If you’re working with Hyper-V, it’s recommended that you use Windows Server 2008 R2 Server Core for your root partition, as its stripped-down nature makes it a more secure option than it’s more full-bodied sibling. But it can also be painful to work with. Jaap Wesselius expertly guides us through the pitfalls. In an earlier [...]

Virtualization is a powerful technology, but it comes with its own host of monotonous and time-consuming tasks, no matter how big or small your organization is. Eliminating these mind-numbing tasks (and the potential for error which they bring with them) is a goal with striving for, and well within your reach. Jonathan Medd explains. Virtualised [...]

If you’re using virtualization technology, then at some point you’ll have run out of (or will run out of) virtual disk space, leading to the provisioning of extra storage; are you confident that you know how to do that? Sean Duffy makes sure you’re doing it right, sharing his recommendations and tips in this step-by-step [...]

 Reliability is one of the great payoffs to virtualization, and failover clustering has now got a whole lot better with Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V. Now, you get failover without any downtime for the virtual machine. Jaap Wesselius tells you how to implement it. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V offers a high availability solution by [...]

 The chore of patching operating systems and applications is taking an increasing proportion of the time of a  system administrator, so it is a a relief that at least VMware is keen to make the task easier. VMware provide a tool in vCenter Update Manager to assist in keeping VMware up to date. Jonathan Medd [...]

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In the first of a series of articles on Hyper-V Networking,  Nirmal explains Hyper-V networking and VLAN tagging, and shows how to set up a Virtual Network switch. Once this is done, the Hyper-V Virtual Network Switches can be used to connect unlimited no. of Virtual Machines. Most of the article talks about Hyper-V Networking. [...]

By using a virtualized clustering computing environment with failover, you can improve server availability without using as many physical computers. A group of independent computers can work together to increase the availability of virtualised applications and services. If one of the cluster nodes fails, another node takes over to provide the service without  disrupting the service. [...]

It isn’t easy to measure the consumption of physical resources by servers in virtual machines, since each partition has its’ own virtualised view of system resources. Not only that, but there is a subtle difference between virtual processors and physical processors. Brien Posey explains the special performance counters that can be used  to get an [...]

For SQL Server and Exchange Server, Windows Server Virtualization is going to be increasingly important as a way for the administrator to allocate hardware resources in the most efficient way, to offer  more robust services, and for deploying services.  Jaap Wesellius starts his new series on Hyper-V by explaining what  Hyper-V is, how it relates [...]