Trying to do a Checkpoint on a VM resulting in error 12700

Today I helped a customer that have issues with their new VM´s and doing backup using Veeam and also trying to do Checkpoints within VMM on their Hyper-V 2012 R2 environment.

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Looking at the error message from VMM it showed quite clearly that it was just one of the VHDx that was having the issue and looking at where it was residing it showed the reason:

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The file was residing on its own in a CSV volume and directly in the root folder, and as stated in the blog post from the Core Team the VM worker process (VMMS) does not have the relevant permissions on that level and thus getting a access denied error when trying to do a checkpoint.

So how do you solve it? By either manually or with live storage migration moving it into a subfolder which will give the right ACL´s and thus giving the VM worker process rights to create a avhdx file in that folder.

So watch out when you create new VM´s that you actually put all of the virtual disks that belong to it inside folders on those CSV´s!

Rescue failing deploy from VMM 2012 R2 to Hyper-v hosts

I was contacted by a customer with an issue where he could not use ISO´s or deploy VM´s from his VMM server to the Hyper-V hosts.

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First I started searching the net for solutions and found some that could match:

Move VM error  : https://fawzi.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/vmm-2012-sp1-error-2912-when-moving-vm/ suggesting changing BITS port

Deploy VM from VMM : http://blogs.msdn.com/b/nitinsingh/archive/2015/03/31/getting-error-error-2912-quot-an-internal-error-has-occurred-trying-to-contact-the-server-no-param-no-param-while-trying-to-deploy-a-virtual-machine-in-system-center-virtual-machine-manager-scvmm.aspx where I updated the hosts certificates on the VMM server,

but they did not help as the error continued, I also tried to reinstall the VMM agents on the hosts if that would have been the cause.

Starting to investigating this issue more thoroughly i noticed some strange things, I could store VM´s from the hosts into the VMM library so that way worked with BITS, So the problem seemed to be related to the VMM Server..

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Talking with my friend and MVP Daniel Neumann he sent me a link to another blog post that describes if you have deleted the VMM certificate (my certificate was there but apparently out of sync in some way) so here is the steps to regenerate the VMM certificate:

1. Launch the VMM PowerShell on the Virtual Machine Manager server.

2. Type the following and press enter:

$credential = get-credential

3. Type the username and password that is a local admin on the VMM server.

4. Type the following and press enter:

Get-VMMManagedComputer -ComputerName “vmm2012sp1.contoso.com” | Register-SCVMMManagedComputer  -Credential $credential

5. Ensure that the VMM job completes successfully under the Jobs tab in the VMM console.

Note: In my example above, vmm2012.contoso.com is the FQDN of the VMM server.

And after this the VMM deploy works again!

 

Moving SCVMM 2012 R2 Server going bad

I have helped two customers moving their System Center VMM 2012 R2 servers to a Hyper-V VM..  Instead of carrying legacy stuff we installed a new Generation 2 VM in Hyper-V with Windows Server 2012 R2.

Easier said than done… or?

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So what went wrong at both customers and how did I solve it?

We copied the library and the database backup from the old server. Did a shutdown of that one and then started the new one and added that to the domain and then installed the VMM server.

Patched it to UR7 with windows update and after that we did a restore of the db from the old system with the binary scvmmrecover.exe -path <db-backupfile>.

After that I started the console and trying to check things in properties and stuff and the console crashed  the service got a dump:

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Looking at the dump, I could see that not everything was great with the database, (the old VMM server was patched to UR7 before I did a database backup). Based on the log file something is missing in the restored database…

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So how did I solve it? I uninstalled the UR7 on the VMM server and then reinstalled it and voila, no more crashes!