Dell TechCenter

Extreme Scaling with Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Beta and the Dell PowerEdge R910

Peter Tsai — Mon, 21 May 2012 16:25:00 GMT

Extreme Scaling with Microsoft® Windows Server® 2012 Beta and the Dell™ PowerEdge™ R910

This blog post was originally written by Michael Schroeder.

Comments are welcome! To suggest a blog topic or make other comments, contact WinServerBlogs@dell.com.

With the recent release of Windows Server 2012 Beta, Microsoft has made great improvements in virtualization scalability. In this blog, we’ll take a look at just a few of these new updates with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs) and demonstrate how these new scale up capabilities harness the capabilities of our Dell PowerEdge R910 Rack Server which is well-equipped with four CPU sockets and plenty of memory capacity with a whopping 64 DIMM slots in a 4U chassis.

To put the new scalability enhancements in perspective, here’s a quick table comparing Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V to Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V. As you can see, the improvements are major across the board ranging from 2x to 32x.

System	Resource	Maximum Number		Improvement Factor
System	Resource	Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V	Windows Server 2012 Beta Hyper-V	Improvement Factor
Host	Logical processors on hardware	Up to 64	Up to 160	2.5×
	Physical memory	Up to 1 TB	Up to 2 TB	2×
	Virtual processors per host	Up to 512	Up to 1,024	2×
Virtual machine	Virtual processors per virtual machine	Up to 4	Up to 32	8×
	Memory per virtual machine	Up to 64 GB	Up to 1 TB	16×
	Maximum size per virtual disk	Up to 2 TB	Up to 64 TB	32x

Using the Datacenter Edition of Windows Server 2012 Beta, I created a large VM on my R910 configured with 1 TB of memory and 32 virtual processors. My healthy BigBoy VM ended up with the following Memory and Processor settings—

From inside the VM, Task Manager gives you a clean view of each of the virtual processors assigned—

Figure 1: Windows Server 2012 running a 32 Virtual Processor VM!

In addition, you can see below in the Hyper-V Manager that I was able to assign a whopping 998144 MB RAM to my Windows Server 2012 Beta Datacenter guest.

Figure 2: Windows Server 2012 running a VM with 900+ GB of memory!

Now, you may not have a bunch of workloads in your infrastructure that require 32 virtual processors and a 1 terabyte of memory; the ability to support these workloads, however, demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to improving hypervisor scalability as well as helping you get the most out of your hardware. Larger sized database, data mining and scientific workloads are very likely to benefit from these types of improvements. The large jump in officially supported processors and memory for both the VMs and the Host (from Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2012 Beta) takes better advantage of today’s large-scale server hardware, and in future platform releases, if testing is successful, will further improve the price/performance ratio of virtualization.

Because Windows Server 2012 Beta is a pre-release product still in active development, all features are of course subject to change. Dell does not provide any support for this pre-release software and it is not recommended for use in a production environment. Feel free to check out the new features of the Beta release on your test servers and let us know what you think. Stay tuned for more blogs from the Dell OS Engineering team.

What Do Dell Storage Executives And You Have In Common?

Dennis Smith — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:41:00 GMT

You could both be on stage during the Dell Storage Forum Boston keynote!

Have you ever wondered what’s next for Dell Storage, what’s new in the world of storage, how are we going to support XYZ, or more importantly wanted to know how YOU could win a free trip to Dell Storage Forum? Well Dell TechCenter is giving you a chance to have all your questions answered! Starting today Monday May 21, 2012 you can enter our “Ask a Dell executive one question” video contest to win a trip to Dell Storage Forum 2012 in Boston. All you have to do is go here (you must have a DTC account) and upload a short video (no more than 3 minutes) on what 1 question you would like to ask. Then we will pick the top 5 questions and have the community vote on the best one. The winner will get airfare, hotel, and a pass to DSF paid for, but the best part is that you will be brought on stage during the keynote to ask your question live to one of the Dell executives on site! Hurry up and get those videos in, because phase 1 ends on the 28^th.

Offical media gallery for uploading of videos - http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/storage/m/ask_a_dell_storage_executive_one_question_contest/default.aspx

Official rules for contest –

http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/storage/w/wiki/3667.ask-a-dell-executive-one-question-official-rules.aspx

Follow these instructions to create a Dell My Account and Community Username.

If you have a Dell My Account:

Click on Sign In in the top right corner
Use your email address and password to log in
You will be prompted to create a Community Username on the next screen.

If you don’t have a Dell My Account or Community Username:

Click on Join on the top right
Click on the ‘Create Account’ button
Fill in the information using a different Username than first tried and you’re set to go!

So Say SMEs in Virtualization and Cloud: Episode 24 Transparent Page Sharing (TPS)

Kong Yang — Mon, 21 May 2012 12:30:00 GMT

In Episode 24, Kong Yang and Todd Muirhead talk about transparent page sharing (TPS) in a VMware environment. TPS and the debate over whether to enable or disable it are covered. We welcome your thoughts and feedback.

