Installation of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012 is simple enough, and I have screenshot each of the important screen you will come across during installation.
The script which I created is not perfect to suit everyone yet, but its enough for most of us out there who in need to create n numbers of VM given a short period. During this event, I have conducted a demo in creating 6 VMs with just a hit on 'enter' and all 6 VMs booted. And right now, I will share with you in details how to achieve this.
What the Powershell script does (In general speaking)
1. Read VMs configuration from CSV line-by-line
2. Create VM into 'C:\clusterstorage\volume1\vname'
3. Set the processor count of each VMs
4. Set the memory for each VMs
3. Create and attach a 'Differencing Disk' to each VMs
Future development of this script
1. To be able to set 'Dynamic Memory' for each VMs
2. To be able to set 'Fixed/Dynamic/Differencing Disk' for each VMs
3. To be able to set desire sysprep/preconfigured or mix OS platform base VMs
4. To be able to add each VMs to CSV cluster if the Hyper-V host is clustered
5. To add and improve comments into the script
1. Create a CSV and list all necessary configuration of each VM as shown sample above.
2. Save the CSV as 'vm.csv'.
3. Copy 'vm.csv' to the Hyper-V host in 'c:\createvm\'
4. Copy the script above and save it as 'createvm.ps1' in 'c:\createvm\' (you may have to edit the variable to suit your requirement and configuration of your Hyper-V host.
Requirement and caution
1. A syspreped OS image is required
2. Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 2008 R2 SP1 with Hyper-V role installed
3. Basic knowledge of Powershell script
4. Changing of variables in the script to suit your Hyper-V environment
5. Use at you own risk as you have been warned this may affects you Hyper-V server. KNOWING WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO EXECUTE IS IMPORTANT.
When you do housekeeping on your target VM which using 'Dynamic Disk', the free space that you free up in your VM will not added back to your Hyper-V host. If space is the concern for you Hyper-V host, then you may have to manually compact the VM's VHD.
To compact a Dynamic Expanding VHD:
Step 1: Right-click the target VM. Select 'Settings...'. Highlight the target Hadr Drive. Click 'Edit'
Step 2: Select 'Compact'.
Compact - Applies to dynamically expanding virtual hard disks and differencing virtual hard disks. Reduces the size of the .vhd file by removing blank space that is left behind when data is deleted from the virtual hard disk. If the virtual hard disk is not NTFS formatted, the blank space must be overwritten with zeroes so that the compact action can reduce the file size by removing sectors that contain only zeroes.
If the virtual hard disk is not NTFS formatted, you must prepare the virtual hard disk for compacting by using a non-Microsoft disk utility program to replace the blank space with zeroes.
Step 3: Click 'Finish'
Wait for the compacting process to finish.
Below show the size of before and after VHD compacting process.
Microsoft's Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 allows backup administrator to co-locate protection groups on tape. In previous version of DPM, tape co-location is not available. This means to say that if you have a protection group with backup size maybe 2Gb a day and 5 LTO4 tapes and the backup strategy is to backup 5 days a week. You will end up with DPM 2010 uses each LTO4 1.6GB (compress) to backup your 2GB everyday. This only utilize 0.1% of your tape capacity, and the worst is that other protection group will not be able to write on the same tape.
With tape co-location available now you can optimizes the tape usage in case you have many small protection groups. The backup to tape will backup multiple protection group on the same tape depending on the backup strategy you configured and consideration on "TapeWritePeriodRatio" and "ExpiryToleranceRange".
Enabling Data Co-Location on DPM
Open DPM Management Shell.
Set-OptimizeTapeUsage to True using the Set-DPMGlobalProperty cmdlet.Set-DPMGlobalProperty -DPMServerName <name of DPM server> -OptimizeTapeUsage $True
Take note that a dataset will be collocated only if both the below conditions are true.
