Monitor and Operate Private Cloud Infrastructure Student Manual

Microsoft Jump Start Course
Creating and Managing a Private Cloud with System Center 2012
Published: 8/9/2012
And welcome back to the private cloud Jump Start creating and managing a
private cloud with System Center 2012. Im Symon Perriman, Microsoft Technical
Evangelist and Im joined again by Kenon Owens technical marketing manager,
Kenon: Product Marketing Manager
Symon: Product Marketing Manager with System Center 2012, Kenons our
infrastructure guy and so weve already done a few sessions on managing the
infrastructure, we really focused on the individual hardware pieces with this
module were now going to think about how we can optimize those components
for the hardware for the private cloud so why dont you go into a little more
detail of what were going to cover in this module.
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Published: 8/9/2012
Kenon: Okay in this module today were going to cover the monitoring and
operating on the private cloud infrastructure so the previous session was all
about those physical devices and how do I make sure that those things are
running correctly, I already talked about how to configure and deploy
everything, now once I have those things available and Ive created this private
cloud and its been running for a few days, weeks, months, years I need to make
sure that Im giving the proper amount of resources to all the different
applications. So were going to talk about how to optimize it, how you can
control access to it, how you standardize updates to things like deployed
services and then how you make sure you have the right size cloud.
Symon: Thats great, now before we dive into this there is one question that Ive
seen come up a few times that I think its worth us addressing now when were
thinking about deploying and configuring an operating system a VMM when
should we use VMM versus when should we use configuration manager, what
are 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 cross
activities and do kind of pieces of the same thing what I would look at is, if I am
managing that underlying Hyper V server, that Hyper V host I want to use VMM
to do that host management. If I use VMM to do the installation, I use VMM to

Published: 8/9/2012
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 patch
management for my Hyper V underlying physical servers. I would use the config
manager 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 manager
across all of my systems whether it be Hyper V or all my other systems that are
out there for doing things like desire configuration management where Im
checking 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 its an application version or something
whether its in compliance or not and I would use configuration manager because
with configuration manager 2012 we have the ability to not only get that
information but we can also set certain things so I can force machines to upgrade
to the proper version or something like that, so thats when I would use config
manager. The other thing is inside of virtual machine, with the virtual machines
up and running for everyday patch management I would probably use config
manager for managing and updating those patches. If Im going to do service
updates, maybe updates to the application thats installed inside of that service
then I would use VMM to push that service down, if I can use the service
template 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 as
for 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 were going to focus on today
is the now monitoring and operating that private cloud infrastructure itself, its not the physical
devices but its the cloud and ensuring that we have the proper access to the resources.

Published: 8/9/2012
So Im going to flip by these slides really quick, youve probably seen them three or four times already if not more
and the things that were 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 Ill do that in a few ways, one of them that I have to do is ensure that Ive
optimized my underlying hypervisor resources and theyre running the proper
VMs because we all know that load changes throughout the day, different times
of 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 these
resources and how they consume those resources and I want to be able to
change these things on the fly if I need to. I have these service templates that
we talked about in the configure and deploy model, well I need to standardize
an approach to updating these services so that I can create this update once and
deploy it out to many deployed services. And then these cloud environments
that I have I want to ensure that theyre sized appropriately now and that Ill be
able to know before I have to grow to grow those systems, in other words I dont
want to run out of resources and then have to scramble to buy those servers,
instead Id rather grow it on time. Had a customer that they started
implementing virtualization, they were moving to a private cloud and so many
people just started creating VMs over and over and over again on these systems
that they overloaded the system before they really even knew it was overloaded
and they needed to now scramble to buy more servers and get them up and
running. If they were able to monitor those systems better they could more
easily know that hey, were starting to run out of resources, lets proactively buy
new hardware and get that thing up and running more efficiently. The other
thing is you know as Im 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 optimization

and this is a new capability inside of Virtual Machine Manager both dynamic
optimization and power optimization.

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And why would I use dynamic optimization, what are the key benefits of it, well
as application workloads in my environment change, I need my private cloud
resources to automatically adjust to these changes and needs. In other words I
may 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 of
resources needs, other VMs dont have any resources needs. But that changes
constantly throughout the day, throughout the week or maybe at the end of
each quarter I need these applications to get access to more resources. I need to
rebalance those workloads on the fly and thats what we can do with dynamic
optimization.

Published: 8/9/2012
So what does it actually mean, what does it look like, well Virtual Machine
Manager is monitoring the clusters within a host group and inside that host
group theyre looking at this individual cluster, theyre looking at the resources
and 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 enough
resources that Im comfortable with left on the system. Then what Ill do is
Virtual Machine Manager will see the different devices on that host and will
automatically move the virtual machines away onto other systems within that
host. So really what were doing is looking at all the different virtual machines on
all the different hosts and were taking basically a waited ten minute average
across those systems and as we find that we move across these different hosts,
thresholds we will migrate different virtual machines around at the optimization
interval. 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 other
systems now goes above that specific threshold at that point we identify whats
the best machine to move we move that around and by moving these things
around between other systems what weve done is kept all the machines below
the optimization threshold. There are a couple of ways we do that, when we
determine virtual machines to move and how we move them theres this
technique called intelligent placement which Ill go into a little bit, especially in
the demo and we only will move things if they have an advantage for the entire
system.
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So if we look at the fundamentals of dynamic optimization we want to keep the

cluster balanced so we want to be able to not have a very disparate amount of
resources used by one host and not the other. So we dont want one running at
80% 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 to
ensure that by having more resources available on each of these systems and
balancing these systems out the VMs will be more responsive to the applications
running on them. And we do this dynamic optimization for not only Microsoft
Hyper V systems but we can also do it for VMWare Vsphere or Citrix Xen Server
clusters. So its important to keep in mind that were going to move things
around depending on the resource utilization of those systems with that ten
minute 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 surpassing
thresholds we can see where we can move those systems, so well move it when
we go across a specific threshold and well consider that entire cluster. Were not
going to move a VM off of a system if its just going to put another system over
the threshold you know were going to optimize this thing as best we can and
we do it with these different types of aggressiveness so we have the ability to
turn on whether you want to do this manually or you want to have it automated
to rebalance this workload, you can choose the frequency with which you do this
automation by default its 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 I