TPS Reference:

Scott Drummond's TPS post;
Michael Webster's TPS post.

Please click below to view the video.

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Initial Hyper-V Role Setup with Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Beta and the Dell PowerEdge R810

Peter Tsai — Fri, 18 May 2012 19:45:00 GMT

Initial Hyper-V Role Setup with Microsoft® Windows Server® 2012 Beta and the Dell™ PowerEdge™ R810

This blog post was originally written by Michael Schroeder.

Microsoft Windows Server 2012 was previously known as Windows Server “8”. Comments are welcome! To suggest a blog topic or make other comments, contact WinServerBlogs@dell.com.

With the announcement of the Windows Server 2012 Beta, we explored some of the common setup tasks that are implemented while deploying the Hyper-V Role on the PowerEdge R810. With the initial setup of our server, we decided to walk through some of the new Windows® PowerShell™ v3.0 cmdlets in Windows Server 2012 Beta to help configure the initial steps for setting up Hyper-V on the PowerEdge R810.

The following steps are a good reference to use when setting up and testing your PowerEdge systems with Windows Server 2012 Beta.

Step 1: Enable the required hardware settings

The Windows Server 2012 Beta Hyper-V role requires the following hardware features:

Hardware-assisted Virtualization - Intel Virtualization Technology
Hardware-enforced Data Execution Prevention (DEP) – Intel Execute Disable (XD) bit.

After pressing F2 to enter the System BIOS, locate the following options and ensure they are both set to “Enabled”:

“Processor Settings” -> “Virtualization Technology”

“Processor Settings” -> “Execute Disable”

Note: Additional BIOS details can be found by highlighting a particular setting then selecting F1 for help.

After the hardware settings are established, the GUI installation of Windows Server 2012 Beta can then be completed.

Step 2: Rename the System

Now we’ll rename the system to something more appropriate for use in our lab. A restart is needed for the name change to take place. We’ll use a new PowerShell cmdlet to make this change. Open Windows PowerShell from the taskbar, and then run the following cmdlet:

Rename-Computer -NewName WIN12HV02 -Restart

Step 3: Configure Network Settings

Let’s list all the available Network Adapters (NICs) using the Get-NetAdapter cmdlet.

The following four sample commands can be used for manually configuring the IP address for your NIC. If you’re using DHCP, you can skip this step.

Set-NetIPInterface -InterfaceAlias “Wired Ethernet Connection” -DHCP Disabled

Remove-NetIPAddress -InterfaceAlias “Wired Ethernet Connection” -AddressFamily IPv4 -Confirm:$false

New-NetIPAddress -InterfaceAlias “Wired Ethernet Connection” -AddressFamily IPv4 -IPv4Address 192.168.1.100 -PrefixLength 24 -Type Unicast
Set-DnsClientServerAddress -InterfaceAlias “Wired Ethernet Connection” -ServerAddresses 192.168.1.10

Step 4: Enable the Hyper-V Role

While you can enable Hyper-V through the familiar Server Manager, you can also do so very quickly via PowerShell. After adding the Hyper-V role a system restart is needed to complete the installation. Run the following cmdlet to add the Hyper-V role and restart the system:

Add-WindowsFeature –Name Hyper-V -IncludeManagementTools -Restart

To confirm the Hyper-V role was installed successfully, run the following PowerShell command to list all the installed roles and features on the system:

Get-WindowsFeature | ? Installed

Step 5: Configure a Hyper-V Virtual Switch

Next, we’ll create and configure an external virtual switch and connect one of our Broadcom 5709 NIC ports to it to allow for external host communication between virtual machines (VMs) and other hosts on our network. We’ll leave another NIC port free for Remote Desktop management of the host.

Step 6: Create the First VM

Now we can create the first VM with PowerShell then open the Hyper-V Manager to configure the VHD details or any other settings we would like configured on the VM. At this point, the VM’s OS can be installed and configured with any desired workload.

As you can see, Windows Server 2012 Beta is packed with a great number of cmdlets to help you quickly configure your Roles and Features on PowerEdge systems. These new PowerShell cmdlets save you a great deal of time when building out your solutions and are also very intuitive to script for your automated needs. We hope you found this walkthrough helpful.

Don’t Chase IT News, Let It Come to You

Matthew Smith — Thu, 17 May 2012 14:01:00 GMT

So, Dell has been launching Wordpress widgets. You read that right. Yes, we’re in the widget business now. I’ll tell you why and what’s in it for IT pros.

Find Cloud Computing and Virtualization News

I don’t have time to chase down tech news across dozens of websites and my RSS feed reader is starting to look like a link farm. That may be the case for you too. So, an easier way to get relevant content in a timely manner is, drumroll please, the content widget.

