monitor and operate private cloud infrastructure student manual

7/18/2019 Monitor and Operate Private Cloud Infrastructure Student Manual

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Published: 8/9/20

011 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft, Windows, Windows Vista, Windows Azure, System Center, Hyper-V and other product names are or

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Microsoft Jump Start Course

reating and Managing a Private Cloud with System Center 2012

And welcome back to the private cloud Jump Start creating and managing aprivate cloud with System Center 2012. I’m Symon Perriman, Microsoft TechnicalEvangelist and I’m joined again by Kenon Owens technical marketing manager,

Kenon: Product Marketing Manager

Symon: Product Marketing Manager with System Center 2012, Kenon’s ourinfrastructure guy and so we’ve already done a few sessions on managing theinfrastructure, we really focused on the individual hardware pieces with thismodule we’re now going to think about how we can optimize those componentsfor the hardware for the private cloud so why don’t you go into a little moredetail of what we’re going to cover in this module.

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Kenon: Okay in this module today we’re going to cover the monitoring andoperating on the private cloud infrastructure so the previous session was allabout those physical devices and how do I make sure that those things arerunning correctly, I already talked about how to configure and deploy

everything, now once I have those things available and I’ve created this privatecloud and it’s been running for a few days, weeks, months, years I need to makesure that I’m giving the proper amount of resources to all the differentapplications. So we’re going to talk about how to optimize it, how you cancontrol access to it, how you standardize updates to things like deployedservices and then how you make sure you have the right size cloud.

Symon: That’s great, now before we dive into this there is one question that I’veseen come up a few times that I think it’s worth us addressing now when we’re

thinking about deploying and configuring an operating system a VMM whenshould we use VMM versus when should we use configuration manager, whatare the trade offs, kind of the roles for each of those different components?

Kenon: So within System Center you have a lot of tools that can do kind of crossactivities and do kind of pieces of the same thing what I would look at is, if I ammanaging that underlying Hyper V server, that Hyper V host I want to use VMMto do that host management. If I use VMM to do the installation, I use VMM to

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connect it to the different storage those types of things for the bare metal install,connect to the storage configuration, use it for the update and patchmanagement for my Hyper V underlying physical servers. I would use the configmanager component for managing the other physical hosts that I may have,maybe I have a physical SQL cluster and I would use config manager for keeping

that patch up to date and those types of things. I would use config manageracross all of my systems whether it be Hyper V or all my other systems that areout there for doing things like desire configuration management where I’mchecking to see whether certain things are installed or certain things are set up

Symon: this might be like a group policy, security settings?

Kenon: Something like that or maybe it’s an application version or something

whether it’s in compliance or not and I would use configuration manager becausewith configuration manager 2012 we have the ability to not only get thatinformation but we can also set certain things so I can force machines to upgradeto the proper version or something like that, so that’s when I would use configmanager. The other thing is inside of virtual machine, with the virtual machinesup and running for everyday patch management I would probably use configmanager for managing and updating those patches. If I’m going to do serviceupdates, maybe updates to the application that’s installed inside of that servicethen I would use VMM to push that service down, if I can use the servicetemplate format for updating things I would use it as much as possible, use

configuration manager for the tasks that it would normally would use as well asfor managing all my client and maybe my VDI VMs and those types of things.

Symon: Excellent thanks



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So if we move to these things are up and running, the things that we’re going to focus on todayis the now monitoring and operating that private cloud infrastructure itself, it’s not the physicaldevices but it’s the cloud and ensuring that we have the proper access to the resources.



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So I’m going to flip by these slides really quick, you’ve probably seen them three or four times already if not more

and the things that we’re going to focus on today is once we have this logical and standardized infrastructure how

do I make sure those clouds are running well, how do I make sure the application is running inside the clouds or

getting the resources that they need, how do I ensure the people that are accessing the resources are only accessing

the ones that I want to give them permission to and how do I keep these services updated and ready to go.

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Full Animation and items grouped

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So I’ll do that in a few ways, one of them that I have to do is ensure that I’veoptimized my underlying hypervisor resources and they’re running the properVMs because we all know that load changes throughout the day, different timesof the year and I want to ensure that the virtual machines are getting the access

to the resources that they need. I need to control who has access to theseresources and how they consume those resources and I want to be able tochange these things on the fly if I need to. I have these service templates thatwe talked about in the configure and deploy model, well I need to standardizean approach to updating these services so that I can create this update once anddeploy it out to many deployed services. And then these cloud environmentsthat I have I want to ensure that they’re sized appropriately now and that I’ll beable to know before I have to grow to grow those systems, in other words I don’twant to run out of resources and then have to scramble to buy those servers,

instead I’d rather grow it on time. Had a customer that they startedimplementing virtualization, they were moving to a private cloud and so manypeople just started creating VMs over and over and over again on these systemsthat they overloaded the system before they really even knew it was overloadedand they needed to now scramble to buy more servers and get them up andrunning. If they were able to monitor those systems better they could moreeasily know that hey, we’re starting to run out of resources, let’s proactively buynew hardware and get that thing up and running more efficiently. The otherthing is you know as I’m trending things over time I want to make sure that I can



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get these systems and keep them up and running appropriately as loads change.



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So one of the ways we handle changing load is through dynamic optimizationand this is a new capability inside of Virtual Machine Manager both dynamicoptimization and power optimization.



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And why would I use dynamic optimization, what are the key benefits of it, wellas application workloads in my environment change, I need my private cloudresources to automatically adjust to these changes and needs. In other words Imay have 30 different VMs or 150 or 300 VMs running on one cluster and inside

the cluster, during the periods of the day certain of those VMs have a lot ofresources needs, other VMs don’t have any resources needs. But that changesconstantly throughout the day, throughout the week or maybe at the end ofeach quarter I need these applications to get access to more resources. I need torebalance those workloads on the fly and that’s what we can do with dynamicoptimization.

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So what does it actually mean, what does it look like, well Virtual MachineManager is monitoring the clusters within a host group and inside that hostgroup they’re looking at this individual cluster, they’re looking at the resourcesand as those resources go above a certain threshold, in other words I used so

many resources on one of those hosts that I basically have not left enoughresources that I’m comfortable with left on the system. Then what I’ll do isVirtual Machine Manager will see the different devices on that host and willautomatically move the virtual machines away onto other systems within thathost. So really what we’re doing is looking at all the different virtual machines onall the different hosts and we’re taking basically a waited ten minute averageacross those systems and as we find that we move across these different hosts,thresholds we will migrate different virtual machines around at the optimizationinterval. And at that point we freed up the resources and everything is running

fine and so maybe a few minutes later, a few hours later one of these othersystems now goes above that specific threshold at that point we identify what’sthe best machine to move we move that around and by moving these thingsaround between other systems what we’ve done is kept all the machines belowthe optimization threshold. There are a couple of ways we do that, when wedetermine virtual machines to move and how we move them there’s thistechnique called intelligent placement which I’ll go into a little bit, especially inthe demo and we only will move things if they have an advantage for the entiresystem.