wanted to and configure how aggressive this optimization is going to be. So
what that really means is that when Im going to move systems around, if I gain
an advantage if I look at intelligent placement I have these things called star
ratings, if I gain an advantage on the star ratings where if I move it from one
system to another and its going to free up either one star rating or .5 star ratings
actually from 2, 4, 6 1 star rating were going to make that move depending on
how aggressive youre set.
Symon: Well we actually have a few questions around the topic, so first one Ill
quickly address is this similar to VMWare DRS, distributed resource scheduler
technology?
Kenon: It is similar to DRS but its a little bit different, were taking into account
more resources than traditionally DRS was taking into account, I dont know if its
using all these resources as well.
Symon: now these optimization thresholds that you mentioned are these
dynamically set, can they be used to configure other choices?
Kenon: Theres a default setting and then theyre user configured and when we
go into the demo Ill 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 pro
tips, it has similar functionality could you kind of compare and contrast the two
and let us know whats happening in pro in this current version of System Center?
Kenon: Sure, so Pro was designed because VMM didnt take into account
dynamic optimization, there are many aspects to Pro, some of them have to do
with looking at your Hyper V machine and your VMs that are running on there,
other ones are actually looking at other devices maybe its looking at your
storage or its looking at the physical hardware itself, with dynamic optimization
what youre 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 just
going to be done through dynamic optimization, the other Pro tips are still
important and they are very much still valid. Were working with those hardware
vendors that we have those existing Pro tips with and those third party partners
to create an update to Pro tips for System Center 2012. so right now you
wouldnt use the existing pro tips against VMM 2012 but were working to get
those Pro tips updated for System Center 2012 so what I would say is that you
wouldnt 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 a
VM 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 virtual
machines across thats why the atomic unit is a cluster so you can have multiple
clusters in the same host group but for each cluster were going to move VMs
within nodes, within that cluster, just like with VMWares DRS it only moves within
that HRDRS cluster within the VMs automatically even though you could live
migrate something out of it. We chose cluster as the atomic unit because all
virtual machine vendors we support, support live migration within a cluster.
Symon: and so Ive 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 two
different clusters?
Kenon: No I cant, I cant live migrate it between it anyways but dynamic
optimization is only going to do things within a cluster, its not going to take it
from 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 Im not going to live migrate a
VM 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 next
version of Windows Server and things that it can do, so if those things if they
change how they work will be at that point and time.
Symon: Now if a customer already has VMWares DRS configured, how does this
work with that, how does it interact with that?
Kenon: So if you have DRS already configured you have a couple of options, you
can 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 enable
dynamic optimization to manage your VMWare and your Hyper V and your Xen
server clusters, what I wouldnt do is I wouldnt have dynamic optimization and
DRS running against the same VMWare cluster because a couple of things are
going to happen, one, VMWares going to kick off migration to move something
around, then dynamic optimization might say, hey no, flip the switch here, now
Ive got to move something around again, youre going to get lost in where
things happen so you would want to have with managing VMWare one or the

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other. Were hoping that you would use dynamic optimization but its your
choice for your organization.
Symon: Now what about using Xen server can we use dynamic optimization
there?
Kenon: Absolutely so Xen server has a cluster and you can move virtual machines,
Xen motion virtual machines between different systems and dynamic
optimization will work for those as well.
Symon: Now what happens if you know weve identified this host thats reaching
its resource load and we need to move it but there are no better hosts, meaning
that all the other hosts in the cluster are even higher resource utilization, what
happens then?
Kenon: so at that point we look at all the hosts and when we consider optimizing
it, depending on the aggressiveness if we can gain better star ratings across all
the hosts were going to do that. But if I move it from one system to another and
its not going to gain me any advantage in your example it wouldnt because all
the other hosts are worse off than this host, were not going to move things
around at that point. So were going to make sure that we dont hurt the cluster
when we move things around, we only do it if we make things better and in that
case, lets just flip over to the demo and let me show you a couple of things on it
because it might make things a little more understandable.

Published: 8/9/2012
DEMO: So in this environment that we saw in the previous sessions I have a

couple of host groups here and this administrative infrastructure host group has
two clusters, it has an ESX cluster and it has a Hyper V cluster. Inside of the host
group 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 now
this is where I set how much of the host resource is available before I decide
whether or not I can place virtual machines on this host. So if I wanted to create
a brand new VM and place it on this host but by doing so will drop the utilization
down to less than 10% for the host then Im not going to do it, that type of
thing. But these are the different values that I can look at when considering
dynamic optimization.
The next step is and this is the unit so I can look at things like either percentage
or either number of GB or MB or the percentage of RAM used on that host. I can
check things like IOPs for disk IO, GB for disk space as well as MB per second so I
can either look at percentage of utilization or I can look at a strict value like how
many MB per second. Then when I flip to the dynamic optimization tab this is
where I see the specifications that I can make, first of all I can say how aggressive
do I want this thing to be, do I want it to be high aggressiveness which means
that Ill migrate things around if I get a point 2 star benefit. And Ill migrate it
even if Im below the specific thresholds so if I have it under high aggressiveness
and I have one machine running at 70% another machine running at 30% Im
going to migrate VMs around even though I havent passed the specific
threshold because I want to get them as close to even as possible. If Im at
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medium high or medium Ill also do that and the numbers are .2 star threshold
gain, .4, .6, if Im at medium low or low I will only migrate virtual machines if Im
above a specific threshold.
Then the next thing I do is a specify whether or not I want it to be automated, in
this 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 that
frequency level there. so this allows me to specify the configuration settings
around dynamic optimization, one other thing I can do is I can specify thresholds
so by default as long as moving the virtual machines off of the system we dont
fall below that 30% available were going to keep the VMs on this system. If you
fall below that 30% available well move virtual machines off and one of the
examples here Im going to show you about dynamic optimization, what Ive
done is Ive kicked up the RAM and I said if I have so many virtual machines on
the system that I dont have 26 gigs of RAM free on this system then I want to
kick off a dynamic optimization event and thats an extreme example because I
would probably wan that down at 1 gig available or something like that, but what
Ive done there is Ive set that threshold at a value so that when I have even a
small set of VMs I can go above whatever that value is and kick off a dynamic
optimization event. So I specify these values and then the next thing is I can do
is if I have this set to automatically I can talk about power optimization in a few
minutes here.
So I have these values set and if we look at this environment I have a bunch of
different virtual machines running on this environment, inside of my ESX cluster I
have three virtual machines, two of them are running on ESX server 2, one of
them 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 machines
around for me. But since I have dynamic optimization set to manual Im just
going to right click on the server and one of the options I have is the ability to
optimize hosts and its going to look at all the virtualized machines on there and
say 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 all
the VMs that you have, this is where I think you should move these virtual
machines 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 just
hit optimize. And at that point its actually going to kick off a live migration or a
Vmotion to move the server from the host 2 over to host 1 and its going to do
that using Vmotion. So thats one of the things that we talk about when were
doing live migration and I remember that there were a couple of questions, while
this is running that you had about managing multiple hypervisor vendors, we
might as well go into that here.

