Microsoft hungry to eat VMWare's lunch

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20015123-56.html?tag=mncol

Sometimes titles like this make me take a look, but as I read the article, they have a few very interesting points…

• "VMware is asking many of you to sign three-year license agreements for your virtualization projects," Microsoft vice president Brad Anderson writes in an open letter to VMware customers. "But with the arrival of cloud computing, signing up for a three-year virtualization commitment may lock you into a vendor that cannot provide you with the breadth of technology, flexibility or scale, that you'll need to build a complete cloud computing environment."

Yes VMware is asking for a long term commitment, but what is their long term commitment to you?  I do like long term relationships with our customers because that's the core of the partnership.  If you still view companies like VMware and Microsoft as “Just vendors”, you are losing out on so many of the benefits of the relationship.  Our goal is to provide long term vision and leadership so that you know we’re committed to not only the point release today, but the long term strategy as well.  Our goal is to continue to provide the platform your business needs as our industry continues to evolve.  Is the cloud right for today?  A lot of people think so...  Is it right for your business today?  Maybe not, but we’ve seen a lot of customers and partners benefit from the exponential growth in the cloud right now.  Remember that we are the industry that cannot be afraid of change, let’s make sure we are looking at the cloud for what it can and can’t give us right now and in the future.  

Next point:

• Even in the virtualization category, which has long been dominated by VMware, Microsoft maintains that it has shrunk the technical gap with its rival while offering a significantly lower cost.

I agree with this statement.  For the majority of customers and partners I work with, we provide the solutions that meet their business needs right now.  Does VMware have other bells and whistles?  Yes they do.  Are they needed?  Are they even economical?  I don’t think so.  As you probably know, I’ve had my head in the virtualization game for years and I am very proud of our current version of Hyper-V, we continue to truly deliver a virtualization solution that can deliver on our customers and partners needs. 

Even if the technologies meet your needs, isn’t there cost in changing?  Yes, but we are not saying that if you want to move to Hyper-V, you have to make an immediate shift.  We have a great coexistence plan.  Migrate to Hyper-V as it makes sense to the business.  Maybe there are workloads that should stay on VMware.  Maybe from a political perspective, or maybe from a “don’t mess with isn’t broken” perspective. 

• "If you're evaluating a new licensing agreement with VMware, talk to us first," Anderson writes in the letter. "You have nothing to lose and plenty to gain. Not only is Microsoft's server virtualization solution approximately one-third the cost of a comparable solution from VMware, but also a recent Microsoft study of 150 large companies showed those running Microsoft virtualization spent 24 percent less on IT labor on an ongoing basis

Don’t we all shop around for everything we purchase?  Partners that I’ve engaged with over the years have clear ROI documentation on their Hyper-V deployments.  Let me also point out that it’s not only about the upfront cost, it’s also about the ongoing cost.  Yes our initial costs are lower, but we also provide the complete end-to-end solution when it comes to the creation, deployment, and ongoing management of your infrastructure.  When I talk about ongoing management, I mean managing both your physical and virtual infrastructure with the same tools!

And the last thing I want to point out:

• The battle between Microsoft and VMWare has been taking shape for several years now as Microsoft has introduced and beefed-up its Hyper-V hypervisor product. VMware, meanwhile, has included lower cost and free versions of its server software as it has added more management and other capabilities to its higher-end products.

Yes this competition has intensified, the winners remain our customers and partners.  I’ve watched this battle take form and it has continued to drive down costs while it has increased the capabilities.  VMware has a very good product, but is it worth the price?  Does it truly continue to provide a compelling ROI?  Do they really have a long term strategy?  I mean a real strategy you can bet your business on? 

You’ve heard our focus on the cloud, take a look at our last 10+ years.  We have been delivering cloud services for over 10 years.  Think about Hotmail.  Hotmail is a a very consistent and stable cloud based email solution that has continued to grow for over 10 years.  Check out other areas like XBOX live, and Exchange Hosted services, Exchange Hosted Services is a cloud based messaging hygiene solution.  We are not asking you to just trust that we have a plan we’re asking you to look at our execution for the last 10+ years as proof points that we’ve consistently driven the cloud based solutions to the scalability and service delivery to levels our customers and partners expect for a Business Ready solution.

