On to the next one

So i’ve passed the 70-410, a task i thought was possibly impossible for a long while, by a good margin. so i’m moving on to the 70-409 and may get back to the 411 lab manual at some point as I have every intention of taking that test after the 409. While studying for this one ive found that the material is covering some things that I don’t know much about so it’s back to blogging for a while. The first thing that seems really obvious that’s kind of a repeated theme is System Center Virtual Machine Manager. I have no idea what VMM is so maybe that’s a good place to start. Im assuming that I should probably buy some books too. I ordered this guy in hopes that it might be a good place to start. I was told that this test was pretty easy and I decided to go this rout before the 411 becuase this one provides an additional hyper-v cert that im pretty excited about. Actually i’m just kind of excited about learning and figuring out how to use these technologies.

So let’s get into understanding a few things before the book gets here. Im just going to do like a question and answer type of thing. Microsoft really created quite an extensive click hole when discussing concepts surrounding SCVMM and its fairly extensive and mostly recently updated material, like update in may. Which is extremely recent IMO. Not sure how long the material has been available but VMM apparently came out fairly recently so hopefully the lack of resources wont be detrimental to me passing the test. Also sorry my HTML editor decided to change all of my ol tags to the number 1 I suppose I should attempt to fix that but im not good enough at coding to know how and besides you get the idea plus if anyone actually ever reads this I will be shocked.

VMM topics
1. What is VMM?

I guess this one is kind of easy to just start with a general definition found here

1. Whats the difference between gen 1 and 2 vms?

A complete list of differences can be found here
however I think the most important difference is that gen 2 vms can be pxe booted using a standard network adapter and are not compatible with legacy nics. It also supports UEFI booting but I have yet to figure out how that will change booting on virtualized systems as UEFI is normally a hardware type of thing. This page referenced on the previous
link is also helpful. It kind of seems like we should be using Gen 2 machines as they have many benefits but personally i’ve only studied Gen 1.

1. What is automatic virtual machine activation?

Activating VMs is a topic I haven’t really had to personally deal with but it is an interesting question as they do still require product keys or hosting them on version of sever that support hosting a number or any number of them. TechNet has a few things to say about it. Sounds somewhat complicated. It does note that the AVMA tool does not work with “other virtualization” technologies. That should seem obvious that it would conflict with VMware products but without knowing how either product really works in production its hard to say how obvious that is.

1. Resource metering vs monitoring hyper V in VMM?

Most of the topics surrounding this on TechNet turn into a click hole but im assuming this
to be a good place to start with browsing the other embeded links. However it becomes obvious that you have to connect it with another tool im not yet familiar with called operations manager (noted later on). Good to at least get an overview before the book gets here which will hopefully provide enough of an overview with available study resources to pass the test. It seems to be so im not overly stressed about this one.

1. hyper-v clustering methods, deploy through hyper-v failover cluster manager?

This is probably a complicated topic worthy of its own blog posts. I spend a ton of time trying to understand a quorum configuration and it was not tested but im still glad i kind of understand it. Just googling it provides real world results with needing to host a highly available SQL instance on VMM and the TechNet article is equally as confusing or complicated.  Going to have to get back to this one.

1. What does the term Fabric mean?

Basically the virtualized network infrastructure that your VMs are sitting on. The TechNet
article is pretty good in this case and for sure click hole worthy but it probably really is the only way to organize the information logically.  I really can see the struggle that they face with displaying that much info in a logical format without being overly preachy or something to that effect.

1. What is a VM creation template?

Just like you can create GP templates you can create VM templates based on existing VMs or a newly created VM for more info check this out how to create a VM template.

1. What are orchestrated updates of hyper-v clusters?

A good comprehensive article is available here that is not a click hole, suprisingly.

1. What are the options for physical to virtual migration?

This is a new topic to me (as are most of these) but I kind of find this interesting as I still ponder the full benefits of virtualization other than the obvious being availability. The benefits to me have to come down to cost to benefit though. So in the case of having very demanding SLAs its a huge benefit. However the actual process to create a virtual machine by essentially cloning a live physical server appears to be relitively easy and instructions for it can be found here.

1. Operations manager hyper-v?

As mentioned earlier I had no idea what it was but began to click around TechNet
and found some usefull information. Still not exactly sure of what all it does but hopefully Ill find more info.

1. hyper-v replica vs cluster

These are really different failover solutions but the basic premise is to have two of the same machines or to create a cluster. Which really when considering it at first is a very confusing set of things because it doesn’t sound like the same thing till you start thinking about it then they seem really similar until you realize that failover clustering is probably a more robust solution for various reasons. This is a helpful thread on the subject with lots of links.

1. How to create networks in VMM?

This done through the fabric console in the main screen of VMM. This really is best served as understanding deploying “fabric” which is starting to make sense as it kind of rolls storage and networking under one heading. basic network topology deployment can be found here and a general overview on how to deploy all things related to fabric can be found here here.