March 12th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
I’ve previously reported problems with MAC duplication on Hyper-V host external network connections on Windows Server 2008 R2, which I’ve never fully resolved, although we have been successfully working around the issue as detailed in the first link above.
A couple of weeks ago I was working simultaneously on my Windows Server 2008 R2 laptop with Hyper-V (the same laptop build that’s been previously mentioned) and a Windows 7 x64 build that I was using for testing, when I noticed severe but intermittent network problems on both machines. After a fair amount of head scratching, I noticed that the two laptops had duplicated MAC addresses. Blatantly that shouldn’t happen, as the whole point of a MAC address is to provide uniqueness. The most perplexing issue was that the addresses conflicted across two different operating systems. However, it happened. Both wired adapters on the two machines had the MAC address 00-21-9B-DC-8E-0B. I uninstalled the wired adapter on the Windows 7 machine and scanned for new hardware. When the device reinstalled the problem went away. read more »
Hardware, IT Management, Networking, Virtualisation, Windows | 
No Comments »
December 1st, 2009
by Tristan Watkins
In the first five parts of this series I covered the project objectives and the system design, then turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build, automated deployment and the guest virtual machine build. In this post I review some of the questions and issues we’ve encountered after a few months of working this way and some overall reflections on the approach. read more »
Client applications, Consultancy and Design, Networking, Performance, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | 1 Comment »
November 27th, 2009
by Tristan Watkins
In the first four parts of this series I covered the project objectives and the system design, then turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build and automated deployment. In this post I describe a SharePoint 2007 virtual machine build.
Where’s the SharePoint 2010 build?
In short, we’re working on it. I’ve produced a new SharePoint 2010 beta virtual machine for this environment but we’re not yet ready to publish build guidance. Stay tuned. Additionally… read more »
Consultancy and Design, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | No Comments »
November 25th, 2009
by Tristan Watkins
The answer, obviously enough, is that it can if it has Silverlight installed. Read on if you’re interested in how the web part will behave in its absence.
read more »
Client applications, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | 6 Comments »
November 17th, 2009
by Tristan Watkins
The Microsoft virtualisation team are certainly taking community engagement and transparency seriously these days. I’m happy to report that Ben Armstrong (Virtual PC Guy) has posted
the definitive summary of Hyper-V high-end graphics performance issues. He was the first person to discover the issue and has produced most of the guidance on it since. Key things to note:
- It’s not an issue on processors with SLAT, but these are only just hitting the market in laptops in the near future
- It’s not an issue with the SVGA driver
- I’ve asked if the SVGA driver might ever offer multi-monitor support. He’s looking in to it. This might be a great compromise until processors with SLAT become ubiquitous
- This same problem occurs in all native Hypervisors
- Virtual PC and VMWare Workstation do not have the same problem but they are Type 2 hypervisors and do not offer the same performance as Hyper-V
So… there’s still no conclusive solution but it’s good to have the full context of the problem. For more background on why this matters for SharePoint see my previous post on the matter.
Performance, SharePoint, Virtualisation | 1 Comment »
November 16th, 2009
by Tristan Watkins
In the first three parts of this series I covered the project objectives and the system design, then turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build. In this section I will look at automating deployment of that host operating system. This is lengthy, but there’s a lot to cover.
read more »
Consultancy and Design, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | 2 Comments »
November 6th, 2009
by Tristan Watkins
Having agreed the project objectives and designed the system, I turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build. This is a high-level build guide with start-up time and baseline memory consumption benchmarks at key milestones. These benchmark figures were taken from the Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate build and are admittedly a bit imprecise. However, they do provide an overall indication of system performance as things were added to and removed from the installation. Although I do not have precise figures on RTM improvements, I spot-checked a few of these benchmarks when I rebuilt the system on RTM. Start-up times improved slightly at each milestone. In fact, the final benchmarks came in at 100MB less idle memory used in the RTM release. read more »
Consultancy and Design, Performance, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | 1 Comment »
November 5th, 2009
by Tristan Watkins
In the first part of this series, I introduced the pros and cons of various SharePoint development approaches and the objectives of this system redesign. In this part I will focus on design choices and conclusions, starting with the core technology.
Why we’ve chosen Hyper-V
There are broadly five decisive factors: performance, management features (like snapshots), cost, 64-bit OS support and a full host OS (not just a virtualisation administration console): read more »
Consultancy and Design, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | 5 Comments »
November 4th, 2009
by Tristan Watkins
As I’ve alluded to a few times in this blog, over the last few months I’ve led the consultancy and system design for a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment built on Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2. This series of six posts will reveal the key decisions and will consolidate recommendations from a broad range of research and guidance. This first post offers a technology-agnostic introduction to the problem, pros and cons of alternative approaches and what we hoped to achieve with the new approach. The design decisions will be covered in more detail in the second post, followed by a deeper look at detailed build guidance. read more »
Consultancy and Design, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | 2 Comments »
October 23rd, 2009
by Tristan Watkins
Further to my post from a few months ago on the this topic (dating back to the RC build), I’ve seen this same problem a few more times on the RTM build of Windows Server 2008 R2. My suggested approach still fixes the problem and it doesn’t recur, but I’ve still not been able to pin down a cause and I can find no documentation on host machine MAC assignments anywhere. read more »
Networking, Virtualisation, Windows | 12 Comments »
