Hotfix and updates check of Hyper-V and Cluster with Powershell

I read Hyper-V.nu great blog article about Christian Edwards script that checks both hosts and clusters for hotfixes and updates and found some things I wanted to improve in the script, first of all I wanted an object list instead of just some Write-Host with cool colors.. Then I can use the fabulous techniques of PowerShell to just show the once that I do not have installed or make a decent report for my cluster or just standalone hosts.

The next improvement I thought of was the automatic download of all hotfixes.. Well registering at the web page and downloading each hotfix can work for some but not many, so I extended the XML files with the DownloadURL and also changed the script to support either a host or a cluster object. The download parameter will not check what´s installed or not, it will just download all hotfixes that I found URL´s for so bare with me if it is not complete and make a comment or send me a tweet and I will try to update the xml file

Here you can see how I can run it and also as I have the result as objects filter on installed or not

Screen Shot 2013-06-28 at 01.36.51

And here you can see when I check a cluster and also add the parameters for downloading and the path to where the downloaded files shall reside

Screen Shot 2013-06-28 at 01.40.18

And here is a screendump of some of the hotfix files that are downloaded, as you can see in the script I utilize the BITS engine to download the files 🙂

Screen Shot 2013-06-28 at 01.32.35

Updated with hotfixes to 2013-07-15! Here is the script and the xml files with the extended DownloadURL are in this download zip file-> hyperv12updatescheck.

# Remake of Christian Edwards script to make it more flexible
# http://blogs.technet.com/b/cedward/archive/2013/05/31/validating-hyper-v-2012-and-failover-clustering-hotfixes-with-powershell-part-2.aspx
#
# Niklas Akerlund 2013-06-28

param
(
    [parameter(ValueFromPipeline=$true,  
                   Position=0)]
    [string]$Hostname,
    [parameter(ValueFromPipeline=$true, 
                   Position=1)]
    $ClusterName,
    [switch]$Download,
    [string]$DownloadPath
)

#Getting current execution path
$scriptpath = $MyInvocation.MyCommand.Path
$dir = Split-Path $scriptpath
$listofHotfixes = @()

#Loading list of updates from XML files

[xml]$SourceFileHyperV = Get-Content $dir\UpdatesListHyperV.xml
[xml]$SourceFileCluster = Get-Content $dir\UpdatesListCluster.xml

$HyperVHotfixes = $SourceFileHyperV.Updates.Update
$ClusterHotfixes = $SourceFileCluster.Updates.update

#Getting installed Hotfixes from all nodes of the Cluster/hosts
if ($ClusterName){
    $Nodes = Get-Cluster $ClusterName | Get-ClusterNode | Select -ExpandProperty Name
}else
{
    $Nodes = $Hostname
}
foreach($Node in $Nodes)
{
$Hotfixes = Get-HotFix -ComputerName $Node |select HotfixID,description

foreach($RecomendedHotfix in $HyperVHotfixes)
{
        $witness = 0
        foreach($hotfix in $Hotfixes)
        {
                If($RecomendedHotfix.id -eq $hotfix.HotfixID)
                {
                    $obj = [PSCustomObject]@{
                        HyperVNode = $Node
                        HotfixType = "Hyper-V"
                        RecomendedHotfix = $RecomendedHotfix.Id
                        Status = "Installed"
                        Description = $RecomendedHotfix.Description
                        DownloadURL =  $RecomendedHotfix.DownloadURL
                    } 
                   
                   $listOfHotfixes += $obj
                    $witness = 1
                 }
        }  
        if($witness -eq 0)
        {
            
            $obj = [PSCustomObject]@{
                    HyperVNode = $Node
                    HotfixType = "Hyper-V"
                    RecomendedHotfix = $RecomendedHotfix.Id
                    Status = "Not Installed"
                    Description = $RecomendedHotfix.Description
                    DownloadURL =  $RecomendedHotfix.DownloadURL
            } 
                   