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Symon: Yes we do so you know we talked about Xen management a little earlier
already but we just want to get confirmation do you need Xen Center, do you
need any other type of management functionality to be able to do Xen motion to
be able to manage those Xen VMs and whats the difference with VMWare when
we do require V center?
Kenon: So V centers required because when I do things like kick off live
migration 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 dont
need Xen server to kick off something like Xen motion, so you dont need any
other tool besides Xen server and VMM. So what will happen is in your Xen
server environment youll install a special integration pack from Citrix and that
custom pack will make it manageable by VMM. I would do that and then I would
be able to manage the virtual machines running on that system but I would
manage the underlying hardware, to manage the underlying hardware I would
have to go to my Citrix Xen server and manage the hardware there. if I wanted to
add storage or something like that I would do that at the Xen server itself not at
VMM. And so VMM will manage the underlying hardware for Hyper V but for
VMWare 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 discussed
earlier, now with the patch manager or with the cluster were updating we said
that 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 their
hardware management so I would say for updating the ESX host I would do
update management from V center, for update in V Center I would install patches
directly on Xen server so we manage the underlying Microsoft Hyper V
environment but we dont do the physical servers for ESX or for Xen server.
Symon: Great, now another question about interoperability, now we touched on
this in the scope of VMWare where we said were not live migrate a VM from you
know Windows Server over to VMWare, what about other types of migration, if
we need to go and move all of my VMs from Xen, all of my VMs from VMWare
over to the Hyper V platform, what is that process of converting them and
moving 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 machines up and
running you would do basically a P to V of that virtual machine. So you have, just
like you have a physical machine right now there, you connect to it and you do a
physical to virtual migration. If youre using a VMWare environment you could
also 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 V
systems and I can do all of that through VMM itself. And that would be for your
Windows guest operating systems.
Symon: Thats all the questions I have for now
Kenon: Excellent, so dynamic optimization allows me to move virtual machines
around 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, you
know we start using more and more resources that we want to move things
around, power optimization happens when I go below a threshold, in other
words Im 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 its
really doing is this, looking at the systems and as I drop below a specific
optimization threshold where even if I shut down machines I will still have this
many resources available then at that point and time well migrate all the VMs
off of that particular machine and after we migrate those machines off of that
machine we will power down that physical box so what that does is allows me to
save some energy and just use the amount of resources that I need within the
system. Now over time you know I wont need those resources but then the
resource utilization will pick up and Ill start moving above that optimization
threshold at that point in time well power on some or all of the remaining
machines that we powered off and then through dynamic optimization it will
move virtual machines around to rebalance that workload.
So this gives me the ability when I dont need those resources to shut them
down but when I do need them well start them right back up again and this
uses the out of band management to do that so I need to be able to connect to
that HPI load, Dell drive, whatever that system is for that out of band
management capabilities.
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So a couple of things here, again we

consider the same resources that we
consider with dynamic optimization but
now were basically going to do this
event when we move below threshold
and we consider the entire cluster.
Meaning that if I have some machines
that are running under the threshold
but I cant when I move everything off
still have all the machines that are left
still be below that threshold were not
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going to move it around, so were not

going to shut a machine down just to 2
minutes later power it back up. You can
specify what hours of the day, you can
schedule when this is going to occur
and when its not and it only is available
when you set dynamic optimization to
automated.
A couple things to ensure here is we
wont power machines down if were
going to overload the remaining nodes
in the cluster and were going to make
sure that we dont violate any cluster
quorum requirements that that cluster
may already have when you do this
power optimization so what that means
is that you have to have enough nodes
in that cluster that when we power
some of them down well still have the
availability, so well still have the
availability to failover machines but also

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well still have that cluster be a valid

cluster. So lets 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 have
and in that same host group if we look at the properties in that exact same place
where we set at dynamic optimization we have to first turn on automatic and by
turning on automatic we have to enable power optimization so if we enable
power optimization we get a whole new dialogue that really goes into those
settings and before where I had the settings set at specific values it increases
things like okay I wont do this unless the hosts still has after weve evacuated
and powered off systems, still has 40% of CPU available. And I can adjust how
that happens and then I can also do things that well I know that my systems are
always busy between 6 and 8 in the morning on the weekdays so I can turn
those systems so that power optimization doesnt happen then when
everybodys logging in in the morning. And then when everybody comes back
after lunch I may want those systems available as well so I dont have people get
slow 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 power
optimization, once I do this again, its going to look at the entire cluster, its not
going to shut down machines if it wont have enough available resources left to
handle a failover, so inside of my systems one of the things that I want to set as
far as a rule is that in the cluster I dont violate any cluster quorum capabilities as
far as how many machines are going to be up and running, once I do that it will
do power optimization for my Hyper V hosts only.
All right so thats power optimization in dynamic optimization.
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The next thing we want to talk about here is access to these resources now
within the configure and deploy private cloud infrastructure we talked about
different user roles and how they are important for delegating access to these
clouds, well thats something that were repeating in that section in this session
here
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because when youre talking about on going maintenance of your cloud, one of
the things thats really important is who has access to what resources and what
they need to do and what they are allowed to do on those resources. And one of
the things thats 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 I
want to ensure that the application owners have access to the resources that
they need but I dont want them to have full access to all my different resources
especially if Im sharing these resources between different groups. And then
lastly I want to control what actions and what different devices or virutal
machines 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 use
Active Directory for the different users inside of there.
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I have the administrator accounts and that would be a full administrator or

delegated administrator to a different group and I also have these things called
user roles and the self service user is only specified at a cloud and has actions
that 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 and
groups and give them different access so I may have cloud users for a specific
set of cloud resources and they may only have things from start stop, deploy
from 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 tasks
that I would expect them to be able to perform and they can then by having
them have this full cloud access they can create different cloud users underneath
them so they can manage that stuff, so I can give access to one guy and then he
can 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 about
quota in that configure and deploy session, the biggest thing here is I had one
organization where they had a bunch of developers and every developer had to
deploy five different virtual machines for their application to work they didnt
want that developer to deploy multiple instance of their application and take up
all the resources so what they did was they had this group of developers and
they basically gave each of the developers the ability at the member level quota
section to deploy only five virtual machines so they were able to deploy one
instance of their application. And they also said well I dont want each of these
developers to have their own instance such as sitting there doing nothing so
even though there were 20 developers in the group it specified the number of
virtual machines that the whole user role could create at 20, so that meant only 4
developers at a time could deploy their application and service on this cloud
resources and it helped them protect the rest of these resources from the
developers that were just deploying many, many, many different virtual
machines.
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So we talked now about dynamically optimizing cloud resources, rebalancing the

load as the needs change but then the next thing is we want to have these
applications that are deployed and we need to ensure that those applications
are 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 the
applications themselves, were running these applications at the right version,
we want an easy way to push these updates out so that we dont have to go
to every single machine that we deployed out and do these updates. Also we
may have different updates to the OS itself, not small patch updates but
maybe a major update from say the OS to a service pack or the OS to an R2 or
something like that, we want to just do a wholesale replacement of that
underlying OS we can do those things through Virtual Machine Manager and
standardizing those approaches to application updates.
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Published: 8/9/2012
23

