Showing posts with label hypervisor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hypervisor. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Converting Disks in Hyper-V

I recently have been running into space issues. I had a four hundred gigabyte hard drive that had almost not space remaining. It stored 8 running servers with dynamically expanding disks that had a maximum size of 40 gigabytes (on the host it was almost 42 gigabytes). I also had to store a backup server image (sysprepped) for copying to quickly create a new server if needed. Additionally, one of the hard drives was 70 gigabytes, not 40. All around, the total came to 459 gigabytes if each hard drive expanded to its largest.I suggested to my boss that we should convert each disk to fixed rather than dynamic disks to improve performance. He agreed and I began my search for how to convert disks. Much to my delight, converting a disk is a relatively painless (albeit slow) process.
Here's how:

For starters, open up the Hyper-V Manager. If you have been working with Hyper-V for any amount of time, you should know where this is. If you're totally new to this, Hyper-V Manager should be located in Administrative Tools. If you can't find it there, open a run window (Windows Key + R) and type mmc. From the window that comes up, Click File -> Add/Remove Snap-in... From the window that comes up, scroll down in the Available snap-ins list and double click Hyper-V Manager. Click OK.

*NOTE* A server must be either off or paused to convert the disk (I chose off for my conversions)

Alright, now that that's out of the way, right click the server you want to convert.

From there, click settings. In the window that comes up (Settings for ), click the hard drive you want to convert. In my case I only had one hard drive 'attached' to my servers.
From here, click Edit











The window that comes up (Edit Virtual Hard Disk Wizard) will start on the "Locate Disk" step but should continue to the next step automatically in a few seconds. On the "Choose Action" step, check the radio button next to the "Convert" option (second down from the top).













Click Next. This will take you to the "Convert Disk" step. Here you need to set the destination filename for the conversion. In my case, I just selected the old file from the browse window and added a "_fixed" at the end of the filename. Any naming scheme works though of course.

Click Next yet again. This will bring you to the summary window. Make sure everything you entered is correct and click Finish.







From here, just sit back and relax.


The conversion speed at the beginning can be a little deceiving. Mine got almost 25% done in the first five minutes. It actually took it about an hour to complete for forty gigabytes though. Reminds me of a cell phone. It reads full battery power until it has none left and then it says it has none five minutes before turning off.


Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Hyper-V and Vista

Hello again all,

Today I built out 8 more servers for our dev team. We have a blade server hosting all of this with Hyper-V. Here's what my picture looks like...
I log into my Vista work machine, use terminal services to log into the blade and open up Hyper-V Manager. From there I connect to the machine via Hypervisor console.
Essentially, I have a remote window inside of a remote window. Naturally, mouse and keyboard key sends are at less-than-desireable speeds. My hopeful solution: Hyper-V management console on Vista.

Over the last year or so I have been hearing talks about how one could not install Hypervisor on Vista so naturally my hopes were already somewhat crushed. Despite the dire situation, I started the search (thanks Google) and much to my suprise, with Vista SP1 Microsoft released a patch (KB952627) to install the Hyper-V Console through Windows Update (thank you Microsoft).

Here are the links (Windows authenticity check required)

Vista x64


Once the management console is installed, you should be able to remotely connect to your server with Hyper-V.
Once again, thank you Microsoft for a very satisfying product.

Regards,
Aaron