Until next time!

Rob

I had this great idea to create a number of videos on Windows Intune so that I could show you how to setup and manage your customers computers.  Windows Intune even lets you manage computers from multiple customers from a single pane of glass.  No more logging into one customer, then out of their account so you can log into another customers account.  Windows Intune makes that a lot easier.

I was also going to show you some of the day to day management tasks like checking hardware and software inventory, manage patch levels and approve patches, assist your customers via Remote Assistance sessions, and even set policies for your customers. 

Like I said, I was going to do that, but the Windows Intune team has already done a lot of that.  Instead of re-creating the wheel, let me point you to some very good material on Windows Intune.

To find this information, head to the Windows Intune home page here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsintune/default.aspx

You can navigate to the Experience section and you will see a whole list of videos.  You can scroll through them and read the overview, but I’m going to highlight a few of them that got my attention below…

How to initially manage Windows Intune clients:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsintune/windowsintune-experience.aspx?slideid=2&icid=email&media=intunestart&listid=1&stop=1

Here, they walk through how to review the Hardware and Software inventory of your clients computers without leaving the comfort of your office, or home office, Starbucks, or hotel across the country.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsintune/windowsintune-experience.aspx?slideid=4&icid=email&media=bigpicture&listid=1&stop=1

And then my favorite, how do I manage multiple customers from a single management console:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsintune/windowsintune-experience.aspx?slideid=5&icid=email&media=managingmultipleacc&listid=1&stop=1

For more Partner related information on Windows Intune, please check out the partner portal at:

https://partner.microsoft.com/40136477?msp_id=windowsintune

The Partner Portal provides additional content for our partners.  The thing I really like about the partner ready content we have is the Windows Intune Training: Cloud Services and Windows 7 for PC Management session.  It’s 45 minutes and walks through the Windows Intune messaging and value. 

Until next time,

Rob

1. How do I learn more about Windows Intune and signup?
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsintune/default.aspx

2. How do I manage my Windows Intune environment now that I'm signed up?
https://manage.microsoft.com

My next session will talk in more detail about how to view and manage machines managed by Windows Intune.

Until next time,

Rob

Here are the Release Notes from the RC that discusses this issue.  It’s about half way down under the System Preparation Tool section.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/F/D/B/FDBFC5A5-51CD-4C8D-9F18-7BCC3810498E/Windows%207%20RC%20Release%20Notes.htm

Until next time!

Rob

We don’t have anyone that wakes up and says “How can I make <insert item here> more complicated”.

I got a real chuckle out of the statement, but it is true.  We don’t try to intentionally make things harder to license; heck, we don’t even try to make our products harder to use, we’ve actually worked hard at making both our licenses and products easier to figure out.  I can point to a lot of areas where we’ve actually made licensing easier on our customers, but I also agree that it’s not always the easiest to work through.  How do we make it easy for everyone?  That’s the tough one.  Each person or company has their own way of purchasing and even their own goals for their purchases.  So how can anyone these days make anything “one size fits all”?

As you know by now, I’m incredibly passionate about virtualization and I feel we’ve done a lot to reduce the complexity of our virtualization licensing.  We’ve tried to make things easier by providing unlimited virtualization on Windows Data Center servers, heck we even provide licensing calculators for not only the OS, but also our server applications.  Check this page out, you can actually walk through, and price out numerous VMs running our application server products like SQL, Exchange, and SharePoint.

While I agree that licensing isn’t the easiest thing on the planet, we are working at making it easier while maintaining flexibility.  To me, I see the number of licensing options as one of the major reasons our licensing becomes a challenge sometimes, but again; everyone wants choice, and with choice comes flexibility.

Until next time,

Rob!

Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 introduce a new format for group policies. ADMX files are the new file formats and they are stored in xml format.  These new policy settings can only be managed from Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 based administrative machines running Group Policy Object Editor or Group Policy Management Console. These new policy settings are defined only in ADMX files and as such, are not exposed on the Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Windows® XP, or Windows 2000 versions of these tools.  Here's where it gets a bit dicey.  I'd like you to upgrade Windows Vista to SP1, the upgrade is well worth it, but doing so removes the ability for Windows Vista to manage domain policies.  To add this functionality back to Vista, you need to install the Remote Server Administration Tools to get the management functionality restored.  This is actually a good thing.  The reality is that 99% of your user community should not be modifying domain policies, so it's best to take the bullets out of their gun :).  Here are a few of the highlights:

• The Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 versions of Group Policy Object Editor and Group Policy Management Console can be used to manage all operating systems that support Group Policy (Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000).
• The Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 versions of Group Policy Object Editor and Group Policy Management Console support interoperability with versions of these tools on early operating systems. For example, custom ADM files stored in GPOs will be consumed by the new tools.
• In the majority of situations, you will not notice the presence of ADMX files during your day-to-day Group Policy administration tasks.

Now, back to the question of how do I upgrade my Server 2003 Schema to support Server 2008 and / or Vista?

First, do not use the schema extensions shipped on the RTM version of Windows Vista.  The version included on your Vista RTM DVD contains the beta version of the Server 2008 schema extensions.  Check out:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/933585

The article below discusses the details of adding a Server 2008 server to your SBS network.  There are just a few things you need to be aware of, and it also discusses how to prepare the forest for Server 2008.  This will get you ready to manage Group Policies for Windows Vista within your SBS or Server 2003 Forest.

Adding a Server Running Windows Server 2008 to a Windows Small Business Server 2003 Network

I'm going to reiterate this again, to manage all of the new toys in Windows Vista, you need to install the Remote Server Administration Tools for Vista SP1.  Here is a brief run down:

Installing the Remote Server Administration Tools for Vista SP1

Description of Windows Server 2008 Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows Vista Service Pack 1

Once you install the update, you have to enable the new features you added.  This is similar to the way the R2 functionality in Server 2003 was added.  The install just gives you the ability to enable the Admin tools.  Go into the Program and Features applet in Control Panel and add the components. 

If you are running SBS 2003, you can stop here.  If you want to drill into more of the planning for Server 2008, I've included additional information below.

I encourage you to follow this document so that you can fully plan your move to Server 2008.  We both know you'll get there, so let's do it right from the beginning.

Information and resources to use when you plan to upgrade Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008

Please review this article, I'm encouraging you to plan this upgrade before you do it.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/948070

The process to upgrade your schema to Server 2008 AD DS is located here. This is the actual process to do the upgrade, but I'd really like you to review the information I have provided first.  I'm not saying you need to be afraid of the schema upgrade, but please plan it before you just do it.  One last thing, backup, backup and then backup again.  Please make sure you have a good backup before you do a schema upgrade.  I've never heard of a schema upgrade failing, but if it does, it could force you to rebuild your whole forest.  Please remember that when you have the power to make positive change, you also have the power to mess things up, so make sure you have a good plan.

adprep /forestprep is the command that you will enter at the command prompt, but please read the full instructions.  You need to run this command from your Schema Master FSMO role holder, and you must be a member of the Schema Admins role.

Please start here for the low down on all of the steps you should follow:

Performing the Upgrade of Active Directory Domains to Windows Server 2008 AD DS Domains

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/library/9c91be5f-df14-40b2-b176-2b1852a51e611033.mspx?mfr=true

If you have a copy of Server 2008, it includes adprep and will allow you extend the schema right from the Server 2008 media.  If you do not have the Server media, you can download the evaluation version of Server 2008 here, it will let you use ADPrep to prepare your Server 2003 Schema to a Server 2008 Schema.  The eval version of Server 2008 contains the same ADPrep, so you can use the ADPrep to upgrade your forest even if you do not install Server 2008.  Right now, all we need are the schema extensions, not Server 2008 itself.

We have a whole section on Windows Server Group Policy, so please check out the new power you have at your finger tips.  Please remember that with power, comes risk.  You have the power to deploy a group policy that can render your domain useless.  Let me say that one more time.  If you are not paying attention, and you do not test your changes in a test lab first, you could render your domain useless.  A useless domain will require you to rebuild from the ground up.  My intent isn't to scare you, but I want to make sure you properly plan and test every single change before you deploy your changes into production.  Here is a good run down of the Vista SP1 updates, the Group Policy Preferences and the Planning and Deployment guide. 