The expiry date of the current dataset should fall in between the following dates:
Upper bound: furthest expiry date among all the datasets on the tape - (furthest expiry date among all the datasets on the tape - current date) * ExpiryToleranceRange
Lower Bound: furthest expiry date among all the datasets on the tape + (furthest expiry date among all the datasets on the tape - current date) * ExpiryToleranceRange.
Current time should be less than first backup time of the dataset on the media + TapeWritePeriodRatio * RetentionRangeOfFirstDataset.
TapeWritePeriodRatio
It is a global property for the DPM which needs to be set using DPM CLI command. Here is the command to set it
Set-DPMGlobalProperty –DPMServerName <dpm server name> -TapeWritePeriodRatio <fraction>
WritePeriodRatio indicates the number of days for which data can be written on to a tape as a ratio of the retention period of the first data set written to the tape.
System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 enables disk-based and tape-based data protection and recovery for servers such as SQL Server, Exchange Server, SharePoint, virtual servers, file servers, and support for Windows desktops and laptops. DPM can also centrally manage system state and Bare Metal Recovery (BMR).
Do you ever got yourself into a situation where you run out of backup tapes due to inappropriate backup strategy ? If your answer is yes, then you probably notice at the same time you are facing an issue and that you are desperately to expire a LTO tape which holding the oldest recovery point. And guess what... You can't do this using DPM 2010 Administrator Console...OUCH!!!
So, you are sitting in the dark, waiting any tape to expire and helplessly watching each and every scheduled backup failed. Well, this will not happen anymore if you use a powershell as found in Microsoft TechNet's Library. The script contents is as below :
Code Begins Here
param ([string] $DPMServerName, [string] $LibraryName, [string[]] $TapeLocationList) if(("-?","-help") -contains $args[0]) { Write-Host "Usage: ForceFree-Tape.ps1 [[-DPMServerName] <Name of the DPM server>] [-LibraryName] <Name of the library> [-TapeLocationList] <Array of tape locations>" Write-Host "Example: Force-FreeTape.ps1 -LibraryName "My library" -TapeLocationList Slot-1, Slot-7" exit 0 } if (!$DPMServerName) { $DPMServerName = Read-Host "DPM server name: " if (!$DPMServerName) { Write-Error "Dpm server name not specified." exit 1 } } if (!$LibraryName) { $LibraryName = Read-Host "Library name: " if (!$LibraryName) { Write-Error "Library name not specified." exit 1 } } if (!$TapeLocationList) { $TapeLocationList = Read-Host "Tape location: " if (!$TapeLocationList) { Write-Error "Tape location not specified." exit 1 } } if (!(Connect-DPMServer $DPMServerName)) { Write-Error "Failed to connect To DPM server $DPMServerName" exit 1 } $library = Get-DPMLibrary $DPMServerName | where {$_.UserFriendlyName -eq $LibraryName} if (!$library) { Write-Error "Failed to find library with user friendly name $LibraryName" exit 1 } foreach ($media in @(Get-Tape -DPMLibrary $library)) { if ($TapeLocationList -contains $media.Location) { if ($media -is [Microsoft.Internal.EnterpriseStorage.Dls.UI.ObjectModel.LibraryManagement.ArchiveMedia]) { foreach ($rp in @(Get-RecoveryPoint -Tape $media)) { Get-RecoveryPoint -Datasource $rp.Datasource | Out-Null Write-Verbose "Removing recovery point created at $($rp.RepresentedPointInTime) for tape in $($media.Location)." Remove-RecoveryPoint -RecoveryPoint $rp -ForceDeletion -Confirm:$false } Write-Verbose "Setting tape in $($media.Location) as free." Set-Tape -Tape $media -Free } else { Write-Error "The tape in $($media.Location) is a cleaner tape." } } }
Code Ends Here
To put this script into use
Open a new Notepad file and copy the code above into it.
Save the file as ForceFree.ps1.
Copy ForceFree.ps1 to C:/Program Files/Microsoft/Microsoft Data Protection Manager/scripts .