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So if we look at the fundamentals of dynamic optimization we want to keep thecluster balanced so we want to be able to not have a very disparate amount ofresources used by one host and not the other. So we don’t want one running at80% utilization, the other running at 10% utilization, but instead we want to keep

it balanced between the systems. We want to avoid VM downtime, we want toensure that by having more resources available on each of these systems andbalancing these systems out the VMs will be more responsive to the applicationsrunning on them. And we do this dynamic optimization for not only MicrosoftHyper V systems but we can also do it for VMWare Vsphere or Citrix Xen Serverclusters. So it’s important to keep in mind that we’re going to move thingsaround depending on the resource utilization of those systems with that tenminute average.So we consider things like the CPU utilization, we consider the memory

utilization in both disk and network IO. And if any of those are surpassingthresholds we can see where we can move those systems, so we’ll move it whenwe go across a specific threshold and we’ll consider that entire cluster. We’re notgoing to move a VM off of a system if it’s just going to put another system overthe threshold you know we’re going to optimize this thing as best we can andwe do it with these different types of aggressiveness so we have the ability toturn on whether you want to do this manually or you want to have it automatedto rebalance this workload, you can choose the frequency with which you do thisautomation by default it’s ten minutes but you can say I only want to do load



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balancing every 30 minutes, I can drop it down to 5 minutes or 1 minute if Iwanted to and configure how aggressive this optimization is going to be. Sowhat that really means is that when I’m going to move systems around, if I gainan advantage if I look at intelligent placement I have these things called starratings, if I gain an advantage on the star ratings where if I move it from one

system to another and it’s going to free up either one star rating or .5 star ratingsactually from 2, 4, 6 1 star rating we’re going to make that move depending onhow aggressive you’re set.

Symon: Well we actually have a few questions around the topic, so first one I’llquickly address is this similar to VMWare DRS, distributed resource schedulertechnology?

Kenon: It is similar to DRS but it’s a little bit different, we’re taking into accountmore resources than traditionally DRS was taking into account, I don’t know if it’susing all these resources as well.

Symon: now these optimization thresholds that you mentioned are thesedynamically set, can they be used to configure other choices?

Kenon: There’s a default setting and then they’re user configured and when wego into the demo I’ll show you that.

Symon: Okay great now we had a feature in the current versions of VMM 2008 r2,

Operations Manager 2007 called performance and resource optimization protips, it has similar functionality could you kind of compare and contrast the twoand let us know what’s happening in pro in this current version of System Center?

Kenon: Sure, so Pro was designed because VMM didn’t take into accountdynamic optimization, there are many aspects to Pro, some of them have to dowith looking at your Hyper V machine and your VMs that are running on there,other ones are actually looking at other devices maybe it’s looking at yourstorage or it’s looking at the physical hardware itself, with dynamic optimizationwhat you’re really going to do is place all the Pro tips that basically we provided

that look at Hyper V server and look at the VMs that are running those are justgoing to be done through dynamic optimization, the other Pro tips are stillimportant and they are very much still valid. We’re working with those hardwarevendors that we have those existing Pro tips with and those third party partnersto create an update to Pro tips for System Center 2012. so right now youwouldn’t use the existing pro tips against VMM 2012 but we’re working to getthose Pro tips updated for System Center 2012 so what I would say is that youwouldn’t install the Pro tips like for Hyper V management or the Pro tip for VM



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monitoring instead use dynamic optimization.

Symon: Okay, great now dynamic optimization when it goes and actually moves aVM can it either use a live migration or saved state, what are the choices there?

Kenon: for dynamic optimization it uses live migration to move those virtualmachines across that’s why the atomic unit is a cluster so you can have multipleclusters in the same host group but for each cluster we’re going to move VMswithin nodes, within that cluster, just like with VMWare’s DRS it only moves withinthat HRDRS cluster within the VMs automatically even though you could livemigrate something out of it. We chose cluster as the atomic unit because allvirtual machine vendors we support, support live migration within a cluster.

Symon: and so I’ve had a few questions on this as well, if I have a VMWare cluster,I have a Windows Server cluster, can I live migrate a VM between these twodifferent clusters?

Kenon: No I can’t, I can’t live migrate it between it anyways but dynamicoptimization is only going to do things within a cluster, it’s not going to take itfrom a VMWare cluster and move it to a Xen Server cluster or anything like that.The other thing is if I have two Hyper V clusters I’m not going to live migrate aVM from one Hyper V cluster to the other one via dynamic optimization

Symon: The boundary again is one cluster

Kenon: Exactly, now there are talks with new things coming in with the nextversion of Windows Server and things that it can do, so if those things if theychange how they work will be at that point and time.

Symon: Now if a customer already has VMWare’s DRS configured, how does thiswork with that, how does it interact with that?

Kenon: So if you have DRS already configured you have a couple of options, youcan continue for the VMWare clusters to use DRS, you could use dynamic

optimization for the Hyper V or the Xen clusters that you have, you can enabledynamic optimization to manage your VMWare and your Hyper V and your Xenserver clusters, what I wouldn’t do is I wouldn’t have dynamic optimization andDRS running against the same VMWare cluster because a couple of things aregoing to happen, one, VMWare’s going to kick off migration to move somethingaround, then dynamic optimization might say, hey no, flip the switch here, nowI’ve got to move something around again, you’re going to get lost in wherethings happen so you would want to have with managing VMWare one or the



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other. We’re hoping that you would use dynamic optimization but it’s yourchoice for your organization.

Symon: Now what about using Xen server can we use dynamic optimizationthere?

Kenon: Absolutely so Xen server has a cluster and you can move virtual machines,Xen motion virtual machines between different systems and dynamicoptimization will work for those as well.

Symon: Now what happens if you know we’ve identified this host that’s reachingit’s resource load and we need to move it but there are no better hosts, meaningthat all the other hosts in the cluster are even higher resource utilization, whathappens then?

Kenon: so at that point we look at all the hosts and when we consider optimizingit, depending on the aggressiveness if we can gain better star ratings across allthe hosts we’re going to do that. But if I move it from one system to another andit’s not going to gain me any advantage in your example it wouldn’t because allthe other hosts are worse off than this host, we’re not going to move thingsaround at that point. So we’re going to make sure that we don’t hurt the clusterwhen we move things around, we only do it if we make things better and in thatcase, let’s just flip over to the demo and let me show you a couple of things on itbecause it might make things a little more understandable.



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DEMO: So in this environment that we saw in the previous sessions I have acouple of host groups here and this administrative infrastructure host group hastwo clusters, it has an ESX cluster and it has a Hyper V cluster. Inside of the hostgroup is where I set the information for dynamic optimization so there are a

couple of things that I want to look at here. First of all is I set host reserves nowthis is where I set how much of the host resource is available before I decidewhether or not I can place virtual machines on this host. So if I wanted to createa brand new VM and place it on this host but by doing so will drop the utilizationdown to less than 10% for the host then I’m not going to do it, that type ofthing. But these are the different values that I can look at when consideringdynamic optimization.

The next step is and this is the unit so I can look at things like either percentageor either number of GB or MB or the percentage of RAM used on that host. I cancheck things like IOPs for disk IO, GB for disk space as well as MB per second so Ican either look at percentage of utilization or I can look at a strict value like howmany MB per second. Then when I flip to the dynamic optimization tab this iswhere I see the specifications that I can make, first of all I can say how aggressivedo I want this thing to be, do I want it to be high aggressiveness which meansthat I’ll migrate things around if I get a point 2 star benefit. And I’ll migrate iteven if I’m below the specific thresholds so if I have it under high aggressivenessand I have one machine running at 70% another machine running at 30% I’mgoing to migrate VMs around even though I haven’t passed the specificthreshold because I want to get them as close to even as possible. If I’m at



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medium high or medium I’ll also do that and the numbers are .2 star thresholdgain, .4, .6, if I’m at medium low or low I will only migrate virtual machines if I’mabove a specific threshold.

Then the next thing I do is a specify whether or not I want it to be automated, inthis example here I have it manual but I could easily just click this switch and it

would turn on to be automated and how often does it do it, it does it by thatfrequency level there. so this allows me to specify the configuration settingsaround dynamic optimization, one other thing I can do is I can specify thresholdsso by default as long as moving the virtual machines off of the system we don’tfall below that 30% available we’re going to keep the VMs on this system. If youfall below that 30% available we’ll move virtual machines off and one of theexamples here I’m going to show you about dynamic optimization, what I’vedone is I’ve kicked up the RAM and I said if I have so many virtual machines onthe system that I don’t have 26 gigs of RAM free on this system then I want to

kick off a dynamic optimization event and that’s an extreme example because Iwould probably wan that down at 1 gig available or something like that, but whatI’ve done there is I’ve set that threshold at a value so that when I have even asmall set of VMs I can go above whatever that value is and kick off a dynamicoptimization event. So I specify these values and then the next thing is I can dois if I have this set to automatically I can talk about power optimization in a fewminutes here.