The goal of our widgets is to help bloggers and readers discover new content and better connect with the IT professional’s community. The first round of widgets are tailored to discover articles about cloud computing and virtualization. But upcoming widgets will pull content on security, healthcare IT, education and other topics.

In fact, we’re open to your suggestions on the type of content that we should be pulling in. Feel free to leave a suggestion in the comment box or contact us on any of our install pages below.

News Widget’s Key Features

How the widget works:

Its special crawler that goes to a pre-set list of cloud computing and virtualization blogs that are selected based on content quality.
It then takes the title and a brief description of the latest articles written by that blog and populates the widget sitting on the installer’s website.
Articles within the widget are then ranked based on a variety of social media factors to present only the best, freshest articles.

Bloggers can add any RSS feed they want into their own widget install. Another key feature is the blog roll auto import, which will take your own blog roll and add it into your widget. So, the widget is fully customizable widget and easy to understand and use.

Put It to Work For You

If you have a blog, it’s easy to install the Wordpress plugin.

Virtualization Wordpress install page

Cloud Computing Wordpress install page

Instructions on how to install or submit your blog for widget consideration

You could also pass this on to your favorite bloggers. You’ll still benefit from reading the feed on their site. We vet each of the content sources that are used by the tool, so that readers get reliable, relevant content.

Good content has been increasingly important to Dell, so we’re getting good at tracking it down. We can share those discoveries with you through this tool. We are currently working on a widget version that can be used independent of any web platform. This will allow anyone that is not using Wordpress to easily install and use the widget on their own website.

Solutions by Engineers for Engineers Presents VMware View: An End-User Computing Perspective

Kong Yang — Wed, 16 May 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Dell TechCenter will be hosting a Dell | VMware End-User Computing / VDI Tech Chat on Tuesday, May 22nd, at 3PM CST. Our featured guests will be:

Andrew McDaniel - Dell Desktop Virtualization Solutions Tech Lead. As the Technical Lead of the DVS team within PG, Andrew currently defines and delivers the desktop virtualization solutions that solve customer problems and deliver measureable customer ROI by collaborating and coordinating across global Dell teams including engineering, services, marketing, operations, and support. Furthermore, Andrew manages the technical relationship between Dell and VMware in addition to other vendors such as Teradici, Atlantis, FusionIO, and many others in the desktop virtualization space.
Dan Kingslien - VMware End-User Compute Architect
Ryan Costello - VMware

Please join us for an in-depth technical discussion of Dell | VMware VDI / End-User Computing. We look forward to the conversations.

To join, please click here - TechTuesday Chat.

A Recipe to Implement SharePoint Server 2010 on vStart

ravikanth — Wed, 16 May 2012 14:30:00 GMT

The infrastructure deployment for any server application workload in any organization — small, medium, or large—requires meticulous planning in terms of identifying the required capacity, best practices for application deployment, and planning for future growth and scalability—while focusing on the business priorities.

At Dell, we understand the challenges this poses to the IT decision makers and administrators. Our Dell vStart infrastructure solutions are designed to address these challenges. These solutions are designed to help our customer realize the benefits of an infrastructure investment faster.

In a recent effort to develop an application recipe for vStart solution, we implemented SharePoint Server 2010 on top of vStart 100 with Microsoft Hyper-V solution – also known as vStart 100m.

In this effort, we leveraged the architecture and design principles of vStart solution and complimented this with application best practices to build a SharePoint Server 2010 farm that is highly available at all tiers of the farm.

The following are some of the key benefits from the Integration between Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and vStart 100m, Dell’s pre-built virtualization solution configured for Microsoft Hyper-V, include:

Leveraging vStart infrastructure for a SharePoint Server 2010 farm deployment enables faster time-to-value for the SharePoint application.
The underlying vStart design along with application best practices helps ensure high availability of all SharePoint farm roles.
We validated this SharePoint 2010 farm deployment on up to 3500 concurrent users with a farm response time of 0.1 seconds and approximately 285 requests per second with a collaboration usage profile using the Dell SharePoint Load Generation framework.

To summarize, leveraging vStart infrastructure solution for deploying SharePoint Server farm derives several benefits. This includes rapid time-to-value for SharePoint application, high availability at all tiers of the SharePoint farm, and infrastructure capacity that can accommodate any future needs of a SharePoint farm.

For more information on this reference architecture and component configuration details, refer to “Implementing SharePoint Server 2010 on Dell vStart solution”.

Dell Cloud Chat: OpenStack with Dell, Rackspace and DreamHost

Rafael Knuth — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:47:00 GMT

Please join the upcoming OpenStack Chat 24th May 2012, 4.00 – 5.00 pm CET (9.00 - 10.00 am CST). In brief: What is Open Stack and Dell Crowbar?

