Tutorial: Microsoft Hyper-V Server R2 on BladeCenter S

By Massimo Re Ferre
published: Monday, February 09 2009

My good friend at Microsoft, Giorgio Malusardi, noticed my blog post "Enterprise Virtualization in a Box" which was essentially an example of how to create a BladeCenter-contained VMware-enabled data center in a box (including servers, storage and networking). Giorgio challenged me with the task to create something similar using the Hyper-V Server R2 Beta that has just been announced. And I accepted the challenge!

This tutorial is going to document the setup of the environment, based on what I have seen and done. I will share my point of view of what's going on and the implication this will or might have in the x86 market in another piece.

Microsoft Virtualization Background

For those of you that are missing the Microsoft basics it would be beneficial to set the stage. Right now, Microsoft is shipping the first version of their hypervisor - Hyper-V - by means of two channels. The first one is as a component (or role) of their Microsoft Windows Server 2008 products. You can enable or disable this role in either a normal (GUI-based) Windows Server 2008 install, or a core (GUI-less) Windows Server 2008 install. Obviously, in order to get Hyper-V, you need to buy a Windows Server 2008 SKU (Hyper-V is included in any 64-bit x86 version of the Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter SKUs). The license rights for guests and included features - such as Failover Clustering technology - are determined by which SKU is purchased.

The second channel is as a free download from the Microsoft web site in a package called Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008. In a nutshell this is basically a scaled-down version of Windows Server 2008 with the following restrictions and peculiarities:

• It is a core install only (i.e. GUI-less as the only option)

• The only role that it supports - which is enabled by default - is Hyper-V (for example, you can't enable the Failover Clustering role)

• It doesn't include any license for Windows guest OS'es

• It does have a number of artificial limitations in terms of number of CPUs and amount of system memory supported.

That's what's available as of today. However, Microsoft recently announced the availability of the Beta version of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Both these products will ship the second generation of the Hyper-V hypervisor and are currently scheduled to ship in about a year from now (roughly). With this Beta, Microsoft announced new features and new restrictions for the free package. The following table is a summary of the features in the current and future offerings:

* Cluster Shared Volumes is a technology currently in Beta and will ship along with the second generation of Hyper-V. It allows you to use the NTFS file system as if it was a "cluster file system" (a la VMFS so to speak). See below in the document for more information on the CSV technology.

Those of you familiar with the Microsoft Virtualization technology will notice that the Windows Server 2008 R2 SKUs will have similar restrictions and limitations compared to the current releases. This statement obviously doesn't take into account new features introduced with the second generation of the hypervisor (such as Live Migration, for example). As you may have noticed, the biggest delta both in terms of new features and artificial limitations is between the currently shipping Hyper-V Server 2008 (first column from the left) and the future Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (second column from the left). Among many differences, it's specifically worth to note that the new (free!) product will support:

• 8 sockets (vs. current artificially limited 4)

• 1TB of memory (vs. current artificially limited 32GB)

• Quick and Live Migration (vs. nothing)

• Failover Clustering (vs. nothing)

• Cluster Shared Volumes (vs. nothing).

The Hyper-V Server R2-Based Self-Contained Data Center

Back on track. As I said, the challenge was to replicate the VMware-based setup we have done on the BladeCenter S. We have used the very same hardware setup we have used for the VMware test. While we wanted to test the Hyper-V Server R2 Beta it must be noticed that the currently shipping Hyper-V solution works as well on the BladeCenter S today. This is a (generic) picture of the BladeCenter S chassis:

For this proof of concept, I decided to look at the things from the following perspective:

• I wanted to focus on the Hyper-V Server R2 free product (and not on the general purpose Windows Server 2008 R2 w/ Hyper-V role enabled)

• I wanted to focus on new technologies that will be shipping in the R2 timeframe. This includes CSV, Failover Clustering and Live Migration

• I wanted to focus on what you could do with the future Microsoft free offering. This includes the standard free tools to manage the environment and obviously doesn't include the fee-based products such as Virtual Machine Manager (the current version wouldn't support Hyper-V Server R2 anyway and there is not a "sister Beta version" of VMM to test with the Hyper-V R2 Beta bits).

All this being said we can "replay" what I have done.

Hyper-V Server R2 Nodes Setup

First, I started installing Windows Hyper-V Server R2 on the two local disks of the two blades in the chassis. This is a picture taken from the Management Module of the BladeCenter S during the setup (remote attended install):