So I have these values set and if we look at this environment I have a bunch ofdifferent virtual machines running on this environment, inside of my ESX cluster Ihave three virtual machines, two of them are running on ESX server 2, one ofthem is running on ESX server 1, well I want to optimize this environment by just,right clicking, if I had this set on automatic it would move virtual machinesaround for me. But since I have dynamic optimization set to manual I’m justgoing to right click on the server and one of the options I have is the ability tooptimize hosts and it’s going to look at all the virtualized machines on there andsay I have a VM on host 2 and dynamic optimization would help me move that,would tell me hey I want to move that to host 1 so it would say okay, these are allthe VMs that you have, this is where I think you should move these virtualmachines and at this point I could say okay great, I can either view scripts so I

can know what the optimization is going to be or the best thing to do here is justhit optimize. And at that point it’s actually going to kick off a live migration or aVmotion to move the server from the host 2 over to host 1 and it’s going to dothat using Vmotion. So that’s one of the things that we talk about when we’redoing live migration and I remember that there were a couple of questions, whilethis is running that you had about managing multiple hypervisor vendors, wemight as well go into that here.



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Symon: Yes we do so you know we talked about Xen management a little earlieralready but we just want to get confirmation do you need Xen Center, do youneed any other type of management functionality to be able to do Xen motion tobe able to manage those Xen VMs and what’s the difference with VMWare whenwe do require V center?

Kenon: So V center’s required because when I do things like kick off livemigration or Vmotion inside of VMWare I can only do that through V Center.With Citrix Xen server I can do that with just the Xen servers themselves, I don’tneed Xen server to kick off something like Xen motion, so you don’t need anyother tool besides Xen server and VMM. So what will happen is in your Xenserver environment you’ll install a special integration pack from Citrix and thatcustom pack will make it manageable by VMM. I would do that and then I wouldbe able to manage the virtual machines running on that system but I would

manage the underlying hardware, to manage the underlying hardware I wouldhave to go to my Citrix Xen server and manage the hardware there. if I wanted toadd storage or something like that I would do that at the Xen server itself not atVMM. And so VMM will manage the underlying hardware for Hyper V but forVMWare and for Citrix I would do that hardware piece of it through Xen center.

Symon: So how does this relate to the patch management that we discussedearlier, now with the patch manager or with the cluster we’re updating we saidthat we patch the hyper V hosts, what happens in the case of VMWare or Citrix?

Kenon: So in Hyper V we can manage the underlying hosts and patch updates,for updates to the VMWare hosts or the Citrix hosts we would do that via theirhardware management so I would say for updating the ESX host I would doupdate management from V center, for update in V Center I would install patchesdirectly on Xen server so we manage the underlying Microsoft Hyper Venvironment but we don’t do the physical servers for ESX or for Xen server.

Symon: Great, now another question about interoperability, now we touched onthis in the scope of VMWare where we said we’re not live migrate a VM from youknow Windows Server over to VMWare, what about other types of migration, ifwe need to go and move all of my VMs from Xen, all of my VMs from VMWareover to the Hyper V platform, what is that process of converting them andmoving them over?

Kenon: so there are a couple of options you have there if you want to migrate



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one hypervisor to another, probably the easiest one is if the machine’s up andrunning you would do basically a P to V of that virtual machine. So you have, justlike you have a physical machine right now there, you connect to it and you do aphysical to virtual migration. If you’re using a VMWare environment you couldalso do a virtual to virtual migration where I can shut down that virtual machine

and I can import that virtual machine from the ESX server over to the Hyper Vsystems and I can do all of that through VMM itself. And that would be for yourWindows guest operating systems.

Symon: That’s all the questions I have for now

Kenon: Excellent, so dynamic optimization allows me to move virtual machinesaround as the load changes throughout the day, besides that I want to talk more

about the power optimization.



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Where dynamic optimization happens through a threshold that call BOB, youknow we start using more and more resources that we want to move thingsaround, power optimization happens when I go below a threshold, in otherwords I’m not using these resources I have so many resources available, I want to

shut some of those systems down. So if we look at power optimization what it’sreally doing is this, looking at the systems and as I drop below a specificoptimization threshold where even if I shut down machines I will still have thismany resources available then at that point and time we’ll migrate all the VMsoff of that particular machine and after we migrate those machines off of thatmachine we will power down that physical box so what that does is allows me tosave some energy and just use the amount of resources that I need within thesystem. Now over time you know I won’t need those resources but then theresource utilization will pick up and I’ll start moving above that optimization

threshold at that point in time we’ll power on some or all of the remainingmachines that we powered off and then through dynamic optimization it willmove virtual machines around to rebalance that workload.

So this gives me the ability when I don’t need those resources to shut themdown but when I do need them we’ll start them right back up again and thisuses the out of band management to do that so I need to be able to connect tothat HPI load, Dell drive, whatever that system is for that out of bandmanagement capabilities.

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So a couple of things here, again weconsider the same resources that weconsider with dynamic optimization butnow we’re basically going to do thisevent when we move below thresholdand we consider the entire cluster.

Meaning that if I have some machinesthat are running under the thresholdbut I can’t when I move everything offstill have all the machines that are leftstill be below that threshold we’re not



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going to move it around, so we’re notgoing to shut a machine down just to 2

minutes later power it back up. You canspecify what hours of the day, you canschedule when this is going to occurand when it’s not and it only is availablewhen you set dynamic optimization to

automated.A couple things to ensure here is wewon’t power machines down if we’regoing to overload the remaining nodesin the cluster and we’re going to make

sure that we don’t violate any clusterquorum requirements that that clustermay already have when you do thispower optimization so what that meansis that you have to have enough nodesin that cluster that when we powersome of them down we’ll still have theavailability, so we’ll still have theavailability to failover machines but also



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we’ll still have that cluster be a validcluster. So let’s take a look at how we set

those things and where it is.



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DEMO: If we go into the demo here, again we see the host group that we haveand in that same host group if we look at the properties in that exact same placewhere we set at dynamic optimization we have to first turn on automatic and byturning on automatic we have to enable power optimization so if we enable

power optimization we get a whole new dialogue that really goes into thosesettings and before where I had the settings set at specific values it increasesthings like okay I won’t do this unless the hosts still has after we’ve evacuatedand powered off systems, still has 40% of CPU available. And I can adjust howthat happens and then I can also do things that well I know that my systems arealways busy between 6 and 8 in the morning on the weekdays so I can turnthose systems so that power optimization doesn’t happen then wheneverybody’s logging in in the morning. And then when everybody comes backafter lunch I may want those systems available as well so I don’t have people getslow e-mail response time after lunch or something like that but besides that,the rest of the days and weekends, power optimization is fine and do it if it

needs to. So I can specify just specific times that I want to do poweroptimization, once I do this again, it’s going to look at the entire cluster, it’s notgoing to shut down machines if it won’t have enough available resources left tohandle a failover, so inside of my systems one of the things that I want to set asfar as a rule is that in the cluster I don’t violate any cluster quorum capabilities asfar as how many machines are going to be up and running, once I do that it willdo power optimization for my Hyper V hosts only.

All right so that’s power optimization in dynamic optimization.