            $listofHotfixes += $obj
 
        }
}

foreach($RecomendedClusterHotfix in $ClusterHotfixes)
{
        $witness = 0
        foreach($hotfix in $Hotfixes)
        {
                If($RecomendedClusterHotfix.id -eq $hotfix.HotfixID)
                {
                    $obj = [PSCustomObject]@{
                        HyperVNode = $Node
                        HotfixType = "Cluster"
                        RecomendedHotfix = $RecomendedClusterHotfix.Id
                        Status = "Installed"
                        Description = $RecomendedClusterHotfix.Description
                        DownloadURL =  $RecomendedClusterHotfix.DownloadURL
                    } 
                   
                   $listOfHotfixes += $obj
   
                   $witness = 1
                 }
        }  
        if($witness -eq 0)
        {
            $obj = [PSCustomObject]@{
                HyperVNode = $Node
                HotfixType = "Cluster"
                RecomendedHotfix = $RecomendedClusterHotfix.Id
                Status = "Not Installed"
                Description = $RecomendedClusterHotfix.Description
                DownloadURL =  $RecomendedClusterHotfix.DownloadURL
            } 
                   
            $listOfHotfixes += $obj          
        }
}
}
if ($Download){
    foreach($RecomendedHotfix in $HyperVHotfixes){
        if ($RecomendedHotfix.DownloadURL -ne ""){
            Start-BitsTransfer -Source $RecomendedHotfix.DownloadURL -Destination $DownloadPath 
        }
    }
    foreach($RecomendedClusterHotfix in $ClusterHotfixes){
        if ($RecomendedClusterHotfix.DownloadURL -ne ""){
            Start-BitsTransfer -Source $RecomendedClusterHotfix.DownloadURL -Destination $DownloadPath 
        }
    }
}

$listofHotfixes

 

Live Migrating a VM from Hyper-V 2012 to R2 with PowerShell

After reading about the possibility to Live Migrate between versions and now getting the R2 bits I had to test the migration of a VM from a Hyper-V 2012 enabled host to a newly installed Hyper-V 2012 R2. I have on both the hosts enabled the migration on the hosts with kerberos authentication and also set up delegation.

When starting a migration I got the following error, and it did not tell me what was actually wrong, but after I disconnected the ISO that was connected the migration succeeded nicely!

migratefaildvd

So here is a perfect place for you to check your VM´s for connected ISO´s and disconnect them before migrating and that can easily be done with PowerShell,

Get-VM -ComputerName HV01 | Get-VMDvdDrive | where DVDMediaType -ne None | Set-VMDvdDrive -Path $null
Screen Shot 2013-06-26 at 14.41.57

After this has been done I can continue to migrate the server and that can also be done with PowerShell,

Move-VM -ComputerName hv01 -Name win2k3-01 -DestinationHost hvr2 -IncludeStorage -DestinationStoragePath c:\vms\win2k3-01
Screen Shot 2013-06-26 at 14.44.13

As you can see it now resides on the 2012 R2 server and is still running :-).

When trying to migrate the VM back to the 2012 Hyper-V I get an strange error (yes I know, it is not supported but I had to try!), the error message could have been a bit more informative, and I have tested to set the migration option to just TCP/IP instead of compression but still get the same error message!

migratetoOld2k12

And with powershell I get a bit clearer view of the error message,

Screen Shot 2013-06-26 at 15.44.23

Still some traces of snapshot name in 2012 R2 Hyper-V PowerShell

To align the Hyper-V with System Center VMM Microsoft has changed the Hyper-V manager regarding the snapshots to Checkpoints. I personally had preferred that they changed the naming in VMM to snapshots instead, but that is my opinion and maybe that is because of my background in VMware environments 😛

checkpointsgui

Although the change has been implemented in the GUI, the PowerShell module has not been updated to reflect this as you can see in my next screendump:

Screen Shot 2013-06-26 at 12.52.22

The cmdlet to take a checkpoint is as it has been in the Hyper-V Powershell module in 2012, Checkpoint-VM.

Upgrading Windows Core Hyper-V from 2012 to 2012 R2

This morning I could read that the R2 preview bits was available to download and of course I had to download and install.