Published: 8/9/2012
So just a quick recap of what is a service template, service template is this, it

could be one or more tiers of applications, each of those tiers would have a tier
associated with it and that VM template is made up of things like the hard drive
of the VM, the OS settings, the applications installed on top of it, whether its a
web tier that may have MS deploy package, an app tier with a service app V
package or data tier with SQL dat packages and put all that stuff together into a
VM tier, put those things together into a service template which is stored in the
library and that template information can then use as what we would call the
source of truth for a service deployment.
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Published: 8/9/2012
So what we have is these services that we deploy are template driven and by
having this one template as being the source of truth what were really gaining is
the fact that when we want to update this service we can update the template
and 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 within
the tiers is that we can leverage upgrade domains so that we dont bring the
entire tier down just to do an upgrade of that piece of the system. And we can
do these updates either in place or image based.
An in place update is something I would use if I was changing a particular
setting inside the virtual machine, maybe I wanted to go from a small amount of
RAM to more RAM or small amount of processors to more processors or I
wanted to change a setting around the hardware, maybe add a new network
adaptor 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 version
1 and I wanted to update it to server App V package server 2. well I would use
in place updates to basically just save the state of that application and pull out
the version 1 of the application, drop down the version 2 of the application and
then apply the state to that application and I can do all that stuff without having
to really do a large scale change of that virtual machine.
If I want to do an image based update, if Im going from say Windows
Server2008 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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Published: 8/9/2012
service pack update process so we can instead of replacing just a piece of this
system with like the application, what well do is lift up the application, replace in
the OS itself, drop in a brand new VHD file , give it the same name, ID and all that
stuff that the old one had and then drop that application back on top of it. So
well reinstall and restore the state of that application.
TechReady12
Published:8/9/2012
8/9/2012
So there was a question?

Symon: Yea, there is one question as were looking at all these templates, the
application 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 as
well, this is all stuff done on top of to the VM itself, not necessarily to the
hypervisor
so we can
this all for any of the different hypervisors, the other
2011 Microsoft
Corporation.
All do
rights
thing is that
we canWindows
have services
reserved. Microsoft,
Windows,
Vista that span multiple hypervisors so one tier
could
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Symon:
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we have limitations about what can actually run inside the VM
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thats
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purposes only
andinrepresents
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view of Microsoft Corporation as of the
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a Windows
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of this presentation.
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must
respond to changing market conditions, it
Kenon:
So within
a aVM guest you can have for each of the tiers it could be
should not be
interpreted
to be
whatever
is aof
supported
commitment
on the part
Microsoft,guest
and operating system so it could be a Linux guest
operating
system
the
thing
Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy is
ofto do the customization stuff that we would do
that stuff
andafter
the updates
would only be done against Windows operating
any information
provided
the date of
this
presentation.
2011
Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft, Windows, Windows Vista, Windows Azure, System Center, Hyper-V and other product names are or
may
be
in the U.S. and/or other countries. The information herein is for informational purposes only and represents the
MICROSOFT
MAKESand/or
NOtrademarks
WARRANTIES,
interpreted to be
a commitment
on the
part of Microsoft,AS
and TO
Microsoft
EXPRESS,
IMPLIED
OR
STATUTORY,
THEcannot guarantee the accuracy of any information provided after the date of this
INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.
26
26

Published: 8/9/2012
system. If I have say an Oracle database instead of a SQL Database, I wouldnt

use the SQL Dac packs and the updates that we do via the service template but if
its running Oracle on Windows then I can create a custom script that performs
those update actions and does the things that I want it to do but it would have
to 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 way
around some of these things. The thing I need to be careful of are is I need to
understand how the upgrade for that application works and be able to script that
appropriately 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 this
template library I have a service template that I want to deploy. So I pick that
template out of the template library and I deploy that service. So its going to
deploy 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 virtual
machines and then has a database tier with only one virtual machine running
SQL. And I have versions of this data and I call it version 1.0, well I have an
update and maybe that update is I want to change the amount of RAM on the
application server or I want to update the application itself from a version 1 to a
version 1.5 or something like that. Well I make a copy of the service template and
then in that service template I give it the new version number, I go through and
make all the changes to that template that I need to make to that service
template, change the amount of RAM or whatever it is Im changing to update
the application and then after Ive done all that I save the template. The next step
is to publish that template and when I publish the template if I refresh the VM I
look at the VM it says hey, theres a new update available for this virtual machine
so the service will be in the pending service update state it doesnt its not going
to apply the update automatically its just going to tell me hey theres an update
available. At that point in time I can push that update down to the service and
because of the use of upgrade domains were not going to bring down the entire
tier just to upgrade this application tier but instead were going to bring it down
one at a time and do the updates. So I push the update down and what well see
if that Ill update the applications within that tier but Ill do it one at a time and
not the entire piece itself , set the version release number to 1.5 and now I can go
and do this update to all the different deployed services that I have.
TechReady12
Published:8/9/2012
8/9/2012
If I look at image based updates its very similar to how its configured and
image based updates what were really doing is instead of replacing the
configuration of the VM or the application installed on it were updating the
actual VHD file itself so I have a deployed service there again version 1.0 if Im
going to do image based updates then the first thing Im going to do is make a
copy of that template, reversion it to say 1.5 and then Im going to update the
VHD file for one of those service templates, maybe Ill go from Windows
SErver2008 R2 to Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. then what happens is that Ill
again Ill
publish that
it will make it look like hey theres an update
2011 Microsoft
Corporation.
All template
rights
availableWindows,
this service
will be Vista
set at pending service update, then the next step
reserved. Microsoft,
Windows
here
is
I
will
push
down
that
and other product names are or may be update to the tiers to that service, again its going
to take intoand/or
account
upgradeindomains, so its not going to bring down the entire
trademarks
version
unless
I
want
the U.S. and/or other countries. it to and the other thing is its going to take the application
thatsherein
installed
that machine, its going to basically lift it up, its going to
The information
is foron
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deploy
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do the install process, sys prep it, give it the same
purposes only
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current
name,
unique
information
that the old VM had and then its going to drop back
view of Microsoft Corporation as of the date
the application
onto
that machine,
restore all the state of that application onto
of this presentation.
Because
Microsoft
must
that
machine.
So
this
is
something
thats
going to take a lot longer per VM
respond to changing market conditions, it
because
it hastotobedoa basically a full install of the VHD file, copy that to the
should not be
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andof
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commitment
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updates
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were probably not going to use a lot of but you
Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of
would
only use
it for
scale updates or if you want to do a whole scale
any information
provided
after
thelarge
date of
this
presentation.
2011
Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft, Windows, Windows Vista, Windows Azure, System Center, Hyper-V and other product names are or
may
be
in the U.S. and/or other countries. The information herein is for informational purposes only and represents the
MICROSOFT
MAKESand/or
NOtrademarks
WARRANTIES,
interpreted to be
a commitment
on the
part of Microsoft,AS
and TO
Microsoft
EXPRESS,
IMPLIED
OR
STATUTORY,
THEcannot guarantee the accuracy of any information provided after the date of this
INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.
27
27

