Third Tier » Hyper-V

Join a Local UserGroup Now. Here’s why.

amy — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 13:55:22 +0000

This week SMBNation published my article on the importance of in-person meetings in the age of social media. Who needs to go to a meeting with a bunch of geeks, when you can just read their tweets and facebook posts? Everyone that is serious about their career.

I am the proud owner of:

• 1 Facebook Account

• 3 Twitter Accounts

• 3 Facebook Pages

• 1 LinkedIN Account

• 1 LinkedIN Group

• 2 LinkedIN Pages

• 1 IM Account

• 1 Blog

• 2 webpages

• 3 email accounts in different domains

…and I use every one of them — daily.

Mastering the Social Networking Scene

I also participate in a bunch of mailing lists and LinkedIN groups. I am very plugged into the online social scene. If you want to connect with me, whether we are associated by friendship, family, you’re a customer of one of my businesses or a member of my boat club, you won’t have any trouble finding me. Just Bing, Google or search in your favorite social media app, and I’m probably there. So why in the world did I start an inperson local SMB IT group in April 2011?

Find out why by reading the whole article here: Connect Local – Stay Global

__________

So who wrote this blog and what do they do for a living anyway?
We’re Third Tier. We provide advanced Third Tier support for IT Professionals like you.

www.thirdtier.net/support

October 21, 2010 PSSBS Meeting

steve — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 13:38:00 +0000

Simplifying High Availability and Virtualization

For those in the Seattle area who are not attending SMB Nation this weekend and Third Tier's Pre-day event in Las Vegas, the Puget Sound Small Business Server User Group October meeting will include a presentation by VM6 Software, a provider of an ‘all in one’ software solution that virtualizes storage, servers and desktops all at the same time, on a single server, without the complexity and costs.

By leveraging Microsoft Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and using any x86-64 servers, VM6 VMex creates a completely virtualized IT infrastructure with the simplest high availability solution in less than three hours without requiring the purchase of a complex SAN. It also comes with its own clustering technology and management console.

VM6 Software is the perfect solution for IT environments that:

• Have less than 50 servers per site

• Have virtualized or have a project to migrate to a virtualized environment

• Require high availability for planned or unplanned downtime

• Have challenges justifying the cost of a SAN

Join us for a presentation that will demonstrate how VM6 VMex can:

· Optimize the capacity utilization of your IT infrastructure

· Simplify and improve IT service availability for small IT environments

· Eliminate the need for shared storage (SAN)

John Cloutier (VM6 Software Technical Evangelist) and Bruce Smith (Microsoft Alliance Manager and Business Development) will be presenting.

VM6 will be providing pizza for the group, and Microsoft will be providing the room and drinks. Will be at our usual location, at Microsoft’s Lincoln Square offices in downtown Bellevue (700 Bellevue Way NE - Lincoln Square, Bellevue, WA 98004).

Park in the Lincoln Square garage and meet at the elevators on the first floor by 6 PM to head up to the meeting (take a ticket when you enter the garage, but parking will be free for the evening).

Meeting will be from 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM.

Training Content MythBusters: Hyper-V Things Not to Try…EVER!

amy — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:47:00 +0000

Wayne Small, SBS, Hyper-V, Trend, Storagecraft and all-around SBS-FAQ guy says…

Hyper-V is the best solution for SMB clients wanting to have their servers virtualised. However there are a lot of myths about how to configure it and how not to configure it. Come to this session to learn about not only the basics of good Hyper-V configuration, but how to get the best performance out of your Hyper-V solutions for your clients. We’ll bust myths such as “Is RAID 10 really better than RAID 5?” and “What’s the best way to configure my CPUs in Hyper-V”.

If you attended Wayne’s Third Tier webinar on Hyper-V you’ll have a leg up because his content here will build and expand upon that webinar.

Join Third Tier in Las Vegas for an all day training on the day prior to SMBNation. See other content details elsewhere in our blog. Thanks to our sponsors, Hewlett Packard, Symform and Storagecraft we are able to keep the cost down to only $50. So head on over to the store and reserve your space for this all-day training session! Seats are limited for this event and we expect to sell out. So register early. http://www.thirdtier.net/store Training takes place October 21st.

Did you hear the news? It’s all over town…

amy — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 17:21:48 +0000

StorageCraft snares Microsoft expert as technical services manager

"This is a major coup for us," StorageCraft Asia-Pacific vice-president Richard Giddey said. "Wayne brings with him a wealth of diverse knowledge and is a highly respected industry expert who will be instrumental in helping us to accelerate our expansion in the Asia-Pacific market."

Wayne will be presenting at our brain exploding all day training event in Las Vegas. He’s presenting Hyper-V Mythbusters: Don’t Try This…EVER! I have a feeling that along side the his disk and CPU performance studies that there might be a little bit about disaster recovery and back scenarios. You can register at www.thirdtier.net/store.

Third Tier is really proud of Wayne, we know just how lucky Storagecraft is to land him. He’s brings a lot more to the table than technical expertise.