I have installed one Win 2012 R2 with GUI and also I have now tried to upgrade my Windows 2012 Hyper-V core server to R2, as you can see on the screendump below, I had some issues to take care of.

Screen Shot 2013-06-25 at 10.17.31

After evicting it from the cluster and also stopping all VM´s I could continue to upgrade the server, it was really fast (now I have SSD and that does make a difference 😛 ) but still, the feeling is that Microsoft have done some work on making the R2 more rapid, the Powershell console is also more alert and responsive when starting it.

Screen Shot 2013-06-25 at 10.29.13

I will continue to evaluate the Preview and there will probably be some more posts about my findings in the R2 release 🙂

Why create all your virtual machines with Windows 2012/ Windows 8?

0606-Server-2012

As the announcement on Teched there has been several improvements on Hyper-V 2012 R2.

With the Windows Hyper-V Server R2  you can create generation 2 virtual machines but these can only be Windows 2012/ Windows 8 or later. And in this post I will try to give you the insight in why it is important that you set up all your virtual machines from now with 2012 and later.

As several blogs have already created lists of the features in R2 I will just refer to them, Thomas Maurer has a great article and also Aidan Finn (The Irish human Hyper-v blogrobot 😉 )

Here are the information about the two features that I want to focus on in this post:

  • Online resizing of VHDX – You can expand and shrink VHDX files during the virtual machine is running.
  • Generation 2 virtual machines – Gen2 VMs are legacy free and based on UEFI. So this means no more emulated devices, boot from virtual SCSI controllers or synthetic network adapters (PXE boot >100MBit) and enables UEFI secure boot as a standard. Supported guest operating systems: 64-bit versions of Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2.

So, WoW we can now while the virtual machine runs resize the VHDX, not just extend but also shrink! But there is a limitation!! The vhdx must be connected to a SCSI controller in the virtual machine to be able to utilize this feature! And as you know the system drive (often C:\) in Hyper-V Gen 1 VM´s has to be connected to IDE controller. And yes it is best practice to install the applications and databases and stuff on a separate virtual hard drive that you connect to a SCSI controller but quite often the system drive get´s full with windows patches, logs  and also some applications, etc  and then you want to be able to extend it and being able to do that online is quite sweet!

I have seen several posts that omit this information and it is quite important to be aware of this and that is why I state above that already now before R2, start creating your virtual machines with Win 2012 so that you when R2 is released and you have it in production can migrate your virtual machines to the Generation 2 VM. Yes I know there are several third party software companies that not have support on 2012 yet with their products. But if they do, then there is no reason to install that on a Windows 2008 R2!

When I get my hands on the R2 bits I will test and see how it works to migrate and will do an post about that so check back 🙂

Windows PowerShell and Desired State Configuration HOL

On Teched 2013 there has been a massive announcement about the future of Windows 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 and there was an session with Jeffrey Snover and Kenneth Hansen about Desired State Configuration DSC and how that works,

Now the Hands-On Lab has been released for DSC and accessible for everyone, this also means that you can access the other parts of PowerShell v4.

Screen Shot 2013-06-12 at 13.05.35

Here is a link to the HOL-310 http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2013/MDC-H310#fbid=9Ij04Tjn-bt

I have done the lab and it is quite impressive how simple and powerfull it is and being able to keep a desired state of installed/configurered servers with a service on them.

As I was in the lab environment I could not resist to check if there was any new powershell cmdlets for the Hyper-V module in R2

Screen Shot 2013-06-12 at 13.15.44

And with this command you can see that there is 14 new cmdlets in the R2 version of the hyper-v module compared to the 2012 version.

Screen Shot 2013-06-12 at 13.13.01

Here is a list of all the HOL that is available online and probably there will be more added later on.

Adding several networks to your VMM 2012 SP1 with PowerShell

I have created an environment at a customer with bare metal deployment with Hyper-V 2012 and SC VMM 2012 SP1 and in the bare metal profile I am utilizing the logical switches to get a consistent configuration on all hosts and not needing to configure each host every time a new network is going to be set up.

