDD0-C09019409FC0&displaylang=en

Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Transport and Routing Guide

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=C092B7A7-9034-4401-949C-B29D47131622&displaylang=en

Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 High Availability Guide

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=FE6A573C-11FF-4CB6-BE2E-9B6F2164C54A&displaylang=en

Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Performance and Scalability Guide