Jeff Wouters's Blog

A customer of mine is planning to consolidate several Hyper-V clusters into one or two big ones.
In order to do that, I had to report on the amounts of memory currently offered by the Hyper-V hosts and the memory configurations of the virtual machines.

When I would use MAP, yet another tool would be introduced into the environment… and only to report on the memory configuration? It seemed to me that this would be a bit overkill.
But then there is SCOM. This customer already has SCOM implemented and configured… but since I’m a n00b when it comes to SCOM this would not have been my favorite solution for such a simple task.

So I turned yet again to my buddy PowerShell

I created a small one-liner to provide an output of all the VM’s, their respective nodes, the amount of memory offered by the nodes and the memory configuration of the VM’s.

Note: This one-liner looks at static memory configurations, not dynamic memory configurations and is based on the SCVMM PowerShell cmdlets!

Get-VM -vmmserver SCVMM01 | select name,memory,vmhost,@{n=’TotalMemoryOfHost(GB)’;e={"{0:N0}" -f ((Get-VMHost &_.VMHost).TotalMemory/1MB)}} | sort VMHost | convertto-html > D:\Temp\MemoryConfig.html

This will give you an output looking like this:

Last November I went to the Experts 2 Experts Virtualization Conference in London where I met some other Hyper-V enthusiasts.
One of them was Carsten Rachfahl (MVP Virtual Server) who does frequent video interviews with leading experts in the Microsoft IT community. He asked a bunch of us if he could interview us which all of us were happy to do

First up was Aidan Finn (MVP Virtual Server). Aidan also did two presentations at the event, one about what he could tell us about Hyper-V 3.0 and one about designing your backup solution when using Hyper-V Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) which were both very interesting… His interview is also about designing Hyper-V CSV and Backup:
http://www.it-cast.de/alle/videointerview-with-aidan-finn-about-hyper-v-csv-and-backup/

Carsten’s second victim was Didier van Hoye (MVP Virtual Server since this month… congrats Didier!). Didier did a presentation at the event about 10GB networking in Hyper-V and found this to be very educational
His interview is about Cluster Shared Volumes and Storage design in Windows 8:
http://www.it-cast.de/alle/videointerview-with-didier-van-hoye-about-csv-and-storage-design/

Third up was Ronnie Isherwood who lives in Jersey (no, not that city in the USA but that small island between the UK and France…). Ronnie also did a presentation at the event, about System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012 although I had to leave in the middle of the presentation because a colleage contacted me from back home (The Netherlands) with a critical issue and needed some advice. So, altough I was unable to see most of Ronnie’s presentation I heard it was a good one (didn’t expected anything else though ).
His interview with Carsten is about SCVMM 2012, among others it’s multi-hypervisor support:
http://www.it-cast.de/alle/videointerview-with-ronnie-isherwood-virtual-machine-manager-2012/

And the fourth person able to get in from of the camera was… me . I did a presentation at the event about the v-Alliance from Microsoft and Citrix, which was my first presentation at an international IT event.
My interview on the other hand was about the combination of my two favorites: Hyper-V and PowerShell:
http://www.it-cast.de/alle/videointerview-with-jeff-wouters-about-powershell/

And to close a few days of deep technical sessions, meeting community peers and of course a lot of fun, we did a group interview (featuring all of the above) about our favorite Hyper-V feature in Windows 8:
http://www.it-cast.de/alle/videointerview-what-is-your-favorite-windows-8-feature/

During the entire event we’ve talked with each other about a lot of things… and I’m hoping some of the ideas will come to see the light of day in 2012… I’ll keep you posted