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Third Tier offering Technical Training at SMBNation PreDay Event!

amy — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:52:35 +0000

I’ve been dying to announce this. I’m so excited! We’re doing a pre-day event at SMBNation in Vegas on October 21st. Make your flights accordingly. Very soon we will be posting a registration form. You must register in advance so keep an eye out for it.

Speakers are our own fabulous staff: Dave Shackelford, Cliff Galiher, Eriq Neale and Wayne Small

Our content has been selected by the guys to reflect the growing concern over compliance, business continuity, manageability and issues surrounding these that our customers are contacting us for help with. Case studies and examples will abound and they guys will show you how to configure the products they will be working with which including Exchange, Sharepoint, Terminal Services and Hyper-V. Expect the sessions to be intense with advanced material. Your brain will be exploding by the end of the day.

I’ll be posting more and more specifics about the content as the event gets closer. Let’s have a look at what Eriq is going to cover first:

Configuring and Using Remote Desktop Services Remote Apps – A Love Story

Many people have heard of Remote Desktop Services Remote Apps (formerly Terminal Server Remote Apps) but either haven’t had an opportunity to implement the solution or just are not sure how to. In this session, Eriq Neale will show how to configure RDS Remote Apps on a Remote Desktop Server and then go over several real-world deployment scenarios. We will also go over how to set up RDS Remote Apps to work with Remote Web Workplace on an SBS Server. Eriq will include case studies on when and why this technology is used.

Configuring RDS Remote Apps

Publishing an Application through RDS Remote Apps

Publishing an Application with multiple configuration options through RDS Remote Apps

Publishing an RDS Remote App through Remote Web Workplace

Please make your flights accordingly and plan to join us for a full day of intense training on October 21st.

Shout Out to Hewlett Packard, Symform and Storagecraft. Without awesome vendors that get the small business space and are willing to invest in partner education, this event would not be possible.

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Hyper-V Webinar Recording Posted

Third Tier — Fri, 28 May 2010 18:05:04 +0000

The Third Thursday webinar that Wayne Small did on Hyper-V has finally been posted in the Third Tier Store for download. We apologize for the delay in getting this webinar posted as it has been one of the most asked-about sessions we have done.

Query Hyper-V Virtual machines using Windows PowerShell

edwin — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:19:00 +0000

Being a lazy administrator as I am, I try to minimize the amount of mouse-clicks I need to make to retrieve information about something on a Windows platform. As I have been using Microsoft Hyper-V on a bunch of my test machines, I always check if a VM is up and running before I power down my host machine (imagine the amount of electricity consumed just by keeping your machine up and running even without using it). This is specifically the case when dealing with my Windows XP VMs. I noticed that the profiles get corrupted if I shutdown the host machine without properly shutting down the VM. So, I always made sure that the VMs are not running before powering down the host machine.

I wrote a PowerShell command to query the current state of the VMs running on Hyper-V

Get-WMIObject -class "MSVM_ComputerSystem"-namespace "root\virtualization"-computername "."

This will actually display a bunch of information about the VMs running on Hyper-V but what we're really concerned about is the name of the VM and it's currently running state. These two properties are associated with the ElementName and EnabledState attributes of the MSVM_ComputerSystem class. All we need to do with the command above is to pipe the results to a Select-Object cmdlet, specifying only these two properties, as follows

Get-WMIObject -class "MSVM_ComputerSystem"-namespace "root\virtualization"-computername "." Select-Object ElementName, EnabledState

While the EnabledState property will give you a bunch of numbers, I'm only concerned with those values equal to 2, which means that the VM is running. But, then, you might not remember what the value 2 means. So might as well write an entire script that checks for the value of the EnabledState property. I've used the GWMI alias to call the Get-WMIObject cmdlet

$VMs = gwmi -class "MSVM_ComputerSystem"-namespace "root\virtualization"-computername "."
foreach ($VM IN $VMs)
{
switch ($VM.EnabledState)
{
2{$state="Running" }
3{$state="Stopped" }
32768{$state="Paused" }
32769{$state="Suspended" }
32770 {$state="Starting" }
32771{$state="Taking Snapshot" }
32773{$state="Saving" }
32774{$state="Stopping" }
}
write-host $VM.ElementName `,` $state
}

On a side note, make sure you are running as Administrator when working with this script as you will only see the VMs that your currently logged in profile has permission to access. Running as Administrator will show you all of the VMs configured on your Hyper-V server

Hyper-V 2008 R2 Partner Day Hosted by Microsoft – February 6th – Redmond

steve — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 07:04:00 +0000

On Saturday, February 6^th, Microsoft & the Puget Sound Small Business Server User Group is holding its Hyper-V 2008 R2 Partner Day: Practical Knowledge for Successful Deployments at Microsoft’s Corporate Headquarters, register now, space is limited.