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/grouppolicy/default.aspx

ADMX Migrator is a snap-in for the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) that simplifies the process of converting your existing Group Policy ADM templates to the new ADMX format and provides a graphical user interface for creating and editing administrative templates http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=77409.

How to use Group Policy to configure detailed security auditing settings for Windows Vista client computers in a Windows Server 2003 domain or in a Windows 2000 domain http://support.microsoft.com/kb/921469

New and updated features in Group Policy http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/library/gpol/a8366c42-6373-48cd-9d11-2510580e4817.mspx?mfr=true

Managing Group Policy ADMX Files Step-by-Step Guide http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=60363

Step-by-Step Guide to Controlling Device Installation and Usage with Group Policy http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=72206

How's that for a little bit of information.

Until next time!

Rob

Back to the performance issue:  It turns out that you still need to tweak your host machine configuration to get the best performance possible out of your VMs.  Five years ago when I started working with Virtual Machines, I learned early on (especially on slower machines) that you have to work hard to put your VMs in the best possible position to be successful.  The rule of thumb is that you have to pay attention to Disk IO, CPU, and Memory (well what else is there??).  While these are not always ranked in this order, more often than not, Disk IO will be your first and most significant bottleneck.  While I was jealous of my friends 2 TB worth of disk space, it turns out that he only has two 1 TB drives.  Having three VMs running on two spindles creates a lot of disk contention since every Windows installation has its' own pagefile.sys and normal OS based disk IO.  When you factor in the host OS, you now have two OS' per spindle.  Killer CPUs and memory can compensate for some of the Disk IO contention, but CPU and memory cannot overpower this much of a deficit.  The lack of spindles can be the Achilles heel of this configuration.

Positioning your VMs on your "spindles" is crucial.  The faster the disks, the lower your disk IO and the better performance you will achieve.  I know it sounds simple, but when you mix in the complexity of virtual machines, you take on an additional layer of OS based IO.  Each VM also has its own pagefile.sys as well its OS based IO.  If you have a VM running on the same drive as your host OS, you now have two OS's competing for the same "spindle".  Drive performance has not improved that much over the last five years, and spindles are usually the first culprit when it comes to poor VM performance.  I actually have a Server Core VM that runs on my 8GB SD card.  It performs well, and it's kinda nice to have a second (small footprint) installation without adding an additional spindle.  Granted, there isn't a whole lot I can do with a small server core, but as I mentioned above, I create a lot of demo configurations, and showing off this additional VM does add some "pop" to my demonstration at a very little resource cost.

Windows Server 2008 now includes Resource Monitor, it's accessible directly off of the Performance Tab in Task Manager.  I really like this tool for its simplicity and "directness".  If the Disk graph stays "high", disk IO is most likely the culprit, but just like conventional performance tuning, it is usually a disk IO issue, but it could also be a "masked" memory issue.  Remember, if any machine does not have enough memory, the OS will spend all of its time paging virtual memory.  Since Hyper-V and VPC do not allow memory over-commit, I doubt memory on the Host OS will be an issue.  I usually suspect that disk IO is the true culprit.  I mention memory though because this is not an absolute rule; but 95% of the time, Disk IO is the problem.  There is a subtle memory problem that will look like a Disk IO problem, so lets take a look at it:  Let's say you create a VM with Windows Vista and you only allocate 512 MB of RAM.  Vista will install and run in 512 MB of RAM, but it's going to page like crazy, right?  So this VM is now paging like crazy into a VHD on a spindle.  You will see Disk IO as the bottleneck when in actuality, it's the fact that you didn't give your VM enough memory to adequately perform.  Again, use performance tuning common sense...