Open Stack
Open Stack is a global community of developers working to create an alternative open source solution to Amazon EC2 and S3. Dell has been an active member of the community since its founding and currently distributes and supports OpenStack deployments. Dell has also developed Dell Crowbar, an open source installation tool built on Chef to install OpenStack quickly and automatically.

Dell Crowbar
With Crowbar, you can install cloud software across clusters and scale out systems quickly and automatically. Crowbar also provides capabilities for network monitoring and discovery, and gathering performance data, among other advantages. With Crowbar, you have a configurable, adjustable framework complete with many built-in features that can save time, streamline effort and potentially lower costs.

Guest Speakers
Rob Hirschfeld, Technical Lead OpenStack & Lead Architect Crowbar at Dell
Scott Purcel, Technical Trainer & MESA SME at Dell
Jim Plamondon, Director Developer Experience at Rackspace (see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Plamondon)
Andrew Shafer, Co-Founder Puppet at Rackspace
Duncan McGreggor, Cloud Engineering Manager at DreamHost

Dell & Rackspace engineers talk with customers
We want bring together engineers who design and build OpenStack and Crowbar with customers seeking first hand technical information. In order to attend the chat, go to delltechcenter.adobeconnect.com/chat (important note: do not type www …) No registration is required. If you have any questions, please contact florian_klaffenbach@dell.com. Looking forward to see you there!

Chat Hosts
Stephen Spector, Cloud Evangelist at Dell (Twitter: @SpectorAtDell)
Florian Klaffenbach, Solution Expert – Microsoft & Cloud Computing at Dell (Twitter: @FloKlaffenbach)
Rafael Knuth, Social Media Manager at Dell (Twitter: @RafaelKnuth)

Dell OpenManage Server Administrator 7.0 for Ubuntu

D. Jared Dominguez — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:00:00 GMT

OpenManage Server Administrator 7.0 for Ubuntu is now available for download. This is a major new release, as OMSA 7.0 is designed with PowerEdge 12G servers and iDRAC 7 in mind. We've tested OMSA 7.0 with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which is great, since Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS introduces support for Dell PowerEdge 12G servers, including PCIe-SSD drives. If you are still using Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS, don't fret, as OMSA 7.0 will work on Ubuntu 10.04 systems as well, although Ubuntu 12.04 is what is recommended on PowerEdge 12G systems.

Check out what is new in OMSA 7.0 by going to the documentation page for the release: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/SOFTWARE/omswrels/om70/index.htm

If you like this release and would like for Ubuntu builds of OpenManage System Administrator to be officially supported, please provide feedback by talking to your account manager or sales representative. Customer feedback is the best way to show your support for OpenManage for Ubuntu.

Where to Get It

To download and install OMSA 7.0, go to http://linux.dell.com/repo/community/deb/latest for detailed instructions.

Please join us on the linux-poweredge@lists.us.dell.com mailing list for support and feedback. You can sign up at <https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge>.

Like the previous OMSA for Ubuntu release, the apt repository for this release will be signed, but this release is transitioning to a stronger signing key:

pub   4096R/34D8786F 2012-03-02
uid                  Dell Inc., PGRE 2012 (PG Release Engineering Build Group 2012) <PG_Release_Engineering@Dell.com>
sub   4096R/79DF80D8 2012-03-02

Dell PowerEdge R820 Performance Benchmarks

David J Morse — Mon, 14 May 2012 21:05:00 GMT

As Paul Steeves mentioned this morning, the PowerEdge R820 is a 4-socket 2U rack server that packs a lot of processing power into a dense form factor. He has a lot of great proof points in his blog that I recommend reading.

In addition, today Intel touted multiple industry-standard SPEC benchmarks using the PowerEdge R820 on their E5-4600 performance page; in fact, the Dell PowerEdge R820 was the only partner platform highlighted by Intel at launch! Check out Intel's graphs below for reference:

As you can see, the PowerEdge R820 shines in overall performance (as measured by SPECint, SPECfp, and SPECjbb), yet does not sacrifice on energy efficiency, as proved out by SPECpower_ssj2008!

The PowerEdge R820 is also great for HPC enviroments such as LINPACK; we've measured 649.2 GFLOPS in our lab, an 85% improvement above the 351.6 GFLOPS we measured on the R720!

We've got some other very interesting performance comparisons using the extremely powerful (but power-efficient!) PowerEdge R820 coming up, so stay tuned to this blog for more information!

References for full disclosure:

SPEC and the benchmark names SPECint, SPECfp, SPECjbb, and SPECpower are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Information on comparisons in the charts referenced above can be found at http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/benchmarks/server/xeon-e5-4600.html.

LINPACK configuration: PowerEdge R820, 4 x Intel Xeon E5-4650 as compared to PowerEdge R720, 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2690 processors.