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The next thing we want to talk about here is access to these resources nowwithin the configure and deploy private cloud infrastructure we talked aboutdifferent user roles and how they are important for delegating access to theseclouds, well that’s something that we’re repeating in that section in this session

here



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because when you’re talking about on going maintenance of your cloud, one ofthe things that’s really important is who has access to what resources and whatthey need to do and what they are allowed to do on those resources. And one ofthe things that’s important to note is that when I set these different user roles I

have the ability to change these values as needs of my organization change. So Iwant to ensure that the application owners have access to the resources thatthey need but I don’t want them to have full access to all my different resourcesespecially if I’m sharing these resources between different groups. And thenlastly I want to control what actions and what different devices or virutalmachines these people can deploy to.

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So again I do that by creating from the cloud, creating this delegated capacity model and I useActive Directory for the different users inside of there.

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I have the administrator accounts and that would be a full administrator ordelegated administrator to a different group and I also have these things calleduser roles and the self service user is only specified at a cloud and has actionsthat I can give, grant or pull away.



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Things to note here is that I can create these custom roles for different users andgroups and give them different access so I may have cloud users for a specificset of cloud resources and they may only have things from start stop, deployfrom a specific template. I may also create cloud admin roles which has full

access to the cloud, they can create new VMs they can do all the different tasksthat I would expect them to be able to perform and they can then by havingthem have this full cloud access they can create different cloud users underneaththem so they can manage that stuff, so I can give access to one guy and then hecan divvy up and manage this cloud off of there.



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Use active directory in groups to manage these things, we talked a lot aboutquota in that configure and deploy session, the biggest thing here is I had oneorganization where they had a bunch of developers and every developer had todeploy five different virtual machines for their application to work they didn’t

want that developer to deploy multiple instance of their application and take upall the resources so what they did was they had this group of developers andthey basically gave each of the developers the ability at the member level quotasection to deploy only five virtual machines so they were able to deploy oneinstance of their application. And they also said well I don’t want each of thesedevelopers to have their own instance such as sitting there doing nothing soeven though there were 20 developers in the group it specified the number ofvirtual machines that the whole user role could create at 20, so that meant only 4developers at a time could deploy their application and service on this cloud

resources and it helped them protect the rest of these resources from thedevelopers that were just deploying many, many, many different virtualmachines.



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So we talked now about dynamically optimizing cloud resources, rebalancing theload as the needs change but then the next thing is we want to have theseapplications that are deployed and we need to ensure that those applicationsare running at the appropriate version level, we want to make sure that we

have updates to the applications and not necessarily to the OS but to theapplications themselves, we’re running these applications at the right version,we want an easy way to push these updates out so that we don’t have to goto every single machine that we deployed out and do these updates. Also wemay have different updates to the OS itself, not small patch updates butmaybe a major update from say the OS to a service pack or the OS to an R2 orsomething like that, we want to just do a wholesale replacement of thatunderlying OS we can do those things through Virtual Machine Manager andstandardizing those approaches to application updates.



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So just a quick recap of what is a service template, service template is this, itcould be one or more tiers of applications, each of those tiers would have a tierassociated with it and that VM template is made up of things like the hard driveof the VM, the OS settings, the applications installed on top of it, whether it’s a

web tier that may have MS deploy package, an app tier with a service app Vpackage or data tier with SQL dat packages and put all that stuff together into aVM tier, put those things together into a service template which is stored in thelibrary and that template information can then use as what we would call thesource of truth for a service deployment.



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So what we have is these services that we deploy are template driven and byhaving this one template as being the source of truth what we’re really gaining isthe fact that when we want to update this service we can update the templateand push it down to multiple instances of deployed service. Within a particular

tier I may have multiple VMs installed or deployed and what we can do withinthe tiers is that we can leverage upgrade domains so that we don’t bring theentire tier down just to do an upgrade of that piece of the system. And we cando these updates either in place or image based.An in place update is something I would use if I was changing a particularsetting inside the virtual machine, maybe I wanted to go from a small amount ofRAM to more RAM or small amount of processors to more processors or Iwanted to change a setting around the hardware, maybe add a new networkadaptor or something like that. The other reason I would use in place settings is

if I wanted to change an application maybe I had a server app V package version1 and I wanted to update it to server App V package server 2. well I would usein place updates to basically just save the state of that application and pull outthe version 1 of the application, drop down the version 2 of the application andthen apply the state to that application and I can do all that stuff without havingto really do a large scale change of that virtual machine.If I want to do an image based update, if I’m going from say WindowsServer2008 to Server 2008 R2 or from 2008 R2 to SP1 it may be faster for me to

just drop in a brand new VHD file instead of having to run through the entire



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service pack update process so we can instead of replacing just a piece of thissystem with like the application, what we’ll do is lift up the application, replace inthe OS itself, drop in a brand new VHD file , give it the same name, ID and all thatstuff that the old one had and then drop that application back on top of it. Sowe’ll reinstall and restore the state of that application.



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So there was a question?

Symon: Yea, there is one question as we’re looking at all these templates, theapplication maintenance, can this only work with Hyper V or can you use this

template and service model on VMWare or Citrix model?

Kenon: This service and template model can be used on VMWare or Citrix aswell, this is all stuff done on top of to the VM itself, not necessarily to thehypervisor so we can do this all for any of the different hypervisors, the otherthing is that we can have services that span multiple hypervisors so one tiercould be on VMWare where another tier can be on hyper V and we can doupdates to that as easily as anything else.

Symon: Now do we have limitations about what can actually run inside the VMthat’s in the service template for example if you wanted to use some other typeof database instead of a SQL Database or if you wanted to use Linux operatingsystem instead of a Windows Server operating system again in the VM guest?

Kenon: So within a VM guest you can have for each of the tiers it could bewhatever is a supported guest operating system so it could be a Linux guestoperating system the thing is to do the customization stuff that we would dothat stuff and the updates would only be done against Windows operating

chReady12 8/9/20

2011 Microsoft Corporation. All rights

served. Microsoft, Windows, Windows Vista

d other product names are or may be

gistered trademarks and/or trademarks in

e U.S. and/or other countries.

e information herein is for informationalrposes only and represents the current

w of Microsoft Corporation as of the date

this presentation. Because Microsoft must

spond to changing market conditions, it

ould not be interpreted to be a

mmitment on the part of Microsoft, and

crosoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of

y information provided after the date of

s presentation.

CROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES,PRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE

FORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.



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system. If I have say an Oracle database instead of a SQL Database, I wouldn’tuse the SQL Dac packs and the updates that we do via the service template but ifit’s running Oracle on Windows then I can create a custom script that performsthose update actions and does the things that I want it to do but it would haveto be something that I would have to script and create myself. If that was maybe

installed as a Server App V package or something like that there might be a wayaround some of these things. The thing I need to be careful of are is I need tounderstand how the upgrade for that application works and be able to script thatappropriately but then once I do that I can push it out anywhere I need to.

Symon: Excellent

Kenon: All right so in this example here I have this template library and inside thistemplate library I have a service template that I want to deploy. So I pick thattemplate out of the template library and I deploy that service. So it’s going todeploy an instance of that service and that service in this example has three tiers,has a web tier with three virtual machines, has an app tier with three virtualmachines and then has a database tier with only one virtual machine runningSQL. And I have versions of this data and I call it version 1.0, well I have anupdate and maybe that update is I want to change the amount of RAM on theapplication server or I want to update the application itself from a version 1 to aversion 1.5 or something like that. Well I make a copy of the service template andthen in that service template I give it the new version number, I go through andmake all the changes to that template that I need to make to that service

template, change the amount of RAM or whatever it is I’m changing to updatethe application and then after I’ve done all that I save the template. The next stepis to publish that template and when I publish the template if I refresh the VM Ilook at the VM it says hey, there’s a new update available for this virtual machineso the service will be in the pending service update state it doesn’t it’s not goingto apply the update automatically it’s just going to tell me hey there’s an updateavailable. At that point in time I can push that update down to the service andbecause of the use of upgrade domains we’re not going to bring down the entiretier just to upgrade this application tier but instead we’re going to bring it downone at a time and do the updates. So I push the update down and what we’ll see

if that I’ll update the applications within that tier but I’ll do it one at a time andnot the entire piece itself , set the version release number to 1.5 and now I can goand do this update to all the different deployed services that I have.