As a rule, I try hard to run only one OS per spindle.  I said OS, not VM, and I said spindle, not drive.  While spindles and drives can be the same thing, I usually take my primary drive and only carve out 40-60 GB as C:.  I then take the remainder of the primary drive and create a second partition with it.  If you put a VM on this second partition, you're in the same boat as if you had placed the VM on the C: drive itself.  Another thing to check; where is your pagefile.sys?  By default Windows puts pagefile.sys on the same partition as the OS, so unless you "tweaked" the pagefile.sys configuration, you should be OK, but it's giving it a quick check.  If pagefile.sys is on a different spindle, it will also create a lot of Disk IO.  I'd shy away from putting a VM on my OS drive, or my drive that hosts pagefile.sys.  Now if you put pagefile.sys on a separate spindle, your host OS will perform better, but you also loose the ability to generate some dumps in the event of a blue screen.  If your focus is to "totally tweak" a machine for performance, consider giving pagefile.sys its own spindle.  I've done a pretty often and I'm usually happy with the performance improvement.  Make sense?

When I create a "big" VM,  and my patience is low, I build the VM on my quad core, 8GB machine.  I've taken two spindles on this machine and striped them.  Striped drives (no parity) perform better than a single spindle since the Disk IO can be spread between the two drives.  Of course, the risks with striped drives still prevail; if one of the two drives fail, you loose the contents of your striped set, so be sure you have good backups.  This striped drive configuration has served me well when I've built VMs, or had VMs that I knew would create a larger than average amount of Disk IO.  SATA 3.0 drives have been very good to me as well, but I still have a ton of PATA drives and they make good spindles for VMs too.

I've also found that while Hyper-V does not support memory "over-commit" is does support CPU over-commit.  I usually have 3 or 4 VMs running on my quad core machine and I give each VM all 4 cores.  This configuration gives Hyper-V the ability to move the CPU resources to the VM that has the immediate need.  Since I, as a rule, give each VM as many cores as possible (4 is the current maximum per VM), I don't have to necessarily worry about CPUs as a potential bottleneck, I can almost always strike CPU bottlenecks from my list of immediate concerns.

As far as memory itself, I try hard to reserve at least 1GB for the host OS.  Hyper-V is very good at ensuring it has enough memory, so again, I don't have to worry about memory that much, so that puts us right back to the spindle performance concerns.  I have one 10K drive, and I've never seen that much of a performance increase with it so I finally just configured it as a boot drive for one of my Hyper-V machines and moved on.  At this point, it's just another drive that is still a lot more expensive than my larger 7200 RPM drives.  I'd much rather purchase two 7200 RPM drives than one 10K drive.  It just doesn't make sense to me since I try to build my hardware "on the cheap".

In summary, I try hard to allocate at least one spindle per VM, and if I know I'm going to have high performance expectations for a particular VM, I'll stripe a few disks to increase performance.  CPU's are the least of my worry, that's with the assumption that I've sized my CPU properly from the beginning.  Memory can still create 'wonky" behavior if you are too stingy with it, so be sure the scale your VM configurations just like you would any other configuration.

I hope my "informal" performance tuning thoughts have helped.  Please let me know if you have any tips & tricks to improve the performance of your VMs.

Until next time!

Rob

BitLocker lets you encrypt the hard drive(s) on your Windows 7 and Vista Enterprise, Windows 7 and Vista Ultimate or Windows Server 2008 and R2.  BitLocker will not encrypt hard drives for Windows XP, Windows 2000 or Windows 2003.  Only Windows 7, Vista and Server 2008 include BitLocker.  BitLocker drives can be encrypted with 128 bit or 256 bit encryption, this is plenty strong to protect your data in the event the computer is lost or stolen.  BitLocker protects your hard drive from offline attack.  This is the type of attack where a malicious user will take the hard drive from your mobile machine and connect it to another machine so they can harvest your data.  BitLocker also protects your data if a malicious user boots from an alternate Operating System.  With either attack method, BitLocker encrypts the hard drive so that when someone has physical access to the drive, the drive is unreadable.  Now if you are a network admin and you need to harvest data from a hard drive when a machine fails, our tools include the functionality to prompt the admin for the recovery key so the hard drive can be accessed.  We've done a good job at ensuring the data does not end up in the wrong hands, while making it easy for authorized users to access the data in the event of a failure.

What does BitLocker do?

