Thank you to all delegates choosing to attend DTL222 on Monday, it was a real pleasure to have such a big room filled for my first presentation of TechEd Africa 2010! And a special thanks to Cameron Skinner for the original content and Jennifer Marsman for a very thorough write-up of Cameron’s tour – it sure helped with my preparation!

You can find several videos featuring Cameron Skinner at TechEd Online and on Channel 9.

MSDN Subscribers remember to grab the Visual Studio 2010 Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack for all those nice extras!

Plan B: an SSD. And not through USB, I have an Express card to add eSATA to my laptop.

Trying to be clever, I then mounted the SSD as a pass-through disk under Hyper-V, just to get that extra little speed…

Installing Windows Server 2008 R2 takes about 7mins! (via the Express card eSATA onto  the Kingston v+ 128GB SSD).

And Hyper-V has this cool feature where when you create a new VHD, you can create it “from” a physical disk: Hyper-V will copy the content of a drive into a VHD:

The VHD file was being created on a 7200RPM 500GB disk placed in the laptop’s media bay. Task Manager’s Resource Monitor suggested that write operation was running about 44 million bytes per second.

The Catch, unfortunately, is that Hyper-V seems to make a raw copy of the disk, not paying attention to the fact that most of that pass-through disk ended up being empty. So I ended up waiting almost half an hour for Hyper-V to read the entire 128GB SSD (perfmon showed 114 million bytes per second read activity on the SSD for the duration), only to end up with a 6.5GB dynamically expanding VHD.

With the up-front time saving blown away, I then tried installing Windows Server 2008 R2 into a dynamically expanding VHD file that was created on the SSD. That took a little longer than the original 7mins, but copying the resulting VHD took only 3mins, so the lesson is that unless you’re going to fill that pass-through disk, you may be better off paying the perf cost during installation: from 7mins to 9mins on my laptop.

The catch? I was not about to spend a ton of money on a server that would be mostly idle, so though I wanted a lot of RAM, there was to be no “i” in my new CPU’s name. Turns out if you go for a “Q” series CPU, the motherboard is enough cheaper to make it worth the trade in speed (for me, YMMV) and the difference helps me afford my RAM appetite. And as an added bonus, Gigabyte has a motherboard for the older CPU that already has USB3 support, so something new with the old.

And thanks to the magic of an MSDN subscription, I can play with both Windows Storage Server 2008 and Windows Home Server; I still have a lot more work to do on the Hyper-V library but I am also tempted to code for WHS. Take a look at this Windows Home Server add-in: a download manager!

The VMWare ESX instances running on several blades all use iSCSI…

And I heard somewhere that Microsoft has an iSCSI software target – meaning you can use a Windows machine to present a “disk” on the network using the iSCSI protocol.

Unfortunately it is only available for use with Windows Storage Server. Which is only available to OEMs.

Except, also available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers!

Off to MSDN Subscriber Downloads, grab a copy of Windows Storage Server 2008 and the iSCSI Software Target – several gigabytes worth of a download later we have WSS2008 installing into a Hyper-V guest on my laptop.

Because the Lenovo T500 I’m using doesn’t have eSATA, I have to resort to an Express Card to get real speed, but whether eSATA or USB 2.0, Windows and Hyper-V doesn’t care where you create your virtual disks.

My laptop is now hosting a Windows Storage Server 2008 virtual machine, presented on the 1Gbps network interface, offering an iSCSI target onto that network.

The test client was the very same laptop: since it is running Windows Server 2008 R2, it has an iSCSI Initiator included and it happily mounts the disk presented by Windows Storage Server.

Sunday morning we’ll find out if VMWare ESX is compatible with the Microsoft software implementation of iSCSI.

Latest update is on CodePlex: just released an alpha of System.Management.HyperV.dll.

But I didn’t have the patience to learn as much PowerShell as I needed to, but I did have the patience to learn a lot of WMI…

One weekend later, here is my C# library to access Hyper-V capabilities via WMI. For now it is just the Image Management Service and one method of the Virtual System Management Service. But it is a start. Next up: Creating virtual networks, then full blown VMs.

Host 1: DC, SCVMM w Library, WSUS, SQL, SharePoint, TFS, Build Controller A, Build Agent A1, Test Controller A, …

Host 2: Build Controller B, Build Agent B1, Test Controller B and then the environments being deployed to and tested against.

I would like to join Host 2 and all the VMs to the DC on Host 1 to simplify authentication.

Easiest way to do that is to give static IPs to all the VMs. That way, even if I do plug both laptops into some client’s switch, they are still likely to be isolated on the network, if only at the IP level.

Another consideration is internet access from inside all the VMs. At first that sounds like a luxury, but remember: Activation. Having network connectivity means I can use my MSDN keys in my scripts and just auto-activate. Also helps for quickly grabbing an update not yet downloaded to my local WSUS VM.

Once I have this configured to my satisfaction I’ll post a few screenshots and diagrams.

First up: I use a laptop. And it is not always all about the VMs. Sometimes I just want to run Outlook or Visual Studio. To help startup time I have all non-essential services Startup Type set to Manual. For starting Hyper-V, run this in PowerShell:

Why does startup time matter? Remember once you add the Hyper-V role to Windows Server 2008, we lose Hibernate and Sleep. Time to go shop for an SSD…

With the release of Visual Studio 2010 came Lab Management: heaven for the likes of us because it integrates with System Center Virtual Machine Manager and all the automation goodness that comes with it.

One catch: where I am based, bandwidth is such that I can not wait for Updates every time I want to spin up a new VM. Let’s face it, all new VMs need the same collection of patches, so why download repeatedly?

First thought was, of course, ISA! Let me just spin up a proxy, set a massive cache and long TTL and be done with it. Well, no: thanks to CDNs, not all the VMs aim at the same HTTP object when reaching out for Windows Updates. So even though a cache would work out fine for corporations, I need WSUS: Windows Server Update Services!

Be sure to grab Windows Server Update Services 3.0 SP2 otherwise you’ll have grief installing it on Windows Server 2008 R2.

My Lab Management rig now consists of:

* Lenovo T500 with 8GB RAM, HDDs: 160GB + 500GB (7200rpm)

* Host running Windows Server 2008 R2 booted from VHD

Guests:

* Windows Server 2003 R2 Domain Controller with SMTP & POP3

* WS 2008 R2 with Windows Server Update Services 3.0 SP2

* WS 2008 R2 with System Center Virtual Machine Manager R2

All of the above was configured manually. Now for the automation fun. Watch this space!