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If I look at image based updates it’s very similar to how it’s configured andimage based updates what we’re really doing is instead of replacing theconfiguration of the VM or the application installed on it we’re updating theactual VHD file itself so I have a deployed service there again version 1.0 if I’m

going to do image based updates then the first thing I’m going to do is make acopy of that template, reversion it to say 1.5 and then I’m going to update theVHD file for one of those service templates, maybe I’ll go from WindowsSErver2008 R2 to Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. then what happens is that I’llagain I’ll publish that template it will make it look like hey there’s an updateavailable this service will be set at pending service update, then the next stephere is I will push down that update to the tiers to that service, again it’s goingto take into account upgrade domains, so it’s not going to bring down the entireversion unless I want it to and the other thing is it’s going to take the application

that’s installed on that machine, it’s going to basically lift it up, it’s going todeploy a brand new VHD, do the install process, sys prep it, give it the samename, unique information that the old VM had and then it’s going to drop backthe application onto that machine, restore all the state of that application ontothat machine. So this is something that’s going to take a lot longer per VMbecause it has to do basically a full install of the VHD file, copy that to themachine and then deploy it and get that up and running. So image basedupdates are something that we’re probably not going to use a lot of but youwould only use it for large scale updates or if you want to do a whole scale

chReady12 8/9/20

2011 Microsoft Corporation. All rights

served. Microsoft, Windows, Windows Vista

d other product names are or may be

gistered trademarks and/or trademarks in

e U.S. and/or other countries.

e information herein is for informationalrposes only and represents the current

w of Microsoft Corporation as of the date

this presentation. Because Microsoft must

spond to changing market conditions, it

ould not be interpreted to be a

mmitment on the part of Microsoft, and

crosoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of

y information provided after the date of

s presentation.

CROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES,PRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE

FORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.



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chagne of the application that was deployed or something like that.



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So what I like to do is go through and talk about these things and show youwhat that piece looks like so I’m going to switch over to the demo here

Symon: Now we had a question that came in, so under this you know broadumbrella category of all of these different types of service template updates wehave is there anyway that we actually document what’s being changed, youknow basically is there anyway that we keep track of hey we applied thistemplate, this got changed just for compliance reasons?

Kenon: So within the different templates we keep all the different templates thatwe have deployed so you can check the difference between them, we do storethings in the jobs, information about what was done and what information has

been changed so you can pull some of that information out, the other way to doit is use configuration manager and design configuration manager to pull thatinformation out of the machine, you can do that and keep track before and afterof what has been changed.

Symon: So as a slightly broader question then that’s related is there any type oflog in that happens, if you need to go back and see what’s happened with VMMis there any type of log in that you can go back and trace hey, VMM did this at

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this time, it did this at this time

Kenon: Absolutely that’s all stored in the jobs that we have so we have all thesedifferent jobs, we have job failed, it tells you what failed and why they might fail

let me drop this thing down you see all these different jobs that have been setwithin the environment so you can actually look inside of there and see what’sbeen happening with that service or what’s been happening with that applicationso you can look back there. We also store a lot of information in the event logsand we post information there so if something fails you can look in the event logand see what’s been happening at that point.

If we look at the library and we look under service templates you can see that Ialready have in this customer demographics server I have a multiple differentversions, version 1.2, 1.3, 1.5 and these are updates that I’ve created over time, if Ilook at the actual deployed service that I have go into the VMs and services, click

under services here, under the customer demographics service that’s running yousee that we’re running version 1.2 so we’re running template version 1.2 andthat’s the one that’s available for it, I’ve done some upgrades before in the pastand dropped them back off so what I’m going to do here is I’m going to gothrough and show you how we make the update and make the changes thenhow we would apply those different types of changes.

So I take this version 1.2 right here and the first thing I can do, I’ll just go to the1.5 that I had and I’ll make an update to that one. So version 1.5 if you look atthe properties of 1.5 we can see that it stores all the information of the things like

what types of things you have to pass through and everything like that. What I’mgoing to do is just make a straight copy of that version, I’m ready to update thisone to the next version so we’ll see that it’s going to say customer demographicservice copy of 1.5 when this copy completed so I’ll take that copy and this is thecopy that I’m going to make my changes to. So I found that 1.5 I actuallyassigned too much memory to the system so I’m going to pull some of that backand I want to change the version of the application that I’m using so I’ll open upthe designer, the easiest way to make changes inside of this service here and thefirst thing I can see is that release number is copy 1.5, I’m going to change it to1.9 I made some changes but I’m not ready to call a whole version update for thisapplication.

If we look at the tiers here I’ll bring it up to 75% we see we have multiple tiers, wehave some app tiers we also have this web tier. Well I found that the web tier hastoo much RAM assigned to it so I’m going to drop some of that down becauseit’s really just wasting that RAM it’s not really using it at all. So if I go underproperties of that service of that tier, that VM template for that tier, look at thehardware configuration we can see that I’m running at basically 1.5 as the startfor dynamic memory and it can bump up to whatever amount of RAM it needs,



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so come on pop up here real quick, all right, let’s close that out and we’re goingto hop back into VMM real quick here.

All right so connecting back into System Center we’re going to log in asadministrator, all right let’s go to this other demo machine that I have, all right soinside of VMM here I’m going to have this customer demographics application

version 1.2, if you look at the library here I have this customer demographicsservice 1.2, I haven’t done an upgrade on this service and this serviceenvironment but I’ll do that right now. So the first thing I’m going to do is I’mgoing to copy this service template and I’ll make all my changes to that copy weleave the original available because the original has services deployed against it.So I take this copy and I’ll open designer and at this point let’s make the changesthat we wanted to make to this service. I have the customer demographics web,well the first thing I want to do is change the version number so update this onefrom 1.2, let’s just call it 1.3 and the next thing I’m going to do is edit the amount

of RAM assigned to this machine. So if I look at the properties of this virtualmachine template I have the hardware configuration and it’s set at 1 virtualprocessor and 512 MBs of memory well I found that one virtual processor is notenough, I’m going to pop it up to 2 but I want to change the amount of RAMfrom 512 I want to give it 1024 so it’s going to start at a gig of RAM and becauseit can use dynamic memory I’ll let it bump up to 2 gigs if it needs to. So thoseare the two major changes I wanted to make here in this VM on the servicetemplate. The other change I want to make is I want to change the applicationversion number one of the applications that I have this order processingapplication, let me make this a little bit bigger so we can all see it, this order

processing VM tier right here, I look at the properties there, I can see under theapplication configuration that we’re using a server App V package and we’reusing this Server App V package called processor, well I know that we have anupdate to that application package so let me pull this over and we see thatthere’s the CD order processor service but I also have this new order processorfor this ST5 app and that one actually is the same app that I can use here so Iwant to pick that as the replacement or update to that application. So I hit okaythere, I’ll call this VST5 02 just to make sure that I understand the changes thatI’ve made here and I’ll hit okay. So I’ve made two changes to this service

template, I’ve changed the amount of RAM assigned to this particular VM andthen the service running on the VM and I’ve also changed the version of the OS, Imean the version of the application I’m running on the order processing tier. Oneof the things that we have inside this application is that the web tier has twoinstances that are going to be deployed initially, it can scale up to five but I havetwo upgrade domains, meaning that I’m going to take however many VMs aredeployed for that tier, divide it by 2 and just bring that many down at a time. If Ihad seven then it would be three down one time, four down the other, that typeof thing. After I finish all those changes that I’ve made I’m going to do a save



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and validate it’s going to check, make sure I haven’t made any stupid mistakesand get this thing up and ready to go. So at this point and time now I’ll see Ihave two lists of these services so I have both the version 1.2 and also the version1.3 but the VM service itself doesn’t see this update yet because I haven’tpublished it. So I’m ready now to publish that service update so I’ll hit publish

here and at this point and time it’s based off the 1.2 version and it’s publishedand available to use.

