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Minimizing the burdens of moving to Windows Server 2008 R2

Asked by Arieh Cohen, Jerusalem, Israel. - March 11, 2010

I’m an IT Manager in a medium-size special education center. I am running a shop with 100-plus VMs running on Windows Server 2008 virtualization hosts. How do I minimize time/resources/disruption, while migrating to Windows Server 2008 R2? As per Microsoft recommended best practices, all the VHDs are a fixed size, and each VHD file is on its own individual LUN. Even though some of the VHDs are stored in mirroring capable hardware, I don’t see any alternative to doing a file copy of the VHDs, because I want to deploy multiple VMs on a single Clustered Shared Volume (LUN). The file copies will also likely affect the performance of other stuff running on the LAN. What can I do to minimize the amount of data transferred across the LAN, minimize disruptions to non Hyper-V running on the LAN, and minimize the file copy times? I can selectively shut down most VMs, provided the downtime is not excessive.

Topics: Infrastructure , Infrastructure Management , Performance , Virtualization

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  • Hi Arieh,
    Like you said, I too would recommend using Windows Server 2008 R2 with the new Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) feature. This would greatly increase your ability to host multiple VMs on the nodes on your cluster. In addition, it will allow you to use the new Live Migration feature of Hyper-V R2, and will lower your total downtime used for migration and maintenance.
    As for the VHD copying, I've tried using a new command line tool that allows the copying of fixed size VHDs to and from SCVMM libraries to Hyper-V hosts. This tool will provision a VM in seconds and start using it even before the SCVMM checkout induced file copy has completed.
    See here: http://www.vmutil.com
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