Again, BitLocker encrypts the hard drive(s) to protect the Operating System from offline attacks.  Server 2008, 2008 R2, Windows 7 Enterprise, Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows Vista Enterprise, and Windows Vista Ultimate all include BitLocker functionality.  Windows 7 Professional and Windows Vista Business Edition and the Home Editions do not include BitLocker.  The RTM versions of Vista only allow BitLocker encryption of the C: drive.  SP1 for Vista, and Windows 7 include the ability to encrypt all of the hard drives belonging to the Vista and Windows 7 machine.  Server 2008 (and R2) include the ability to encrypt all of its attached hard drives as well.  BitLocker on a Server 2008 (and R2) server might not make sense for your servers in the Data Center, but using BitLocker on servers in remote offices makes a lot of sense.  How many remote offices have their servers in secure Data Centers?  They don't!  If you're lucky, your server sits in a locked closet.  If you're unlucky, it sits under someone's desk.  Deploying BitLocker to these machines makes perfect sense because if those machines are stolen, their data is encrypted and protected from the types of attacks that they would be exposed to.  Another piece to protect these remote servers is the Read Only Domain Controller functionality.  I won't go into it here, but it gives you the ability to provide fast logon experiences for your remote users while ensuring that all of the domain credentials are not stored on these remote office servers. 

Windows 7 extends BitLocker functionality to removable drives, we call that functionality BitLocker to Go.  BitLocker to Go gives you the ability to encrypt your thumb drives and even USB hard drives.  You even have the ability to enforce BitLocker to Go via Group Policy, this Group Policy can ensure that users can only store corporate data on encrypted drives. 

What does BitLocker not do?

BitLocker does not protect the computers contents while Windows is running.  Again, BitLocker is built for offline attacks, once the operating system is up and running.  Windows 7 and Vista will protect your data from unauthorized access.  When 7 (and Vista) is up and running, unauthorized access can come in the form of:

1. A malicious user trying to log onto the local computer.  Windows 7 (and Vista) can protect itself by enforcing strict password policy and complexity.  Please ensure that if your data is important enough to encrypt, that you also require complex passwords and/or two factor authentication.  Two factor authentication takes the simple passwords or easy to guess passwords out of the equation so that they are no longer a risk. 
2. A malicious user connecting to the computer over the network to harvest data from the local computer.  If the user has access to your physical network, the malicious user can try to connect to your machine over the network.  Again, strict user permissions on the local machine and on your network as a whole, will prevent malicious users from accessing your network. 

Other ways to protect your data:

RMS, EFS, IPSec.  I'll give you more detail in my next post.

Until next time!

Rob

Thanks for the article.  What do you do about your host system's pagefile?  I'm thinking more about size.  Do you leave the default?  I have a 16GB system and 12GB of that is allocated to VMs. 

Do I size the host pagefile for the whole 16GB or just for the 3 or 4GB not used by the VMs?  Of course, I want to reduce paging and disk I/O for the host, but if I don't need a huge pagefile, then I'd rather not.

Still researching to see if the old 1.5x RAM sizing is still applicable to x64 large-RAM Hyper-V systems.

Thanks!

Well I did some looking around and there is not a black and white answer to this one, but for the majority of your situations, I'd recommend that we let the system manage the pagefile.sys.  Pagefile.sys is around for two reasons:

1. Provide Virtual Memory to support the physical memory on the server. 1x-1.5x the amount of memory is the "suggested size" of the pagefile.sys, but usually that does not make "sense" on a 16GB machine, and this is "traditional guidance" that does not take Hyper-V into consideration.
2. Pagefile.sys has always been available as the dump location in the event of a crash, so in this situation, sometimes you need a pagefile.sys that is at least the size of your available RAM (plus a little more).  Check out the article below that discusses the details to be considered.

If the server crashes once, do you really want a dump of all of the RAM? If you do, then pagefile.sys needs to be larger than the available RAM, and the machine probably needs to be configured to allow all of the RAM to dumped. Be warned that if you do this, the memory dump could take a very long time (30 - 60 minutes?).  Most likely, you don't want to run with this big of a pagefile.sys, because machines don't bluescreen that often anymore.  If you do encounter repeated blue screens, you'll most likely work with a Support Professional that will help you configure the server to generate the appropriate dump anyway.