If I now look at my VMs and services I can see the different tiers that I have and Ican see on my web tier I have two VMs deployed, I can see one tier for thebusiness logic SQL and order processing and I’m running version 1.2. well thefirst thing I want to do now is on this service I want to check to see if there areany updates so if I do a refresh of the service we can see an update status thatwe have a new release available so there is a new release available and if I wantto I can apply that release to this machine. So is there a question?

Symon: well there’s just been a few kind of questions, you know people are reallyexcited about this service template model but it sounds like there’s a little bit ofunfamiliarity with when to adopt it, do we have any examples of sample servicetemplates, specifically there’s been a request about sample service templates forcluster.

Kenon: so there have, there are some sample service templates that we’ve madeavailable, not as a template but really as blog articles on how to create thesetypes of things. We’re also looking to, now that System Center 2012 is finallycoming out, really doing a lot of education on how the service model is differentthan maybe developing applications initially and what types of things you can doand you can’t do so you’ll see a lot more information over the next six monthsabout things within the service template. Talking to some of our TAP customersand MVPs that have started working on this with their customers and theircompanies what they found is that the service template model it’s different thanhow they would do things in the past. And it’s not that they can’t do it but a lotof the developers that they work with are used to doing things one way and this

is a very different way of doing these things so they’re looking at doing twothings right now, the first one is getting their infrastructure ready to go and beable to present and do the private cloud but also they’re doing a large scaleeducation to their development group, showing them how they can do things alittle bit differently in their side which makes things a lot easier as far as runningand operationalzing these applications that their developers are running. Andwhat they’ve said is that it’s a parallel activity and it’s going to take a little time tostart moving these developers over to that, just like it took a long time to movepeople from touching and feeling a physical machine to moving to virtual. So it’s



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not something that you’re going to change the way you do it over night but overtime you’ll see a lot of different applications and services start being developedfor cloud principals which is really going to handle this service model. So yea,there are some blogs now and there will be blogs with more detail on how to setup these service templates, creating a service template isn’t a you know 2 click

thing, takes a little while to set up, what you’re going to see though is that if youstart developing your applications with service templates in mind if you take thetime to set up these service templates for these applications you deploy over andover and over again it’s going to make up for a lot of that wasted time that youdo afterwards in just configuring these applications it’s going to take all that stufffor you. We talked to some customers and every time they installed anapplication they had a 146 page run book that they had to go through, click byclick by click on every piece of configuration that they had to do. If you’re able totake that 146 page run group, put it into a Server App V package and be able todeploy this application multiple times without having to go through all thesedifferent configuration steps it’s going to save you a lot of time in the future. Sothat’s where the education between what you’re doing now and what you can bedoing in the future is going to take some time but it’s going to really pay off inthe future.

So I have this update, these are some of the things that you know when you setup you can show your developers that hey, now that I have made these changesthat I want to make instead of having to go to every single deployed service andevery single VM in that service and make all these changes, I can make it to theone template and push it out to all these different deployed services that are out

there. so I have this version that’s this new release available at that point I canspecify for that particular template, set the template to the version that I want sowhat I want to do here is instead of just modifying existing application settings Iwant to update to the newest version of the template so I can pick the versionthat I want which is version 1.3 here and at that point just go through the rest ofthese browsers, this wizard, what it’s going to do is say okay here’s the currentvalue of the settings that you have do we have to change them no, do you wantto change them, if you wanted to change any of these values you could and itwould push those values into the service but you don’t have to, the next thing is

how do you want to do these updates, do you want to do them in place or doyou want to do them image based and deploy new virtual machines. Well all thechanges I made are in this template update are things that I do in place, I don’thave to replace the VHD so I’m just going to do in place updates for them, it’sgoing to go through and check the existing values of the service and the newvalues is there anything I need to add inside of there, it’s going to look at each ofthe different tiers and sees what’s going to happen and you’re going to seesomething in that viewing of the tiers. We have a couple of warnings here, thewarnings are for the different tiers that don’t have upgrade domains. So I have



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multiple tiers, I have a demographics tier no changes are going to be made to itso I can ignore that warning, the web tier there are no warnings because I haveupgrade domains, so it’s not going to bring the whole thing down. This is justbasically telling me that that order processing tier I’m going to have to take thewhole tier down because I don’t have multiple upgrade domains. And that’s fine,

I understand that that’s going to happen in the upgrade process so I’m okay withthat and if I had cared about the SQL server, but since I’m not making anychanges there it’s not going to affect it. Then the next thing is well I’ve done thatnow I want to apply those updates immediately so as soon as I hit okay here whydon’t we just start that process on the tier, so I do that and hit finish at this pointit’s going to start the job and that job’s going to run through all the differentsteps. The first thing we see is that we’re stopping that web tier if you look at theweb tier you see the VMs is set for 512 Megs right now, I’m stopping the VM, it’sgoing to make adjusted setting from 512 megs to one gig and we see here that’snow at 1 gig and it’s going to restart the VM it’s all I really had to do is changethat, change the number of processors if I look at web 1 here, it’s still at 1processor, 512 the web 2 here is 2 processors and 1 gig, and after it gets thatmachine up and running that machine’s checked back in and we see thateverything’s running okay on that machine we will then do that same processwith this web 1 server here. So we see it’s now stopping shutting that VM down,going to make the changes that we made and it’s going to bring that machineback so those are some of the things you can do and I can push these out to allthe different virtual machines or services that have deployed through thiscustomer demographics service template. After it brings both of those things

down the next thing it’s going to do is work on the order processing tier and herethe VM is going to run but what it’s going to do is take this deployed service andit’s going to update that with the updated version that I got that I applied to this.So it’s not going to use the existing version but save the state, deploy thatupdate and reapply the state to it and it’s just running through the demo fromthat or just running through the rest of the updates for that system.

So that shows you some of the benefits that you have within the modified andmanaging your service templates and being able to do these image based andthese in place updates allows you to make the change in one place and then

push it out to all these different places.

Symon: so I have a good question about you know these service templatesrunning them simultaneously in production and in a test environment so let’s sayI’ve got this template in a test environment, I love it what’s the easiest way tomake that live to go import it from my test world over to my production world?

Kenon: So I’ve made the service template, if the VMM server is managing both of



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those environments both the dev and the production environment then I cansimply make that template available to my production cloud and people can startdeploying it once it’s gold. The other thing I can do is this, if I have two differentVMM servers one VMM server is in my dev environment and another one is inmy production environment I can take that template and let’s say this 1.3 version

of the template and I can export it and when I export that template it exports allthe information and I have a couple of options here; do I just want to export themeta data of that template or do I want to export all the different files andeverything that are necessary for that template. So I pick the template that Iwant to export and I specify where I want to export that template to and I cancopy it to a local machine or I can copy it up to a network or something like thatand actually let’s create a new folder inside of here, call it template and then hitokay there. and at that point it’s going to export all the information for thattemplate to that machine. If I wanted to add other templates when I do thisexport process I can add those templates straight from this machine, if I want tooverride or extract any of the sensitive data and keep that data inside thetemplate so it’s all encrypted and everything like that I can turn those things onas well. I can even set a password value against it so when I move it from onesite and I import it to another site I have to type in that password to protect it. SoI won’t have any of that information set up hit okay and it will start exportingthat template. Then once that template is exported, I can import it and now atthe new VMM server the import process I may not have the same VHD file orthese network names you know here I have Contoso, maybe over there I haveContosoprod as the name. well we have this equivalency set up so when I import

that template I can choose I wanted it to be this VHD file not this other one, Iwanted to use this network instead of the other one so I have the ability to setthose things as well.