Published: 8/9/2012
chagne of the application that was deployed or something like that.

Published: 8/9/2012
So what I like to do is go through and talk about these things and show you
what that piece looks like so Im going to switch over to the demo here
Symon: Now we had a question that came in, so under this you know broad
umbrella category of all of these different types of service template updates we
have is there anyway that we actually document whats being changed, you
know basically is there anyway that we keep track of hey we applied this
template, this got changed just for compliance reasons?
Kenon: So within the different templates we keep all the different templates that
we have deployed so you can check the difference between them, we do store
things 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 do
it is use configuration manager and design configuration manager to pull that
information out of the machine, you can do that and keep track before and after
of what has been changed.
Symon: So as a slightly broader question then thats related is there any type of
log in that happens, if you need to go back and see whats happened with VMM
is there any type of log in that you can go back and trace hey, VMM did this at
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Published: 8/9/2012
this time, it did this at this time

Kenon: Absolutely thats all stored in the jobs that we have so we have all these
different 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 set
within the environment so you can actually look inside of there and see whats
been happening with that service or whats been happening with that application
so you can look back there. We also store a lot of information in the event logs
and we post information there so if something fails you can look in the event log
and see whats been happening at that point.
If we look at the library and we look under service templates you can see that I
already have in this customer demographics server I have a multiple different
versions, version 1.2, 1.3, 1.5 and these are updates that Ive created over time, if I
look at the actual deployed service that I have go into the VMs and services, click
under services here, under the customer demographics service thats running you
see that were running version 1.2 so were running template version 1.2 and
thats the one thats available for it, Ive done some upgrades before in the past
and dropped them back off so what Im going to do here is Im going to go
through and show you how we make the update and make the changes then
how we would apply those different types of changes.
So I take this version 1.2 right here and the first thing I can do, Ill just go to the
1.5 that I had and Ill make an update to that one. So version 1.5 if you look at
the 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 Im
going to do is just make a straight copy of that version, Im ready to update this
one to the next version so well see that its going to say customer demographic
service copy of 1.5 when this copy completed so Ill take that copy and this is the
copy that Im going to make my changes to. So I found that 1.5 I actually
assigned too much memory to the system so Im going to pull some of that back
and I want to change the version of the application that Im using so Ill open up
the designer, the easiest way to make changes inside of this service here and the
first thing I can see is that release number is copy 1.5, Im going to change it to
1.9 I made some changes but Im not ready to call a whole version update for this
application.
If we look at the tiers here Ill bring it up to 75% we see we have multiple tiers, we
have some app tiers we also have this web tier. Well I found that the web tier has
too much RAM assigned to it so Im going to drop some of that down because
its really just wasting that RAM its not really using it at all. So if I go under
properties of that service of that tier, that VM template for that tier, look at the
hardware configuration we can see that Im running at basically 1.5 as the start
for dynamic memory and it can bump up to whatever amount of RAM it needs,

Published: 8/9/2012
so come on pop up here real quick, all right, lets close that out and were going
to hop back into VMM real quick here.
All right so connecting back into System Center were going to log in as
administrator, all right lets go to this other demo machine that I have, all right so
inside of VMM here Im going to have this customer demographics application
version 1.2, if you look at the library here I have this customer demographics
service 1.2, I havent done an upgrade on this service and this service
environment but Ill do that right now. So the first thing Im going to do is Im
going to copy this service template and Ill make all my changes to that copy we
leave the original available because the original has services deployed against it.
So I take this copy and Ill open designer and at this point lets make the changes
that 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 one
from 1.2, lets just call it 1.3 and the next thing Im going to do is edit the amount
of RAM assigned to this machine. So if I look at the properties of this virtual
machine template I have the hardware configuration and its set at 1 virtual
processor and 512 MBs of memory well I found that one virtual processor is not
enough, Im going to pop it up to 2 but I want to change the amount of RAM
from 512 I want to give it 1024 so its going to start at a gig of RAM and because
it can use dynamic memory Ill let it bump up to 2 gigs if it needs to. So those
are the two major changes I wanted to make here in this VM on the service
template. The other change I want to make is I want to change the application
version number one of the applications that I have this order processing
application, 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 the
application configuration that were using a server App V package and were
using this Server App V package called processor, well I know that we have an
update to that application package so let me pull this over and we see that
theres the CD order processor service but I also have this new order processor
for this ST5 app and that one actually is the same app that I can use here so I
want to pick that as the replacement or update to that application. So I hit okay
there, Ill call this VST5 02 just to make sure that I understand the changes that
Ive made here and Ill hit okay. So Ive made two changes to this service
template, Ive changed the amount of RAM assigned to this particular VM and
then the service running on the VM and Ive also changed the version of the OS, I
mean the version of the application Im running on the order processing tier. One
of the things that we have inside this application is that the web tier has two
instances that are going to be deployed initially, it can scale up to five but I have
two upgrade domains, meaning that Im going to take however many VMs are
deployed for that tier, divide it by 2 and just bring that many down at a time. If I
had seven then it would be three down one time, four down the other, that type
of thing. After I finish all those changes that Ive made Im going to do a save