In an earlier post I made a script for adding networks into VMM 2012 but now in SP1 we have logical switches and now also a VM network, the later that adds a bit of complexity in the adding process.

In this case we are using VLAN´s and I want to be able to configure and add them without going through the console and all dialogs in the GUI

To get VLAN properly working you also need to check a box in the logical network properties

Screen Shot 2013-06-10 at 22.23.35

So this script asumes that you have a Logical Network already defined and what we do here is adding the subnets in the network sites. If someone finds another way to why I have to add all the subnetVLan objects every time I update the Logical Network Definition, that would be super.. If I do not add all the objects the networks without dependencies are removed.. not so smart

As you can see on this error message when I just try to update with a new Subnet VLAN and not including the other VLAN objects the Set-SCLogicalNetworkDefinition tries to remove and as there is already an VM network it fails. If you look at the script from the gui wizard you will see and understand what I am fuzzing about.

Screen Shot 2013-06-10 at 22.41.01

The structure of the CSV file is as the next screendump and If you already have an excel document or some other information table you could easily change the script to suit your environment and deployment.

Screen Shot 2013-06-10 at 22.34.42

And when running the following PowerShell script it will create not only the subnets in the Network Site but also the VM Networks. Here is the logical network before running the script

Screen Shot 2013-06-10 at 22.57.23

And here is after

Screen Shot 2013-06-10 at 23.02.18

And the VM network, as you can see on the details on the ADM-Servers details it is connected to the VM Subnet with the VLAN 399

Screen Shot 2013-06-10 at 23.03.17
Screen Shot 2013-06-10 at 23.03.33

And here is the script:

# Add Networks to VMM 
#
# Niklas Åkerlund 2013-06-10
$LogicalNetName = "VMNET"
$LogicalNetDefName = "DevNets"
$ImportFile = "C:\PowerShell\networkvms.csv"

# The networks that is going to be imported
$vlans = import-csv $ImportFile -Delimiter ";"
$LogicalNet = Get-SCLogicalNetwork -Name $LogicalNetName

$allSubnetVlan = @()
foreach ($vlan in $vlans) {
    # First in fabric 
    $LogicalNetDef = Get-SCLogicalNetworkDefinition -LogicalNetwork $LogicalNet -Name $LogicalNetDefName
    $allSubnetVlan = $LogicalNetDef.SubnetVLans    
    $Subnet = $vlan.IPnet + $vlan.Octet
    $SubnetVlan = New-SCSubnetVLan -Subnet $Subnet -VLanID $vlan.VLAN
    $allSubnetVlan += $SubnetVLAN
    Set-SCLogicalNetworkDefinition -LogicalNetworkDefinition $LogicalNetDef -SubnetVLan $allSubnetVlan

    # VM Networks
    $vmNetwork = New-SCVMNetwork -Name $vlan.Name -LogicalNetwork $LogicalNet -IsolationType "VLANNetwork"
    New-SCVMSubnet -Name $vlan.Name -LogicalNetworkDefinition $LogicalNetDef -SubnetVLan $SubnetVLAN -VMNetwork $vmNetwork

}

There are some things that I am working on the next version of this simple script, I am going to make it as a function and also some error checking and also verify if the networks already exists or not, that will be posted in another article 🙂

SCVMM DB Backup and cleaning with PowerShell

I have been working on some Virtual Machine Manager deployment and configuring at a customer and after some configuration and misstakes a backup would have been nice. There is a PowerShell cmdlet in the VMM and what it does is to create a DB dump on a path that you specify. Remembering to do this every day that you work with the environment so you can recover is not always so easy and it is often that just after you make a misstake or the system does it for you, the need for backup arrises.

