This is the fifth and final part of the HyperV cluster setup series of video tutorials with the help of Alan Richards in this video Alan gives a demo of live migration in a HyperV setup no sound in this video but a picture (Or video) paints a thousand words. I hope you have enjoyed and can reuse the info in these videos later this week I will start a blog post on our SharePoint 2010 architecture based solely in HyperV including our SQL 2008 virtual failover cluster.
This is the fourth part of the HyperV cluster setup with the help of Alan Richards in this video Alan shows how to install the HyperV role and also how he set up the network for the HyperCluster and finally we see how to make a virtual server highly available through HyperV.
Dave
Some of you may have noticed that the ISE environment is not there as a default for Server 2008 R2. This post will go through adding it and also loading the SharePoint modules to enable you to script all your sharepoint bit’s and pieces in a nice environment.
The ISE is just a windows feature. So click server manager:
Features, Add features:
Tick The Windows Powershell ISE Feature, Click next then install.
It will say that the server may require a restart. The server does not require a restart to add the ISE.
That’s it! It’ll now be on your start menu. If you want to do it all via script then I found this blog from Shay Levy
One thing I found with the ISE was that the Modules and Snapins for SharePoint are not loaded. This means that you can’t run the good old New-SPWeb command! If anyone finds a better way of doing this please let me know but this is how I work so far:
Load PS with modules (As Admin):
Then in the console type “ise” (no quotes) and the ISE will load up – the magic of an Alias!
Run this command from the ISE:
Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell
And you are good to go with all the SharePoint cmdlets.
Like I said, please let me know if you know a better way of loading the Powershell ISE with all the modules and snapins ready to go!
One of the issues we have been seeing in recent times is students and staff bringing into Twynham wireless enabled devices and because we run an open wireless system these devices then receive an IP address from our DHCP servers, I do not even believe that they intend to use the wireless connection this was illustrated to me this week when I managed to catch up with a member of staff who’s IPhone kept on appearing on our DHCP server when I asked if he used the wireless he had no idea what I meant. So I was very pleased to see in Server 2008 R2 the ability to block devices from obtaining an IP lease and it could not be simpler…
All you need to do is right click on the lease then add the device to the deny filter. The filters themselves need to be enabled to use and as I found the hard way if you turn on the allow filter NO device receives an IP address so if you do turn this on please be aware that you will have to allow devices by adding their MAC address to the list which is fine if you run a small network but for us at Twynham with fast approaching 1000 devices this would be a Herculean task. So far as you can see below I have blocked 59 MAC addresses these are mainly IPhones but also a large number of IPod’s and with the price dropping I can only see this becoming a bigger problem on your network as well.
DHCP Server Deny List
Dave
As i said in a previous post in our preparation for SharePoint 2010 we have started to invest in virtualisation technology using Microsoft HyperV R2 based on Server 2008 R2. This for me has been a big shift in thinking in taking this technology on and trusting it to run our servers but thanks to some of the tools available this has been made a lot easier for me, and with the release of HyperV R2 even easier with some of the benefits being live migration, Processor compatibility mode and dynamic storage being just some of the reasons. Over the next few posts i would like to take you through some of the features that made this decision a no brainer for us and hopefully explain some of the benefits for others.
Through these posts i will talk to you about HyperV R2 on Server 2008 R2 the hardware that we have purchased to enable us to use this. HyperV manager, System centre virtual machine manager including the live migration feature and also the physical to virtual conversion which i hope to show you in a video.
First of all the hardware to achieve the fault tolerance that i require for Twynham School we purchased 3 x Dell PowerEdge servers with:-
2x Intel Xeon X5570 Processor (2.93GHz, 8M Cache, 6.40 GT/s QPI, Turbo, HT)
To include RAM: 72GB Memory for 2CPU (18x4GB Dual Rank RDIMMs) 1066MHz
Hard Drives: 2 x 300GB SAS 15k 3.5″ HD Hot Plug
Also to allow us to setup the shared clustered volume we purchased a Dell MD3000i http://www.dell.com/content/topics/topic.aspx/global/products/pvaul/topics/en/us/pvaul_md3000i_landing?c=us&l=en
Now this was not a cheap exercise with the servers coming in at £5000 each and the MD3000i box at around £6000 but now we run 19 virtual servers on these 3 boxes and bearing in mind that i used to pay anywhere between £2000 and £3500 for each server i think you will see that it makes sense long term financially. Also please bear in mind the power savings, we do have a range of server with differing specs and age but now we are running 3 servers compared to 19 previously that must equate to quite a saving on our power bill and not forgetting our air conditioners as we can go from 2 to 1 unit.
These virtual servers also enabled us to set up Office Communication Server 2007 R2 during the summer this software required us to have 1 OCS front end server and also an OCS edge server previously we would have had to go out and buy 2 physical servers but with HyperV we just created 2 virtual OCS servers.
Back in June I and Mike Herrity visited Seattle where we had the opportunity to meet up with the SharePoint product team and also the Education team at Microsoft Redmond. After a presentation to the SharePoint Product group we were fortunate to spend some time with Brenda Carter to discuss our thoughts for SharePoint 2010 in terms of our planned SharePoint Farm. We intend to be early adopters of this platform so in readiness we have started to plan our architecture for this version.
We have already started the planning and purchasing so we were very much ready for the public Beta which became available in November 2009. Along with a testing farm we have already planned a school demo site for people to try and see the power of SharePoint 2010 http://ict.twynhamschool.com/SitePages/Home.aspx. For this setup of our SharePoint farm we will be using Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V R2 to deploy our web front end servers and with this in mind we have purchased three Dell Poweredge R710 servers with the following spec. In a future blog post I will run through the rationale of making such a significant purchase.
Server: 2x Intel Xeon X5570 Processor (2.93GHz, 8M Cache, 6.40 GT/s QPI, Turbo, HT)
To include RAM: 72GB Memory for 2CPU (18x4GB Dual Rank RDIMMs) 1066MHz
Hard Drives: 2 x 300GB SAS 15k 3.5″ HD Hot Plug
Within the Farm we will have 2 SharePoint front end servers and also an SharePoint Application server the big debate is whether or not to virtualize the indexing server with the processor overheads associated with the indexing service how will that work on our virtual servers We have also purchased a Dell MD3000i with 2TB of storage which we can expand up to 10 TB for storage of our images and video files in readiness for the production setup of our farm This server specification may seem over powered but these servers are not just for SharePoint as we plan to virtualise a lot of our server stock we have over the coming year so you will also see a post on Hyper-V R2.
The biggest debate is whether to virtualize the indexing server or not, well the beta programme will give us the chance to try lots of different scenarios including a virtualized indexing server which I will tell you about in future posts. One other scenario we will try is a virtualized install of SQL 2008 to host our SharePoint databases this is something that Chris McKinley is not keen on but I do think that while we are going through the testing phase it would be worth considering and trying all installations types so hopefully we can report back on the best and worst.
ShareNews, ShareEvents, ShareIdeas, ShareCV or ShareCoffee
Dave Coleman
Chris McKinley
Blog Comments