Published: 8/9/2012
and validate its going to check, make sure I havent made any stupid mistakes
and get this thing up and ready to go. So at this point and time now Ill see I
have two lists of these services so I have both the version 1.2 and also the version
1.3 but the VM service itself doesnt see this update yet because I havent
published it. So Im ready now to publish that service update so Ill hit publish
here and at this point and time its based off the 1.2 version and its published
and available to use.
If I now look at my VMs and services I can see the different tiers that I have and I
can see on my web tier I have two VMs deployed, I can see one tier for the
business logic SQL and order processing and Im running version 1.2. well the
first thing I want to do now is on this service I want to check to see if there are
any updates so if I do a refresh of the service we can see an update status that
we have a new release available so there is a new release available and if I want
to I can apply that release to this machine. So is there a question?
Symon: well theres just been a few kind of questions, you know people are really
excited about this service template model but it sounds like theres a little bit of
unfamiliarity with when to adopt it, do we have any examples of sample service
templates, specifically theres been a request about sample service templates for
cluster.
Kenon: so there have, there are some sample service templates that weve made
available, not as a template but really as blog articles on how to create these
types of things. Were also looking to, now that System Center 2012 is finally
coming out, really doing a lot of education on how the service model is different
than maybe developing applications initially and what types of things you can do
and you cant do so youll see a lot more information over the next six months
about things within the service template. Talking to some of our TAP customers
and MVPs that have started working on this with their customers and their
companies what they found is that the service template model its different than
how they would do things in the past. And its not that they cant do it but a lot
of 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 theyre looking at doing two
things right now, the first one is getting their infrastructure ready to go and be
able to present and do the private cloud but also theyre doing a large scale
education to their development group, showing them how they can do things a
little bit differently in their side which makes things a lot easier as far as running
and operationalzing these applications that their developers are running. And
what theyve said is that its a parallel activity and its going to take a little time to
start moving these developers over to that, just like it took a long time to move
people from touching and feeling a physical machine to moving to virtual. So its

Published: 8/9/2012
not something that youre going to change the way you do it over night but over
time youll see a lot of different applications and services start being developed
for 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 set
up these service templates, creating a service template isnt a you know 2 click
thing, takes a little while to set up, what youre going to see though is that if you
start developing your applications with service templates in mind if you take the
time to set up these service templates for these applications you deploy over and
over and over again its going to make up for a lot of that wasted time that you
do afterwards in just configuring these applications its going to take all that stuff
for you. We talked to some customers and every time they installed an
application they had a 146 page run book that they had to go through, click by
click by click on every piece of configuration that they had to do. If youre able to
take that 146 page run group, put it into a Server App V package and be able to
deploy this application multiple times without having to go through all these
different configuration steps its going to save you a lot of time in the future. So
thats where the education between what youre doing now and what you can be
doing in the future is going to take some time but its going to really pay off in
the future.
So I have this update, these are some of the things that you know when you set
up you can show your developers that hey, now that I have made these changes
that I want to make instead of having to go to every single deployed service and
every single VM in that service and make all these changes, I can make it to the
one template and push it out to all these different deployed services that are out
there. so I have this version thats this new release available at that point I can
specify for that particular template, set the template to the version that I want so
what I want to do here is instead of just modifying existing application settings I
want to update to the newest version of the template so I can pick the version
that I want which is version 1.3 here and at that point just go through the rest of
these browsers, this wizard, what its going to do is say okay heres the current
value of the settings that you have do we have to change them no, do you want
to change them, if you wanted to change any of these values you could and it
would push those values into the service but you dont have to, the next thing is
how do you want to do these updates, do you want to do them in place or do
you want to do them image based and deploy new virtual machines. Well all the
changes I made are in this template update are things that I do in place, I dont
have to replace the VHD so Im just going to do in place updates for them, its
going to go through and check the existing values of the service and the new
values is there anything I need to add inside of there, its going to look at each of
the different tiers and sees whats going to happen and youre going to see
something in that viewing of the tiers. We have a couple of warnings here, the
warnings are for the different tiers that dont have upgrade domains. So I have

Published: 8/9/2012
multiple tiers, I have a demographics tier no changes are going to be made to it

so I can ignore that warning, the web tier there are no warnings because I have
upgrade domains, so its not going to bring the whole thing down. This is just
basically telling me that that order processing tier Im going to have to take the
whole tier down because I dont have multiple upgrade domains. And thats fine,
I understand that thats going to happen in the upgrade process so Im okay with
that and if I had cared about the SQL server, but since Im not making any
changes there its not going to affect it. Then the next thing is well Ive done that
now I want to apply those updates immediately so as soon as I hit okay here why
dont we just start that process on the tier, so I do that and hit finish at this point
its going to start the job and that jobs going to run through all the different
steps. The first thing we see is that were stopping that web tier if you look at the
web tier you see the VMs is set for 512 Megs right now, Im stopping the VM, its
going to make adjusted setting from 512 megs to one gig and we see here thats
now at 1 gig and its going to restart the VM its all I really had to do is change
that, change the number of processors if I look at web 1 here, its still at 1
processor, 512 the web 2 here is 2 processors and 1 gig, and after it gets that
machine up and running that machines checked back in and we see that
everythings running okay on that machine we will then do that same process
with this web 1 server here. So we see its now stopping shutting that VM down,
going to make the changes that we made and its going to bring that machine
back so those are some of the things you can do and I can push these out to all
the different virtual machines or services that have deployed through this
customer demographics service template. After it brings both of those things
down the next thing its going to do is work on the order processing tier and here
the VM is going to run but what its going to do is take this deployed service and
its going to update that with the updated version that I got that I applied to this.
So its not going to use the existing version but save the state, deploy that
update and reapply the state to it and its just running through the demo from
that 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 and
managing your service templates and being able to do these image based and
these 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 templates
running them simultaneously in production and in a test environment so lets say
Ive got this template in a test environment, I love it whats the easiest way to
make that live to go import it from my test world over to my production world?
Kenon: So Ive made the service template, if the VMM server is managing both of

Published: 8/9/2012
those environments both the dev and the production environment then I can
simply make that template available to my production cloud and people can start
deploying it once its gold. The other thing I can do is this, if I have two different
VMM servers one VMM server is in my dev environment and another one is in
my production environment I can take that template and lets say this 1.3 version
of the template and I can export it and when I export that template it exports all
the information and I have a couple of options here; do I just want to export the
meta data of that template or do I want to export all the different files and
everything that are necessary for that template. So I pick the template that I
want to export and I specify where I want to export that template to and I can
copy it to a local machine or I can copy it up to a network or something like that
and actually lets create a new folder inside of here, call it template and then hit
okay there. and at that point its going to export all the information for that
template to that machine. If I wanted to add other templates when I do this
export process I can add those templates straight from this machine, if I want to
override or extract any of the sensitive data and keep that data inside the
template so its all encrypted and everything like that I can turn those things on
as well. I can even set a password value against it so when I move it from one
site and I import it to another site I have to type in that password to protect it. So
I wont have any of that information set up hit okay and it will start exporting
that template. Then once that template is exported, I can import it and now at
the new VMM server the import process I may not have the same VHD file or
these network names you know here I have Contoso, maybe over there I have
Contosoprod 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, I
wanted to use this network instead of the other one so I have the ability to set
those things as well.
Symon: okay, another question around these upgrades, well first of all weve been
asked can you exactly define what is an upgrade domain?
Kenon: So an upgrade domain is a number that you specify that says when I
upgrade this service Im going to bring down the number of VMs that are
deployed in that service divided by the upgrade domain, so if I had the upgrade
domain set at 3 then I would take that number of VMs that are in that service, in
that tier of that service and I would divide it by three and I would bring down a
third of them the first time, a third the second and a third the last time, but if
there were like 7 and it was 3 then I would bring down 3 the first time, 2 the
second time, 2 the third time because you know it may not evenly divide. So an
upgrade domain just means that every time I do an upgrade of that tier I only
upgrade a specific piece at a time until Ive upgraded the entire tier so Ill bring