Now when we consider your situation, 4Gb is usually adequate since the other 12Gb is dedicated to the VMs.  Since the VM's require real RAM, not virtual memory, there's really no reason for pagefile.sys to support the VM memory for day to day operations.  Again, the only good reason I could find to have a 16Gb page file in *most* (but not all) instances is to be able to capture a memory dump in the event of a failure.

Here is the guidance on Server 2003 and WindowsXP pagefile.sys planning. While we have made some changes in Server 2008, this guidance is a very good starting place, check it out.  It asks you to profile your machine with your workloads, and then take that profile information to determine the pagefile.sys size.

How to determine the appropriate page file size for 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP

At this time, we do not have guidance specifically for Server 2008 and Hyper-V, but this plan should be fine in most scenarios.  One thing that has changed in Server 2008 and Vista is that you can now specify a different dump file, location and size of the dump files.  That's a different discussion, but the pagefile.sys guidance above should be adequate for "best practice" configurations.

As you can tell, I've hedged my bets boths ways on this because there is no one size fits all answer if you feel you need to customize the pagefile.sys configuration, but usually the pagefile.sys configuration is not an item that will impact system performance that much anymore. The pagefile.sys configuration is System Managed by default for both Server 2008 and Windows Vista.  If you want to conserve space, I can see the reasoning for no more than a 4Gb pagefile.sys on a Hyper-V machine.  Heck I can even see where only a 2 Gb pagefile.sys might make sense, but again, the system by default can take care of that for you. 

Of my three Hyper-V machines, I've configured two of them manually so that I could move the pagefile.sys file off of the boot drive.  My third machine is configured with the default configuration of System Managed.  If you really want to tweak performance, putting pagefile.sys on a different drive can reduce drive contention as long as the new destination isn't hosting any other disk IO intensive applications like Virtual Machines or databases. 

Until next time!

Rob

During the IT Pro Conference, someone asked if they could eliminate the UAC (and the local administrator requirements) just for printer driver installations on Windows Vista machines.  Printer Drivers are the most difficult issue when it comes to removing the requirement for local administrator access to a machine.  I've monkeyed with  this a little, I have more research to do, but I think I found a way to solve this predicament.  Point and Print.  This feature was included in Windows XP and in Windows Vista we require local administrator privileges to install these drivers.  There is a Group Policy setting that tells Windows Vista to not require local administrator privileges for printer drivers that are already installed on your servers.  This is the Point and Print functionality... 

Below is a screen capture of the Group Policy setting that disables the local Point and Print Restrictions.  This will allow Windows Vista users to install printer drivers without local administrator permission.  This is a Local Machine policy, but you should also be able to define an AD based Group Policy to do the same thing.  Let me warn you, the reason we require local administrator privileges is to prevent malicious device drivers.  This setting will allow any device driver to be installed.  Now you can define the policy setting Package Point and print - Approved Servers to allow users to install the printer drivers from only an approved list of servers.  This will allow normal users to install any printer driver, once it's been approved and installed on your servers. 

To disable the Point and Print restrictions, you need to get to the screen below, To do that, let's click on Start (or the Vista Perl)  -> and in the Search box, type mmc and press enter. Once the management console comes up, choose File -> Add / Remove Snap in... Choose Group Policy Object and then click Add... If you are defining a local policy, choose local computer.  If you are an AD admin, you should know how to set an AD group policy.  If not, let me know and I'll include those instructions later.  Once you click OK, you should be back to the Local Computer Policy screen like below.  Go ahead and expand the Local Computer Policy, and then choose  User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Control Panel -> Printers.  Then you're able to disable the Point and Print Restrictions. 

Once you make this local policy change, you need to either reboot your computer, or go to a command prompt and execute the command gpupdate / force to ensure the local policy gets applied.  Now you should be able to browse to a local server and double click on a shared printer.  Now the printer driver will install without requiring local administrator privileges.

Give this a try and let me know how it works for you.

Until next time!

Rob