This is day of Live Builds; Instruction; Demonstration; and, Tips & Tricks on Hyper-V for fellow Microsoft partners who want to use Hyper-V within their practice. You will see deployment, optimization and management of Hyper-V, all with a focus for how to use Hyper-V within a Microsoft focused IT practice from a fellow practicing Microsoft partner. Watch & Learn as the Hyper-V Role is deployed on a Windows Server 2008 R2 and while Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is installed.

This is not a Hyper-V versus VMware day.
This is not a hands-on day.
This is not a test preparation day.

This is an “I can do ‘that’” day.
This is a Partners sharing with Partners day.

Schedule:

9:00 AM	-	9:30 AM	Registration
9:30 AM	-	11:30 AM	Morning Session
11:30 AM	-	12:20 PM	Lunch Break
12:20 PM	-	1:50 PM	1^st Afternoon Session
1:50 PM	-	2:10 PM	Break
2:10 PM	-	3:30 PM	2^nd Afternoon Session
3:30 PM	-	4:00 PM	Wrap Up

Here is a list of the topics we will be covering:

Deploying Hyper-V Role via:

· Windows Server 2008 R2 (Full Installation) with Hyper-V ß Live Build

· Windows Server 2008 R2 (Core Installation) with Hyper-V

· Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 ß Live Build

Managing Virtual Machines:

· Hyper-V Manager ß Live Demonstration

o Virtual Network Manager

o New Virtual Machine Wizard

o New Virtual Hard Disk Wizard

· System Center Virtual Machine Manager

Practical Tips & Tricks:

· Virtualizing Windows Small Business Server 2008 ß Live Demonstration

· Virtualizing Remote Desktop Services (Terminal Services)

· Performance Optimization ß Live Demonstration

· Backups

Overview of Advanced Topics:

· Power Shell Hyper-V

· Managing Virtual Machine Storage

· Quick Migration

· Live Migration, Failover Cluster & Cluster Shared Volumes

· System Center Essentials and how it integrates into the System Center Virtual Machine Manager

· Hyper-V and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

The primary person in front for this event is Tim Carney. Tim a MCP and Small Business Specialist is President of EBT Solutions / SFBay-Link Network Services, Inc. Since 2002, Tim has been providing technology consulting services to emerging San Francisco Bay Area businesses and assisting other IT Professionals in designing Secure Infrastructure. During the 15 years prior to establishing his consulting business, he was the CFO and CTO for a 45 person Copier Sales and Services Business in Silicon Valley. Tim was the technical force in changing its sales focus from Telex to Facsimile, Fax to Copiers, Analog to Digital, and Stand-Alone to Connected. Tim’s areas of expertise include Small Business Server, Secure Infrastructure, Virtualization and Mobility Enablement. Tim is an Eagle Scout and has a B.S. degree in Business Management. As a leader in the local community, Tim has co-founded BASBiTS.org a San Francisco Bay Area users’ group for Small Business Information Technology Specialists. Follow Tim on his blog at SBS-Mobility.blogspot.com and on Twitter as TechmoTim.

When: Saturday, February 6^th

Registration starts at 9:00 am

Main Event is from 9:30 am to 3:30 pm

Wrap-Up Event by 4:00 pm

Where: Microsoft Corporate Headquarters

3350 157th Ave N.E., Building 9, Room 1001 – Tahoma

Redmond, WA 98052

You Give: $20 per person

You Get: Relevant & Useful Information

Food & Drinks provided

RSVP: Register for the event by clicking:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032439175&Culture=en-US

See you all there!

Steve

Enabling wireless on Windows Server 2008 – and eventually allowing Hyper-V guests to use it

edwin — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 05:55:00 +0000

A lot of you may probably ask why the need to enable wireless on a server operating system. Well, if you're like me who runs a server operating system on a laptop for testing purposes, there's a thousand and one reason why you would like to have it enabled. Now, since my Windows XP work-machine is now a virtual machine, I would need to have the wireless on my laptop enabled and working with Windows Server 2008. For this, you would need to install the Wireless LAN Service feature in Windows Server 2008. This article provides a detailed step-by-step procedure on enabling wireless on your Windows Server 2008. You just need to make sure that you have the appropriate Windows Server 2008 drivers for your wireless adapter or it won't work.

But my dilemma didn't stop there. I obviously don't want to access the internet via the Windows Server 2008 platform. That's what my Windows XP virtual machine is for. So what I did was to add an Internal virtual network using Hyper-V's Virtual Network Manager. This will create another network adapter on the host operating system - in this case, Windows Server 2008. I've renamed this WiFi-Guest-Bridge. Next, I've added a network adapter on the Hyper-V guest and mapped it to this virtual network. Once, I've done both of these, I've bridged the wireless network adapter and the WiFi-Guest-Bridge network adapter, thereby, providing wireless connectivity to my Hyper-V guest.

Keith Combs provided a step-by-step procedure (with screenshots) on how to configure wireless networking with Hyper-V guests in his blog

It is very important to name your network adapters accordingly as Windows does a real good job of using a generic naming convention (i.e. Local Area Network x) which adds confusion especially if you are dealing with a ton of virtual networks from within a single Hyper-V (or other virtualization) platform