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Posts tagged SCVMM
Removing a non-existent VMM Library Server
Feb 5th
I admit, you don’t have to remove a non-existent VMM Library Server everyday, but today happened to be such a day. Let me explain what happened. In addition to a SQL Server 2012 AllwaysOn cluster for the VMM database and a VMM 2012 SP1 Failover Cluster, I wanted to also make the VMM Library Server highly available because the management foundation for a production Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V hosted cloud would soon become too big too fail.
Let me concentrate on the VMM Library cluster. I created an ordinary guest based 2-node Windows Server 2012 cluster using the new synthetic virtual Fibre Channel adapters, connected to an EMC VNX5300 storage system. After documenting the WWN’s and WWPNs for both adapters and requesting the SAN admin to create a few disks and to correctly zone the FC devices, creating the failover cluster was really a very quick deal. For some reason after installing EMC PowerPath 5.5 SP1, only one node of the cluster detected the correct Multi-Path Disk Device while the other thought it was dealing with a VRAID SCSI Disk Device.
Because uninstalling the devices or removing and reinstalling EMC PowerPath didn’t do the trick, I just went on to create a standard clustered file server role and add a share to be used for the VMM Library.
Installation of Data ONTAP Simulator in a Hyper-V guest (CentOS) and using an SMI-S provider to connect to SCVMM 2012
Aug 19th
Introduction
If you are a NetApp Customer or if you are an Advantage Partner (or if you have good friends among them) you can get access to the NetApp Data ONTAP Simulator. The reason why I wanted to try this out is to have an SMI-S compliant storage device which I could use in my System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 lab. As you may know Microsoft decided to use the SMI-S provider (SNIA Standard) to enable deep integration of storage arrays for Virtual Machine Manager 2012. I wrote a detailed blog about it here.
Getting the simulator was one thing, installing a Linux VM with Hyper-V Integration Components was another. Fortunately it was easy to find some good step-by step guidance by Yusuf Ozturk (1 and 2) and Michel Lücher (3)
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Installing Hyper-V v2.1 IC’s Setting up a CentOS 5.6 Desktop installation on Hyper-V and mouse support – Part 2
Because I don’t expect everyone to be able to read German, I will translate the instructions here and blog about my findings.
By the way, I have a third challenge … I don’t know anything about NetApp either, so this blog really describes my first steps into the Linux and NetApp world. At least the Hyper-V and System Center world is familiar territory.
I will not go through steps 1 and 2 because if you exactly follow Yusuf’s steps, you will end up with a Hyper-V aware CentOS guest. I downloaded the DVD ISO for CentOS 5.6 here.
The Netapp Data ONTAP simulator can be downloaded here.
Hyper-V video reference on Dutch TechNet Edge
Aug 9th
A couple of months ago @robakk asked me if I would co-operate with a Hyper-V video reference. Off course I said yes to this nice invite. On the 23rd of June I visited the Microsoft headquarters @ Schiphol for the recordings. It was really cool to record this video. Together with James van den Berg and Jacco Brouwer we’ve talked about the products Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine manager. The video is published yesterday and I’m impressed about the end result:
http://technet.microsoft.com/nl-nl/edge/microsoft-hyper-v-video-referentie.aspx
Sorry for all who don’t understand dutch but I can translate it on request 
May and June – Monthly overview new released KB articles
Jul 4th
Every day Microsoft is releasing knowledge base articles and hotfixes to explain, fix and improve the possible bugs present in their products. This post gives you an overview of all released knowledge base articles and hotfixes for the month(s): MAY & JUNE 2011.
The knowledge base articles and hotfixes in this post are related to Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. Updates can be for RTM or R2 versions, with or without SP1.
April – Windows Server 2008 and SCVMM 2008 KBs
May 1st
Every day Microsoft is releasing knowledge base articles and hotfixes to explain, fix and improve the possible bugs present in their products. This post gives you an overview of all released knowledge base articles and hotfixes for the month: APRIL 2011.
The knowledge base articles and hotfixes in this post are related to Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. Updates can be for RTM or R2 versions, with or without SP1.
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 RTM/R2/SP1
SCVMM 2012 – Creating a Hyper-V Cluster
Apr 25th
This culminating blog in a series on SCVMM 2012 shows how to create a Hyper-V R2 cluster in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012. With the arrival of Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2, cluster creation has almost become a trivial job, largely because of the excellent Cluster Validation Wizard. The previous blogs showed us what preparations to make before we could perform a successful bare metal deployment. One moment you have 16 unconfigured blades, the other you have 16 fully installed Windows Server 2008 R2 hosts including the Hyper-V role. All that is left is to build a cluster from them … the easy way!