So setting it up with a scheduled job in PowerShell is the way to go, and the script I have also removes the backups after 7 days.

here is the simple script that does the backup and cleaning

# Backup VMM Server
#
# Schedule with either PSScheduledJobs or Task manager
# Niklas Akerlund 2013-06-04
$backupPath = "C:\temp"

ipmo virtualmachinemanager
Backup-SCVMMServer -Path $backupPath

get-item -Path "$backupPath\*" | where {$_.LastWriteTime -lt (get-date).AddDays(-7) -and $_.Name -match "bak"} | Remove-Item

And here is the scheduling that is done with PS Scheduling

backupschedule
$cred = Get-Credential
$dailybackup = New-JobTrigger -Daily -At 10:45PM
Register-ScheduledJob -Name "VMM Backup" -FilePath C:\PowerShell\backupVMM.ps1 -Trigger $dailybackup -Credential $cred

This way you at least have a backup once a day to get you to recover, and talking of recover, if you want to recover the database for the VMM you can use the binary SCVMMRecover.exe and the parameter -Path. You can find the SCVMMRecover in the following path if the VMM is installed with default settings,  “C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center 2012\Virtual Machine Manager\bin”

vExpert 2013

vexpert_logo_2013

This year I got the vExpert award again, this is the second year I get the title and feel honored to be part of the program 🙂

I have two former colleagues from Sweden and my time at Real Time Services that also got the title this year and they are serious mega-experts 🙂

Thank you John Troyer and all other involved in the vExpert program!

You can find the rest of the 580 vExperts on this link.

SysCtr PDT deployment session on PSUG Sweden

Yesterday I was at the Swedish PowerShell User Group Community Day and I had a session about the System Center and deployment with PowerShell and talked about the PowerShell Deployment Toolkit.

Here is a screendump where I have installed VMM, AC,ORCH,SM,DPM,OM and also as you can see the automatic creation of shortcuts both on the desktop and the taskbar on the server that I have configured for console. As the PDT is designed to not kill itself I had to restart the deployment after rebooting the HV03 (the reason for this was the installation of .Net 3.51 which required the reboot) which was also the server running the deployment and the last part took 9 minutes. In a youtube video you can see how the deployment takes about an hour with the whole system center suite of roles and integrations between them, quite amazing!

finishedpdt

One thing that is wrong in the package of PDT is the size of the Microsoft.Windows.Server.Library.mp so when the installer.ps1 is validating the size of the files the validation fails. This mp is not wrong it is just updated. Edit the workflow.xml file and set the right size and you should be fine.

Screen Shot 2013-05-24 at 13.17.00

In the workflow.xml file find the line and update the size to the correct value

Screen Shot 2013-05-24 at 13.45.24

I have created a small scripted file that creates all the AD accounts in the PDT as this is not included. This also create an OU that it puts all objects in so it will be more manageable and easy to find.

# Add all Accounts nesssesary for SC Deploy with PDT
#
# Niklas Akerlund

# Create OU´s for groups, users and Server objects
$OU = New-ADOrganizationalUnit -Name SCPDT -PassThru
$SAccounts = "installer","vmm","or","spf","ac","om_saa","om_das","om_dra","om_dwa","sm_s","sm_w","sm_r","sm_a","sm_p"

foreach ($Account in $SAccounts){
    #Account creation  
    New-ADUser -Name $Account -SamAccountName $Account -AccountPassword (convertto-securestring -string "LUMA15gate" -asplaintext -force) -PasswordNeverExpires $true -Enabled $true -path $OU
    get-adgroup "domain admins" | Add-ADGroupMember -Members (Get-ADUser $Account)

}
# rest of admin groups and stuff
New-ADGroup -Name SPFAdmins -path $OU -GroupScope Global -GroupCategory Security
New-ADGroup -Name SM_PDT -path $OU -GroupScope Global -GroupCategory Security
New-ADGroup -Name DW_PDT -path $OU -GroupScope Global -GroupCategory Security
New-ADGroup -Name SMAdmins -path $OU -GroupScope Global -GroupCategory Security
New-ADGroup -Name SQLAdmins -path $OU -GroupScope Global -GroupCategory Security
Get-ADGroup "SQLAdmins" | Add-ADGroupMember -Members (Get-ADgroup "domain Admins")