We’ve always been a VMWare shop.

As some of you might know, I’ve been involved in the Microsoft virtualisation stack in the past, writing guides for Virtual PC and bits and pieces for the server products, but on the server side of things, at least, VMWare have always had the lead. They’ve had the advantage of beating Microsoft (and others, but this article isn’t about those) to market and the advantage of being able to concentrate on virtualisation because it’s all they do.

HyperV has always been playing catchup to VMWare and in some ways it still is, but when Windows 2012/HyperV v3 was released we finally decided to evaluate HyperV because word on the street was that it was now ‘good enough’.

Of course “Good Enough” is a relative term; what might be good enough for my needs might not be enough for yours, but Microsoft have been bigging up HyperV v3 so we decided to take a look.

We were impressed. For my money, VMWare is still the better solution, and for some workloads it may still be the only viable solution, but HyperV has come on in leaps and bounds since it was first released and now does a very good job of meeting the needs of SME sysadmins, especially those who work in a primarily Microsoft server environment.

HyperV builds on top of the standard Microsoft technology stack; you cluster HyperV servers by using the Windows clustering services, you script it with powershell, you patch it with wsus, and you manage it with SCCM. Specifically System Centre Virtual Machine Manager. Compare this with VSphere, which is all managed through one product, VCenter. Vcenter can be expanded with plugins but fundamentally remains one product and one central management point for your VSphere deployment.

SCCM is a massive product. In fact, it’s a family of products rather than just one thing, and for most businesses it’s not cheap. It’s extremely cheap for education, and a lot of schools and colleges here in the UK that are large enough to benefit from management tools of this kind are choosing SCCM.

This means that if you’ve already implemented SCCM as we have, deciding to implement SCVMM as well is a very cheap option. This is what made us decide to migrate from VSphere to HyperV; we could complete a new install of HyperV onto all our virtual hosts and migrate our current virtual guests from ESX to HyperV for substantially less than renewing our current VSphere licences for another year. This was especially important to us in light of our need to increase virtual host capacity this year, which would again be a lot more cost effective with HyperV than it would have been with VSphere.

At this point we’ve moved all our virtual guests from VSphere to HyperV. This includes   Sharepoint servers with no issues with any of the Sharepoint server tiers including the SQL server. Web servers, file servers, database servers have all moved fine. We’ve also moved a couple of DCs without problem though playing virtualisation games with DCs still makes me sweat a little.

The only systems we had problems moving were one or two machines that were P2V’d into ESX where the original physical system used a weird disk config, and the  only ones that outright failed were VMWare virtual appliances rather than VMs we’ve built on top of ESXi ourselves. I think that’s a fairly good success rate, though the appliances will be a problem as more and more systems ship like that these days.

SCVMM - the elephant in everyone's room

SCVMM is where things start to fall apart for Microsoft slightly. It's not a bad product by any means. In fact it's got a lot of features, including the ability to manage HyperV, ESX and Xen environments side by side, which makes both migrations and managing mixed environments a lot easier.

The problem with SCVMM is that it’s a little bit more fragile than it ought to be, and everything is just that little bit more harder work than it should be. This means that SCVMM might be the HyperV feature that really helps HyperV eat VMWare’s low to middle-end market away while at the same time being the HyperV feature that’s most despised by the people who actually have to use it day to day.

I’ll give you a few examples from patch management that cropped up for us, along with a solution for those SCVMM users who have been bitten by these ones:

Installing patch/update management in VCenter:

Installing patch/update management in HyperV:

Of course it isn't that easy. To do that, you need to: If you try and do this through the gui on Windows 2012 you will find it tends to have problems running the WSUS post-install tasks, as these assume you have the full WSUS install in place because the WSUS team apparently doesn't talk to the SCVMM team. Congratulations, you've integrated WSUS with SCVMM.

[caption id=“attachment_204” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”]SCVMM Update Server config SCVMM Update Server config[/caption]

If any of the above steps go wrong, it’s quite possible to get into a state where adding the WSUS server is greyed out as an option in SCVMM but no server is visible in Fabric/Update Server.

To fix this, log onto your SCVMM server’s SQL database, go into management server, locate the database entry for your faulty WSUS server config and delete it. What could be simpler? No. Really. That’s what you need to do.

To verify this, do the following on your SCVMM server (or the server holding its SQL database at least).

Deploying an 'out of band' patch.

At this point we were given a hotfix by Microsoft Product Support Services and asked to roll it out to all our HyperV Hosts to fix a problem we were seeing with Exchange 2013.

Hotfixes are outside the normal Microsoft patching regime and as such are not available normally via WSUS.

That’s fine. I get that hotfixes shouldn’t be installed for funzies, so they’re not therefore available via WSUS, but I need a way to update my HyperV clusters with this patch while minimising disruption, and Microsoft’s “Cluster-Aware updating” feature is designed to work with your update server’s patches to allow you to automatically schedule patches for deployment out to hosts in a virtual farm cluster via the usual ‘put host in maintenance mode and quiesce it, update, restart, take out of maintenance mode and move on to next host’ dance… Let’s see now:

How to manually add a patch to VMWare Update Manager:

As per the VMWare blog on patching, open VCenter client, click on update manager icon, select patch repository, click 'Import Patches'.

How to manually add a patch to Cluster Aware Updating:

Use the CAU Microsoft.HotfixPlugin as documented here.

Work harder, not smarter.

In both cases we see that while it's possible to do the same things in SCVMM that we could in VCenter, it's much harder work in SCVMM than it was in VCenter. I don't intend this to be a love song for VCenter because that has plenty of flaws of its own, but both products reflect a different approach and it shows. VCenter is a single integrated product with a plugin architecture, and SCVMM is a console which attempts to integrate many different Microsoft products and sometimes struggles to do so.

Even with SCVMM’s issues I still think that our move to HyperV was worthwhile, if only for the money we’ve saved. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking it was easy.