Symon: okay, another question around these upgrades, well first of all we’ve beenasked can you exactly define what is an upgrade domain?

Kenon: So an upgrade domain is a number that you specify that says when Iupgrade this service I’m going to bring down the number of VMs that aredeployed in that service divided by the upgrade domain, so if I had the upgradedomain set at 3 then I would take that number of VMs that are in that service, inthat tier of that service and I would divide it by three and I would bring down athird of them the first time, a third the second and a third the last time, but ifthere were like 7 and it was 3 then I would bring down 3 the first time, 2 thesecond time, 2 the third time because you know it may not evenly divide. So anupgrade domain just means that every time I do an upgrade of that tier I onlyupgrade a specific piece at a time until I’ve upgraded the entire tier so I’ll bring



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down a third, do the upgrade on those bring those back up, do the next third, dothe upgrade on those, bring them back up and then do the next third, bringthem back up. Now, if the application can support having multiple versions of itat the same time, maybe I have the first set of VMs and they’re connected to aweb interface and I’m updating the whole scale web page, well those that are

connected to the web sites, with the old version you would still see the oldversion until those machines got updated so your application has to be able tohandle or you have to be okay with it that you have two versions up at the sametime. if I don’t have that then I’ll probably just want to keep one upgrade domain,bring them all down, bring them back up depends on how much outage I want.

Symon: Okay a few other questions on the topic can we upgrade servicetemplates while they’re offline?

Kenon: So a service that is shut down, I don’t know, I haven’t tried, so weprobably could apply that because it depends on what the update is, if theupdate is something where the VM has to be running like I’m updatingsomething inside the VM then no we couldn’t but if it was something where it’s

just changing a configuration of the VM like the amount of RAM I think that thatmight work, I haven’t tried it.

Symon: Okay, and now what would be the process of updating a VHD itself

meaning you know I have VHD old, I have VHD new I need to go and replace theexisting VHD with the new VHD is there anything unique to that process?

Kenon: So what I would do is this, to update a gold VHD that I have I would takea VM and deploy it off of that VHD file, I would make all the changes that I wantinside that VHD file and then I would create a template off of that VM and thatwould give me that updated VHD file. That VHD file I would then store in thelibrary and so underneath the library if I look at my different library servers and Ilook at this VMM01 library server it has a bunch of things like VHDs and I have

these multiple VHDs that are created and I would just create new VHD off of that.One of the things that you can do with VHDs are you can set properties of themso I may have a virtual hard disk file and I might want to say that this file is aspecific type of family so I may want to give it a family name like this is server OSno apps and a release number and I can call this 1.0. I want to make the updateto the VHD file and I store that updated VHD file inside this library I can set anequivalent resource so that this is seen as an update to that existing VHD file so Ican put those things together. The other thing is when I import this servicetemplate and it says it needs this kind of VHD I can pick whatever one I have in



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my library at that other VMM server.

Symon: Great can you remind us one more time, what authoring tool are youusing to actually create an manipulate the service templates?

Kenon: So I’m modifying and creating the service templates through the servicetemplate designer that’s within VMM itself, so VMM comes with that authoringtool to do that.

Symon: Excellent, that’s all the questions we have on service templates for now

Kenon: Great so if we go back now and look at the VMs and services you see that

we’re now up to version 1.3 it completed, there’s a job status here so I can look atthe job itself and find out you know what worked, what didn’t if something’sfailed, all that stuff’s kept from me and if something failed I can make somechanges and restart the job and it would pick off from where I left off.



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All right so we’ve talked now about service templates and service templates is just going to be something that it’s just going to take awhile for people toreally understand but once you start using them you’ll see the power thatservice template gives you. But now we want to know with all these services

that are deployed I want to ensure that the cloud that I’m providing is givingme the right size, I’m not going to want to have a lot of spare resources sittingaround I’d like to almost do just in time on my resources, make sure I have alittle bit of a buffer but I don’t want to buy for my peak usage when I’m onlyusing 10% of that most of the time. I’ll buy for what I need to use and then beable to expand.



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And to do that I’ll need to know what is the utilization on my private cloud rightnow, what is happening on my system right now, I’ll also want to trend that overtime and say over the last six months how have I been growing on this privatecloud because maybe the usage over the last six months can help me forecast

my future private cloud needs. So with VMM and operations manager we havebuilt in reporting on how your infrastructure is running.



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and then we’ll generate a report on how these machines are performing andyou’ll be able to use that information to say how have things been working overtime.



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The other thing that we’ll be able to do is some what it forecasting so we’ll beable to if you have SQL analysis services running inside on your OperationsManager server you’ll be able to do some SQL analysis what if forecasting andsay we’ve trended data over the past X amount of months for this amount of

usage this is what the change or the update’s going to be anticipated over thenext month or two and you’ll be able to decide do I need to buy more or notfrom that.

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So let’s show a little bit about what that looks like and how we get thosereporting information so I’ll move back to this system right here and we haveunder Operations Manager we have this reporting section and under reportingwe have all the reports for System Center virtual machine manager so we’ve

created these different reports and put them in there and they could be thingslike what’s my capacity utilization, what’s the host utilization some of these arepretty interesting if we look at the host utilization report and we go through itthis is where we could find out how each of my hosts are performing and we cando this over a set period of time, day, week, month, year so I’ll do it from thebeginning of the month to today, if I add a group then what I can do is pickinside the group and choose the different hyper V hosts that I have inside ofhere, just pull in all this information but if I search by class and I pick hyper Vhosts I can pick all the hyper V hosts in my environment and I will pick these

three hosts right here, I can also add my ESX hosts and they are called Con prodESX and so if I add my Hyper V hosts I can add them in as well as my ESX or anyother type of hosts inside of here. So let me pull them up right here, I’ll just dothe Hyper V ones, I can’t find them real quick here and I will hit okay. And at thispoint, I’ll just see that object here and we see the Con prod ESX hosts right here,so I’ll choose some of those as well and hit okay so now we have five hosts thatwe’re looking at; we’re looking at some Hyper V hosts and some ESX hosts andwe hit run and it will generate the report on these different hosts and I can seehow the performance is running for these different systems. The other thing

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that we’ll be able to do and the one that I want to show after this is capacity andthe capacity planning that will help me determine, it kind of pools multipledifferent resources together and gives me kind of a performance index numberon how these things are performing, so while that’s running I’ll start the otherone up here and that’s capacity utilization. Again we’ll just do it for this month

we’ll add object and here we’ll add the Hyper V hosts and a couple of ESX serverhosts so we have those hosts available. Let’s see did this thing come up okay, sofirst of all this report came up and it show me that I’m probably not using a lot ofthe resources on here, I have a lot of VMs using a lot of RAM on these systemsbut I’m not really fully utilizing things like the CPU so I can see how things arerunning within this environment. If I look at the capacity utilization within thissame group when it runs this report it’s going to kind of aggregate all this valuesof CPU, disk, network and memory, pull them all together and really just tell mehow these things are performing so things that we can see here is that thedifferent hosts, we can see that most of my hosts aren’t using a lot of resources ifwe look at the performance impact factor so I’m not running out of resources onthese hosts they can really handle a lot more especially in the CPU thing, realm.Under net transfer I can see the utilization of these devices and what we see isthat most of my utilization is through memory, I have a lot of different systemsthat are running and each of those systems require some memory so it’s reallypulling a lot of my memory but my disk IO, my network IO, my CPU is all running

just fine. And in any of this information if I want to look at what the values are Ican just pull down that piece in the report and I can see over the period of timethis is the aggregated amount of CPU, disk and memory network usage over the

past month. So I have all that capability available for me to be used.So reporting gives me that capability of understanding how things are runninghere and the next thing that I would want to do is look at if I hade analysisservices running I could look at the host utilization growth and predict what thatgrowth’s going to be. I can also report on the individual virtual machines as well,things like virtual machine utilization and here again, we’ll do it for this monthwe’ll add an object, objects that contain 01, so I have all these virtual machinesthat have been deployed, some are infrastructure servers, some are just serviceVMs everything, I’ll just add all those servers in there, hit okay and we’ll run that

report and we’ll get good information about how are these virtual machinesperforming, what’s their CPU utilization and I see that my Operations Managerserver is running pretty high compared to some of these other servers here, wecan sort by lowest to highest if we pull down here we can see that OperationsManager server is the hottest machine that I have on here some of the otherones are running not so hot. If you look at the RAM utilization or memory youcan see which ones are needing or wanting more RAM then they’re really using.So I have all this different information that I can use to see how these virtualmachines are performing and how everything’s working together.



