Monday 4 October 2010

Key Hyper-V Role and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Updates

When putting a new Hyper-V R2 based server into production, there are a few updates that should be applied prior to bringing that new box online.

  1. MS KB2264080: An update rollup package for the Hyper-V role in Windows Server 2008 R2: August 24, 2010
  2. MS KB975354: A Hyper-V update rollup package is available for a computer that is running Windows Server 2008 R2
  3. MS KB974909: The network connection of a running Hyper-V virtual machine is lost under heavy outgoing network traffic on a Windows Server 2008 R2-based computer

Once the updates have been completed we reboot the Hyper-V box prior to beginning our configuration steps.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

3 comments:

andrew said...

Hi Philip,

Unrelated to this post, but on the subject of Hyper-V server 2008: What is your preferred solution to backing up VMs under hyper-v server r2? I am looking at doing a virtualized SBS Premium installation, but finding it difficult to decide on the easiest, most automated backup solution for my clients. What are you doing for this?

Thanks!

Anonymous said...

Floppies, just kidding, have you looked into Acronis?

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

Depending on the setup, we do the following:

Set up a NAS device on the network that has a large volume of redundant storage as well as eSATA ports. For larger VM deployments we will set up a second or more NAS devices.

Configure the native SBS or Windows Server Backup to back up the VM to a VHD (backup drive) on the NAS.

Configure a StorageCraft ShadowProtect backup to run to an eSATA connected external drive (~45-75 MB/Second) for off-site rotation. The SP backup will have a password set and at least AES 128bit encryption to protect those backup files.

We coordinate the WSB, SP backup, and the volume shadow copy (Previous Versions) local backups to not conflict with each other's VSS requests to prevent data corruption.

Philip