Published: 8/9/2012
down a third, do the upgrade on those bring those back up, do the next third, do
the upgrade on those, bring them back up and then do the next third, bring
them back up. Now, if the application can support having multiple versions of it
at the same time, maybe I have the first set of VMs and theyre connected to a
web interface and Im updating the whole scale web page, well those that are
connected to the web sites, with the old version you would still see the old
version until those machines got updated so your application has to be able to
handle or you have to be okay with it that you have two versions up at the same
time. if I dont have that then Ill 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 service
templates while theyre offline?
Kenon: So a service that is shut down, I dont know, I havent tried, so we
probably could apply that because it depends on what the update is, if the
update is something where the VM has to be running like Im updating
something inside the VM then no we couldnt but if it was something where its
just changing a configuration of the VM like the amount of RAM I think that that
might work, I havent 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 the
existing 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 take
a VM and deploy it off of that VHD file, I would make all the changes that I want
inside that VHD file and then I would create a template off of that VM and that
would give me that updated VHD file. That VHD file I would then store in the
library and so underneath the library if I look at my different library servers and I
look 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 them
so I may have a virtual hard disk file and I might want to say that this file is a
specific type of family so I may want to give it a family name like this is server OS
no apps and a release number and I can call this 1.0. I want to make the update
to the VHD file and I store that updated VHD file inside this library I can set an
equivalent resource so that this is seen as an update to that existing VHD file so I
can put those things together. The other thing is when I import this service
template and it says it needs this kind of VHD I can pick whatever one I have in

Published: 8/9/2012
my library at that other VMM server.

Symon: Great can you remind us one more time, what authoring tool are you
using to actually create an manipulate the service templates?
Kenon: So Im modifying and creating the service templates through the service
template designer thats within VMM itself, so VMM comes with that authoring
tool to do that.
Symon: Excellent, thats 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
were now up to version 1.3 it completed, theres a job status here so I can look at
the job itself and find out you know what worked, what didnt if somethings
failed, all that stuffs kept from me and if something failed I can make some
changes and restart the job and it would pick off from where I left off.

Published: 8/9/2012
All right so weve talked now about service templates and service templates is
just going to be something that its just going to take awhile for people to
really understand but once you start using them youll see the power that
service template gives you. But now we want to know with all these services
that are deployed I want to ensure that the cloud that Im providing is giving
me the right size, Im not going to want to have a lot of spare resources sitting
around Id like to almost do just in time on my resources, make sure I have a
little bit of a buffer but I dont want to buy for my peak usage when Im only
using 10% of that most of the time. Ill buy for what I need to use and then be
able to expand.
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Published: 8/9/2012
And to do that Ill need to know what is the utilization on my private cloud right
now, what is happening on my system right now, Ill also want to trend that over
time and say over the last six months how have I been growing on this private
cloud 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 have
built in reporting on how your infrastructure is running.
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Published: 8/9/2012
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and then well generate a report on how these machines are performing and
youll be able to use that information to say how have things been working over
time.
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Published: 8/9/2012
The other thing that well be able to do is some what it forecasting so well be
able to if you have SQL analysis services running inside on your Operations
Manager server youll be able to do some SQL analysis what if forecasting and
say weve trended data over the past X amount of months for this amount of
usage this is what the change or the updates going to be anticipated over the
next month or two and youll be able to decide do I need to buy more or not
from that.
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Published: 8/9/2012
So lets show a little bit about what that looks like and how we get those
reporting information so Ill move back to this system right here and we have
under Operations Manager we have this reporting section and under reporting
we have all the reports for System Center virtual machine manager so weve
created these different reports and put them in there and they could be things
like whats my capacity utilization, whats the host utilization some of these are
pretty interesting if we look at the host utilization report and we go through it
this is where we could find out how each of my hosts are performing and we can
do this over a set period of time, day, week, month, year so Ill do it from the
beginning of the month to today, if I add a group then what I can do is pick
inside the group and choose the different hyper V hosts that I have inside of
here, just pull in all this information but if I search by class and I pick hyper V
hosts 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 prod
ESX and so if I add my Hyper V hosts I can add them in as well as my ESX or any
other type of hosts inside of here. So let me pull them up right here, Ill just do
the Hyper V ones, I cant find them real quick here and I will hit okay. And at this
point, Ill just see that object here and we see the Con prod ESX hosts right here,
so Ill choose some of those as well and hit okay so now we have five hosts that
were looking at; were looking at some Hyper V hosts and some ESX hosts and
we hit run and it will generate the report on these different hosts and I can see
how the performance is running for these different systems. The other thing
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Published: 8/9/2012
that well be able to do and the one that I want to show after this is capacity and
the capacity planning that will help me determine, it kind of pools multiple
different resources together and gives me kind of a performance index number
on how these things are performing, so while thats running Ill start the other
one up here and thats capacity utilization. Again well just do it for this month
well add object and here well add the Hyper V hosts and a couple of ESX server
hosts so we have those hosts available. Lets see did this thing come up okay, so
first of all this report came up and it show me that Im probably not using a lot of
the resources on here, I have a lot of VMs using a lot of RAM on these systems
but Im not really fully utilizing things like the CPU so I can see how things are
running within this environment. If I look at the capacity utilization within this
same group when it runs this report its going to kind of aggregate all this values
of CPU, disk, network and memory, pull them all together and really just tell me
how these things are performing so things that we can see here is that the
different hosts, we can see that most of my hosts arent using a lot of resources if
we look at the performance impact factor so Im not running out of resources on
these 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 is
that most of my utilization is through memory, I have a lot of different systems
that are running and each of those systems require some memory so its really
pulling 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 I
can just pull down that piece in the report and I can see over the period of time
this 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 running
here and the next thing that I would want to do is look at if I hade analysis
services running I could look at the host utilization growth and predict what that
growths going to be. I can also report on the individual virtual machines as well,
things like virtual machine utilization and here again, well do it for this month
well add an object, objects that contain 01, so I have all these virtual machines
that have been deployed, some are infrastructure servers, some are just service
VMs everything, Ill just add all those servers in there, hit okay and well run that
report and well get good information about how are these virtual machines
performing, whats their CPU utilization and I see that my Operations Manager
server is running pretty high compared to some of these other servers here, we
can sort by lowest to highest if we pull down here we can see that Operations
Manager server is the hottest machine that I have on here some of the other
ones are running not so hot. If you look at the RAM utilization or memory you
can see which ones are needing or wanting more RAM then theyre really using.
So I have all this different information that I can use to see how these virtual
machines are performing and how everythings working together.