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So with that, we’ve talked a lot now about the different environments, we talkedabout dynamic optimization, service access, service templates and nowperformance and monitoring but were there some questions that were out there?

Symon: There were, why don’t we wrap this up and then we’ll spend a fewminutes covering the remaining questions.

Kenon: Excellent



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So the things that we’ve really focused on today are optimizing this private cloudto handle our dynamic workloads, controlling access to who has access to thoseresources, a better and updated approach to how we handle updates to theseservices and apps that are deployed and how to keep on top of knowing how

much resources are being used and trending that for the future.

Symon: Excellent, thanks Kenon, well let’s jump into some of the questions thatwe have, we’ll answer questions for about five minutes then we’ll take a break,first question we have ties back to the templates again the question is around, isthere any way to compare the templates or is using the versioning the best wayto figure out if there’s a change that’s been applied to a version>

Kenon: there’s no way to say what’s the difference between this template andthis template the versioning would help you do that and that would besomething you probably want to keep track of in say your CMDB or somethinglike that and with the service manager connector to VMM it will pull thatinformation as you make changes and updates to the templates into the CMDB.

Symon: Great, so hopefully you’re aware when a change does happen, great, wellnext question is going back to some of the earlier things as well so first of all

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with cluster creation can we create Xen clusters and VMWare clusters or do wemanage them?

Kenon: We don’t create them we just use them, so you create them outside

Symon: That would be the same concept you were talking about earlier rightwhere we’re just managing their VMs we’re not necessarily managing the hoststhemselves?

Kenon: Exactly

Symon: Great now will Power Optimization also work on VMWare and Xen

servers?

Kenon: Power Optimization is Hyper V only

Symon: Okay, so specifically targeted for that, now when we actually go throughscheduling this power optimization and we have servers that are distributed,meaning different time zones do we have a logic that takes that into account ordo you know how that works? Is it based on the primary site where you configureit?

Kenon: You know I’m not sure so I haven’t played around with that, that would besomething we’d have to look into but I would imagine that it’s based on the timezone of the VMM server, not the time zone of the different hosts but I’m not sureon that.

Symon: Great, well that will be a great question to post in the TechNet forum,there are TechNet forums already available for all of the System Center 2012

products so please post that there, we’ll get some more information on that.Now as we actually go through a dynamic optimization process is it possible forus to leave out a particular host inside the cluster or is the boundary of dynamicoptimization that entire cluster?

Kenon: The boundary of dynamic optimization is the entire cluster, now you canuse some things with custom placement rules that specify where you want tomove things around to and such but at the base level dynamic optimization is at



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the entire cluster.

Symon: so one example of how you could do that, the failover cluster itself doeshave properties called preferred owners and possible owners so you could

possibly specify this group of node is the preferred or possible owners for theseset of VMs, this group of node for preferred or possible owners for this set ofVMs and dynamic optimization will still honor that underlying cluster logic andideally it will separate them but still the primary goal is to keep the services upand running and to load balance so it’s not going to take any service down either.

Kenon: Exactly and a couple of other things we do have inside of VMM itselfcustom placement rules also where you can say in this VM needs to be on a hostwith this type of property and as long as you’ve set that property on the host

then it will be able to move it to one of the hosts but it won’t, and you can say itmust contain or it may contain as well.

Symon: Excellent well now we have a question about the actual host itself whyshould we use server core instead of a full edition of Windows Server for ouractual host?

Kenon: there are a couple reasons to use server core over a full version ofWindows and there are a couple of reasons to use the full version of Windows

over server core it really depends on what you as an organization want to do butwith server core we found that there is about a 50% amount less of patching onthat system because of all the extra stuff

Symon: There’s no internet explorer for example

Kenon: Exactly, but some people think that server core is too limiting and so theymade some updates to Windows 8 or the Windows server 8 which will have

something more about that if you build sessions you can get more of thatinformation.

Symon: There’s a lot more flexibility with how you can upgrade and downgradebetween server core and full installation. You know just to emphasize on yourpoint about there’s fewer components there, fewer components of course meansthere’s fewer things to patch, fewer patches means fewer reboots, fewer reboots,higher availability so if you’re really concerned about up time with regards to



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patching go and use server core, install that, you’re going to have less failovers,less needs to patch those hosts. Now, final question that we have, this wasactually asked yesterday and I believe Sean addressed it but we’d love to get yourperspective on this, what are your thoughts around using System Center 2012 asfar as multiple tenancy, meaning what’s the best way to really you know isolate

individual owners, isolate individual roles for let’s say a host or environment?

Kenon: So there are things you can do with System Center 2012 for multi-tenancybut it’s not totally there yet. The fact is like if I’m doing service deployment I needto have access to the domain so that I can VMM can communicate with that VMthat was deployed, makes it really difficult when I have multiple differentdomains for multiple different companies and so some of those things aren’tgoing to be possible to do yet with the existing version of System Center 2012.there are some things you can do if you’re just managing the underlying hosts

and the VMs are just regular VMs you would deploy then you can handle someof that multi-tenancy you would have to give users access to your VMMenvironments, they would have to have some type of access to your domainsomehow if you wanted them to see the cloud or something like that, so we’reworking on making that better but the story right now is that it does multi-tenancy okay but really there’s a lot more that hosters would want.

Symon: Okay great and there’s one final question that came up around hostingpolicies that I’m going to address, the question is around how can you go and

actually separate VMs with a similar to put them on different hosts, so anexample of when you might want to use this is if you have a guest cluster, avirtualized cluster you don’t want that running on a single host because if thathost crashes, you lose the whole cluster. Likewise if you have infrastructureservices, let’s say you have your DHTP servers, you don’t want all of those VMs ona single host, if that host crashes you lose everything. So one of the ways thatyou can actually isolate and separate the VMs across different hosts is a clusterproperty called anti-affinity class names. Basically using this property you go andsay this VM is blue, this VM is blue and any two VMs that share the same anti-affinity class name are purposefully going to try and separate themselves acrossdifferent hosts. There’s actually a great blog on the cluster team blog, written inDecember 2010 about VM placement policies that talks about our preferredowners, possible owners, anti-affinity class names so if you want more details goto blogs.msdn.com/clustering and find the link from December 10th and I willpost that as well shortly.

Well, Kenon that about wraps up this session, thank you so much for joining usfor these four modules, I hope everybody’s really learned about not only how togo and deploy this private cloud infrastructure and optimizing it but then



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monitoring and managing and supporting it.

Kenon: Exactly

Symon: So thank you very much for your time

Kenon: Thank you everyone, I appreciate the time today

Symon: And we’ll be back after a break with Sean Christensen and we’re going togo and talk about service delivery and automation, how to monitor and how tooperate. Thank you

Kenon: Thank you.



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