Because I didn’t have 16 available blades I had to settle for only two. But you’ll get the idea despite of this.
SCVMM 2012 – Out of Band Management (OOB)
Apr 14th
As I wrote earlier in my blog on Deep Storage Integration in VMM 2012, Microsoft decided to embrace standards as much as possible in SCVMM 2012. This is also the case in the area of Out of Band Management (OOB). Microsoft supports several standards based options:
OOB is of course intended to take control of the bare metal machine using some kind of baseboard management controller (BMC). In the HP world we know OOB very well by the name of Insight Lights Out (iLO2 and iLO3). Dell has a BMC called DRAC which stands for Dell Remote Access Controller. IBM has a Remote Supervisor Adapter or RSA. OOB can serve several purposes. One is power state control (query status, power on and power off) but also to collect information about the server hardware (SMBIOS GUID, Manufacturer, Model, AssetTag, Serial Number) or to collect system hardware logs. The ultimate goal is to leave the bare metal untouched, yet under your total control.
We can think of several scenarios:
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Bare Metal Deployment
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Dynamic Optimization
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Power Optimization
The Out of Band Management interface in SCVMM 2012 is fully extensible and offers custom OOB Configuration Providers. Here is an example of such a provider in Powershell.
March – Monthly overview new released KB articles
Mar 31st
Every day Microsoft is releasing knowledge base articles and hotfixes to explain, fix and improve the possible bugs present in their products. This post gives you an
overview of all released knowledge base articles and hotfixes for the month: MARCH 2011.
The knowledge base articles and hotfixes in this post are related to Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. Updates can be for RTM or R2 versions, with or without SP1.
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 RTM/R2/SP1
Windows Server 2008 RTM/R2/SP1
Upgrading from SCVMM2008R2 RC to SP1
Mar 25th
When upgrading from SCVMM2008R2 RC version to SP1 you need an additional tool that changes the database used by the RC version.
The tool is called UpgradeVMMR2SP1RC.exe and can be downloaded here.
Before you start make a backup of your SCVMM database! After this run the tool and than upgrade the Server component of SCVMM2008R2. The other components can be upgraded in the same way the RC version is installed.
Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1 RC Upgrade Tool
Use this tool to upgrade your VMM 2008 R2 SP1 RC database.
Usage: UpgradeVMMR2SP1RC.exe -server -database
Example (named SQL instance):
UpgradeVMMR2SP1RC.exe -server VMMDB01\MICROSOFT$VMM$ -database VirtualManagerDB
Example (default SQL instance):
UpgradeVMMR2SP1RC.exe -server VMMDB01 -database VirtualManagerDB
A full description in how to use this tool can be found here: Migrating to VMM 2008 R2 SP1 from VMM 2008 R2 SP1 RC.
What’s New in Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1
Mar 24th
Okay, more Virtual Machine Manager News! SP1 for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 is OUT!
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (VMM 2008) is a comprehensive management solution for managing virtualized infrastructure running on Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V, Virtual Server 2005 R2 and VMware ESX through Virtual Center. With the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, significant feature improvements were made to Hyper-V—the underlying hypervisor platform.
VMM 2008 R2 SP1 – the next version of VMM – has been released. VMM 2008 R2 SP1 leverages the new platform enhancements and extends the feature set of VMM 2008 R2. This overview highlights the most important new and significantly enhanced features in VMM 2008 R2 SP1:
Support for new features of Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
- Dynamic Memory: Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V supports Dynamic Memory enabling customers to better utilize the memory resources of a Hyper-V host. VMM 2008 R2 SP1 allows administrators to create and deploy Virtual Machines onto Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V hosts and will report on the memory currently in use for these VMs where Dynamic Memory is enabled. Using Dynamic Memory for supported VMs allows for more efficient utilization of memory, with consistent performance, and higher consolidation ratios.
- Microsoft RemoteFX: Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 introduces a new set of end user experience enhancements with Microsoft RemoteFX. VMM 2008 R2 SP1 allows administrators to create and deploy Virtual Machines with RemoteFX enabled to qualified Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V hosts. This enables a rich, local-like desktop environment over the network.
Download Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1
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