The syntax to run the script is ForceFree.ps1 -DPMServerName <Name of server> -LibraryName <Name of library> -TapeLocation <slot numbers>.
Sample of script execution
PS C:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Scripting> .\ForceExpire.ps1 DPM server name: : backupserver Hewlett Packard LTO Ultrium-4 drive Hewlett Packard MSL G3 Series library (x64 based) Library name (cut & paste from above): : Hewlett Packard MSL G3 Series library (x64 based) Tape location: : slot-2 Processing this slot list... slot-2 The operation will remove the following recovery point(s) because they have dep endencies on each other: Datasource '\\?\Volume{9f6da658-f6f1-11df-8d4f-00155d000115}\' on targetcomputer1.xxx.xxx.xx: Saturday, 5 November, 2011 10:31:28 AM Monday, 7 November, 2011 11:52:13 PM Wednesday, 9 November, 2011 4:03:54 AM Wednesday, 9 November, 2011 9:47:34 PM Thursday, 10 November, 2011 8:01:09 PM Friday, 11 November, 2011 8:09:17 PM Monday, 14 November, 2011 8:31:54 PM The operation will remove the following recovery point(s) because they have dep endencies on each other: Datasource '\\?\Volume{dff33793-b735-11df-a919-00155d000225}\' on targetcomputer2.xxx.xxx.xx: Sunday, 6 November, 2011 12:02:41 AM Tuesday, 8 November, 2011 2:36:56 AM Wednesday, 9 November, 2011 7:33:40 AM Wednesday, 9 November, 2011 9:24:50 PM Thursday, 10 November, 2011 11:04:38 PM Friday, 11 November, 2011 10:01:35 PM Monday, 14 November, 2011 8:09:52 PM Tuesday, 15 November, 2011 8:00:30 PM
Found and interesting topic over the weekend. A topic which most of us overlook during the design of a storage infrastructure.
We all do concern about the speed if the data transfer between storage and host, the network bandwidth, and that RAID configuration used, while we always forgot about the IOPS.
For some of us out there who wondering what is IOPS, "IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second, pronounced i-ops) is a common performance measurement used to benchmarkcomputer storage devices like hard disk drives (HDD), solid state drives (SSD), and storage area networks (SAN). As with any benchmark, IOPS numbers published by storage device manufacturers do not guarantee real-world application performance" - Wikipedia (on layman term)
The table I found below to remind myself of the ball park IOPS figure of various type of common hard drives:
Device
Type
IOPS
Interface
7,200 rpm
HDD
~75-100 IOPS[2]
SATA 3 Gb/s
10,000 rp
HDD
~125-150 IOPS[2]
SATA 3 Gb/s
15,000 rp
HDD
~175-210 IOPS [2]
SAS
Simple SL
SSD
~400 IOPS[citation needed]
SATA 3 Gb/s
Intel X25-
SSD
~8,600 IOPS[11]
SATA 3 Gb/s
Intel X25-
SSD
~5,000 IOPS[13]
SATA 3 Gb/s
G.Skill Ph
SSD
~20,000 IOPS[citation needed]
SATA 3 Gb/s
OCZ Verte
SSD
Up to 60,000 IOPS[citation needed]
SATA 6 Gb/s
Texas Me
SSD
120,000+ Random Read/Write IOPS[17]
PCIe
Fusion-io
SSD
140,000 Read IOPS, 135,000 Write IOPS [18]
PCIe
Virident S
SSD
320,000 sustained READ IOPS using 4KB blocks and 200,000 sustained WRITE IOPS using 4KB blocks [19]
PCIe
OCZ Revo
SSD
200,000 Random Write 4K IOPS [21]
PCIe
Fusion-io
SSD
250,000+ IOPS [22]
PCIe
Violin Me
SSD
250,000+ Random Read/Write IOPS[23]
PCIe /FC/Infiniband/iSCSI
DDRdrive
SSD
300,000+ (512B Random Read IOPS) and 200,000+ (512B Random Write IOPS)[24][25][26][27]