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This is a short post on how to enable long awaited feature, Nested Virtualization in Hyper-V that is available in Windows 2016 Technical Preview 5 (TP5), which the competition VMware had for few years now.

Nested Virtualization is a feature that would allow us to enable Hyper-V inside the VM. This has many interesting use cases mainly labs and training. and even run other Hypervisors like VMware on top of Hyper-V.

To try this feature download latest Windows Server 2016 TP5 ISO from here

Install TP5 and enable Hyper-V role.

Create a new VM and install 2016 TP5 on the VM.

Now if you try to enable Hyper-V role, you would be presented with below error.

This is because Virtualization Extensions of Processor are not exposed to VM and so VM thinks Processor does not have Virtualization Capabilities.

First turn off the VM and run below command in PowerShell admin mode. Replace <VM’s Name> with name of VM in which you want to enable Hyper-V

Set-VMProcessor –VMName <VM's Name> -ExposeVirtualizationExtensions $true

Once the above PowerShell command finishes successfully you can start the VM and enable Hyper-V.

If you run the command without shutting down the VM you would see a error as below

If you like to check if Virtualization Extensions are exposed to the VM, you can run the below command.

ExposeVirtualizationExtensions will be True if enabled and False if not

Get-VMProcessor -VMName <VM's name> | FL *

Below is the graphical representation of Nested Virtualization.

Image Source – msdn.microsoft.com

Reference-

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyperv_on_windows/user_guide/nesting

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/virtualization/2015/10/13/windows-insider-preview-nested-virtualization/

http://www.altaro.com/hyper-v/nested-virtualization-hyper-v-windows-server-2016/

Download Windows Server 2016 TP5 ISO (You would need Microsoft Live ID to download) - https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-server-technical-preview

CloudWatch an AWS service provides rich set of tools to monitor health and resource utilization of various services on AWS. These metrics can be used to trigger an alarm, send notifications, even trigger actions based on these alarms.

One main metric that is missing from default CloudWatch metrics is Memory utilization of EC2 instances. Since AWS does not have access to EC2 instance at the Operating System level, only CPU, Network utilization, IO and other metrics that can be monitored through Hypervisor layer are available by default in AWS Console.

AWS provides a set of scripts that utilize CloudWatch API to send Memory Utilization info and make use of CloudWatch features to monitor and take action if alarms are raised.

The process of sending these custom metrics are different for Linux and Windows Instances. Even the process of installing pre-requisites on different Linux distributions is slightly different.

In this post we will see the process of installing and configuring CloudWatch Custom Metrics for Redhat derived Linux Distros, mainly RHEL, Amazon Linux and CentOS along with Windows to monitor Memory Utilization of the EC2 instance

Updated (27-March-2016) – Added Commands for Ubuntu Linux

List of all commands run on Linux are also available at the end of the post for easy

reference.

Step –1

Create an IAM user with access key. We do not need password or console access to this user.

Copy and keep the Access key handy as we would need this every time we configure custom metrics to be sent to CloudWatch

If you have installed Windows Server 2012 Roles and Features using PowerShell or remote server admin tools or new multi server manager console, you will see that the management tools are missing from the server on which you just have enabled the role or feature. This is because Microsoft has provided more granular control on what is installed on the Windows Server 2012. As an administrator we have choice to include or not to include management tools while installing the Roles and Features we choose.

Below is a comic illustrating the same.

Source:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/servermanager/archive/2012/08/13/the-case-of-the-missing-role-and-feature-management-tools.aspx

Reference:

More on Installing Roles and Features here