Published: 8/9/2012
So with that, weve talked a lot now about the different environments, we talked
about dynamic optimization, service access, service templates and now
performance and monitoring but were there some questions that were out there?
Symon: There were, why dont we wrap this up and then well spend a few
minutes covering the remaining questions.
Kenon: Excellent

Published: 8/9/2012
35

Published: 8/9/2012
So the things that weve really focused on today are optimizing this private cloud
to handle our dynamic workloads, controlling access to who has access to those
resources, a better and updated approach to how we handle updates to these
services 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 lets jump into some of the questions that
we have, well answer questions for about five minutes then well take a break,
first question we have ties back to the templates again the question is around, is
there any way to compare the templates or is using the versioning the best way
to figure out if theres a change thats been applied to a version>
Kenon: theres no way to say whats the difference between this template and
this template the versioning would help you do that and that would be
something you probably want to keep track of in say your CMDB or something
like that and with the service manager connector to VMM it will pull that
information as you make changes and updates to the templates into the CMDB.
Symon: Great, so hopefully youre aware when a change does happen, great, well
next question is going back to some of the earlier things as well so first of all
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Published: 8/9/2012
with cluster creation can we create Xen clusters and VMWare clusters or do we
manage them?
Kenon: We dont create them we just use them, so you create them outside
Symon: That would be the same concept you were talking about earlier right
where were just managing their VMs were not necessarily managing the hosts
themselves?
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 through
scheduling this power optimization and we have servers that are distributed,
meaning different time zones do we have a logic that takes that into account or
do you know how that works? Is it based on the primary site where you configure
it?
Kenon: You know Im not sure so I havent played around with that, that would be
something wed have to look into but I would imagine that its based on the time
zone of the VMM server, not the time zone of the different hosts but Im not sure
on 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, well get some more information on that.
Now as we actually go through a dynamic optimization process is it possible for
us to leave out a particular host inside the cluster or is the boundary of dynamic
optimization that entire cluster?
Kenon: The boundary of dynamic optimization is the entire cluster, now you can
use some things with custom placement rules that specify where you want to
move things around to and such but at the base level dynamic optimization is at

Published: 8/9/2012
the entire cluster.

Symon: so one example of how you could do that, the failover cluster itself does
have properties called preferred owners and possible owners so you could
possibly specify this group of node is the preferred or possible owners for these
set of VMs, this group of node for preferred or possible owners for this set of
VMs and dynamic optimization will still honor that underlying cluster logic and
ideally it will separate them but still the primary goal is to keep the services up
and running and to load balance so its not going to take any service down either.
Kenon: Exactly and a couple of other things we do have inside of VMM itself
custom placement rules also where you can say in this VM needs to be on a host
with this type of property and as long as youve set that property on the host
then it will be able to move it to one of the hosts but it wont, and you can say it
must contain or it may contain as well.
Symon: Excellent well now we have a question about the actual host itself why
should we use server core instead of a full edition of Windows Server for our
actual host?
Kenon: there are a couple reasons to use server core over a full version of
Windows 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 but
with server core we found that there is about a 50% amount less of patching on
that system because of all the extra stuff
Symon: Theres no internet explorer for example
Kenon: Exactly, but some people think that server core is too limiting and so they
made 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 that
information.
Symon: Theres a lot more flexibility with how you can upgrade and downgrade
between server core and full installation. You know just to emphasize on your
point about theres fewer components there, fewer components of course means
theres fewer things to patch, fewer patches means fewer reboots, fewer reboots,
higher availability so if youre really concerned about up time with regards to

Published: 8/9/2012
patching go and use server core, install that, youre going to have less failovers,
less needs to patch those hosts. Now, final question that we have, this was
actually asked yesterday and I believe Sean addressed it but wed love to get your
perspective on this, what are your thoughts around using System Center 2012 as
far as multiple tenancy, meaning whats the best way to really you know isolate
individual owners, isolate individual roles for lets say a host or environment?
Kenon: So there are things you can do with System Center 2012 for multi-tenancy
but its not totally there yet. The fact is like if Im doing service deployment I need
to have access to the domain so that I can VMM can communicate with that VM
that was deployed, makes it really difficult when I have multiple different
domains for multiple different companies and so some of those things arent
going to be possible to do yet with the existing version of System Center 2012.
there are some things you can do if youre just managing the underlying hosts
and the VMs are just regular VMs you would deploy then you can handle some
of that multi-tenancy you would have to give users access to your VMM
environments, they would have to have some type of access to your domain
somehow if you wanted them to see the cloud or something like that, so were
working on making that better but the story right now is that it does multitenancy okay but really theres a lot more that hosters would want.
Symon: Okay great and theres one final question that came up around hosting
policies that Im 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 an
example of when you might want to use this is if you have a guest cluster, a
virtualized cluster you dont want that running on a single host because if that
host crashes, you lose the whole cluster. Likewise if you have infrastructure
services, lets say you have your DHTP servers, you dont want all of those VMs on
a single host, if that host crashes you lose everything. So one of the ways that
you can actually isolate and separate the VMs across different hosts is a cluster
property called anti-affinity class names. Basically using this property you go and
say this VM is blue, this VM is blue and any two VMs that share the same antiaffinity class name are purposefully going to try and separate themselves across
different hosts. Theres actually a great blog on the cluster team blog, written in
December 2010 about VM placement policies that talks about our preferred
owners, possible owners, anti-affinity class names so if you want more details go
to blogs.msdn.com/clustering and find the link from December 10th and I will
post that as well shortly.
Well, Kenon that about wraps up this session, thank you so much for joining us
for these four modules, I hope everybodys really learned about not only how to
go and deploy this private cloud infrastructure and optimizing it but then

Published: 8/9/2012
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 well be back after a break with Sean Christensen and were going to
go and talk about service delivery and automation, how to monitor and how to
operate. Thank you
Kenon: Thank you.

Published: 8/9/2012
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Creating and Managing a Private Cloud with System Center 2012

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