vNiklas Virtualization blog

If you still have some Windows 2008 R2 SP1 Core Hyper-V hosts running and thinking of upgrading to WMF 3.0 there has been some problems with the VMM 2012.

I have a Win 2008 R2 Core SP1 Hyper-V  in my VMM 2012 SP1 UR2 and wanted to test if this was still an issue. The main reason for upgrading to the WMF 3.0 is the rebuild of the vmm refresh that is described in this blog post.

First I just tried to run the install file for WMF 3.0 and got the following dialog, and after reading a bit more realizing that it was because I need the .Net 4 as a prerequisite.

I installed the .Net 4 and there are some things that need to be configured on the Core server before and that is explained on the download page for .Net for Win 2008 R2 SP1 Core

After that It worked to install,

And after rebooting the host I looked in VMM and also tried some refresh and start/stop on VM´s and setting the host in maintenance mode, everything worked without any issues

Today I was presenting on the Technet Sweden Live meeting:System Center Sp1 Springtime series and my session was about:

The presentation can be downloaded on the following link -> SC2012SP1VarenPSClouds and I have also added it to slideshare

I also promised that the powershell files I have created for the demonstrations would be downloadable and here they are, I have made one file for each of the cloud management parts

• Cloud Demo VMM PS
• Cloud Demo App Con PS
• Cloud Demo Azure PS

You can also read some of my other posts about App controller and how to add clouds to it, also the post about how to extend your VMM console with custom properties and also how to download and update help in SCVMM.

I will try to get some time to make some demo movies and publish them in a near future

 

I have described before in blog posts about how to add a running VM to a Hyper-V failover cluster with the PowerShell cmdlets without moving it or turning it off, asuming it already was on a highly available storage such as a CVFS volume or smb 3.0 file share

In my exploration of the virtual machine manager PowerShell module I wanted to test and see if this was also possible in there but I do not succeed, or more correctly maybe should be noted that the SCVMM team has not implemented that for this release what has been implemented is the possibility to make a VM highly available when moving between datastores on a cluster node or from a single hyper-v host to a cluster node. As there is some copying of data it will also take longer time than the below command.

In Hyper-V with failover cluster PowerShell module I can add a VM to the cluster with the following cmdlets without stopping the VM.

Hyper-V\Get-VM vmtest -ComputerName HV02 | Add-VMToCluster -Cluster HVCL30

As you see, the reason why I have added the Hyper-V to the cmdlet is that because in the VMM PowerShell cmdlet there is an alias that is called Get-VM and refers to the Get-SCVirtualMachine and that conflicts with the Hyper-V PowerShell module´s Get-VM and I have imported both modules in the same console. I have also imported the failover cluster module in the same console.

If I try to use the Set-SCVirtualmachine vmtest -HighlyAvailable $true I get the following error.

In the VMM Console this option is also greyed out and cannot be set.

Here is the command to move the VM from one datastore to another and in the same time making it highly available,

I have made a blog post about the issue with Move-SCVirtualMachine not updating the cluster resource and this can be a way to handle this but in my opinion a far more complicated way as you have to move the VM to a new datastore and removing the high availability and then moving it again to another datastore and making it high available again, with a large virtual machine this can take some considerable time when it otherwise just is to run the cluster cmdlet.

Last post I did was about how to get the connection to an remote SC App Controller Server with the SCAC PowerShell module.

Now I will show you how to add your Private and Public Cloud to your App Controller with the PowerShell cmdlets.

First off I will add my SC VMM server, and as you can see I first connect to the App Controller and then add the VMM server.

I do not know if it is my silverlight that has some issues or, but the web console did not reflect the addition of the VMM Server until I logged of and then on the App Controller portal

PS C:\> Add-SCACCloudSystem -VMM -Name VMM2012 -ServerName vmm2012.lumademo.local -Port 8100

Then I will add my Azure account and that is done by adding an subscription, here you will need the certificate with the private key for the management certificate that you uploaded to your Azure subscription. And yes I have cluttered out the password and subscription Id in the screendump so it is not your monitor that broke

PS C:\> Add-SCACAzureSubscription -Name vNiklas -Id your-azure-subscription-id -ManagementCertificatePath C:\temp\certazure.pfx -ManagementCertificatePassword (ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText "YourCertPassword" -Force)

Pretty easy and now I have two clouds in my App Controller, I can also add a SPF cloud connection from a third party vendor to get a truly hybrid cloud, that I have not set up yet though so it will have to be in another post.

Today I have been exploring the System Center App Controller 2012 SP1 and the PowerShell module that it has.

There is not so many cmdlets in this but maybe it is enough… will find out soon

One cmdlet that is necessary is the Get-SCACServer if you are running the powershell module remote. Here comes the small problem when like me not using a certificate from a trusted CA like the AD CS or bought by a small amount of $$$ from verisign or other vendor of certs. As you can see on the next screendump I get a small error that the cmdlet does not like the certificate, well as there is no -force parameter on the cmdlet I went for another aproach and I added the self-signed cerificate from the App Controller server that was used in the IIS to the trusted root certificate authorities certificate store in the cert manager on the Management machine where I wanted to run the appcontroller PowerShell module. And now the cmdlet did not complain and I could get the App Controller server

Here you can see where I added the cerificate,

When using the App Controller PowerShell module locally on the same server as the App Controller Server resides this trust of the cert is already taken care of

A good post on how to create your own certificates for example using in management of your Azure or your IIS SSL you can find here on this link.

Today I wanted to use the help in SC Virtual Machine Manager PowerShell console and found that I had to download the updated help before I could see the whole, and of course I tried to do that but encountered the little error that follows in the screendump as you see,

I had used the PowerShell shortcut in the VMM Console, and was using my own login account, It is part of administrators/domain admins but still had not proper rights on the VMM server.

I opened a new PowerShell console by right click on the shortcut on the taskbar and chose Run-As Administrator and typed:

Import-Module virtualmachinemanager
Update-Help -Module virtualmachinemanager

And now I can see the full help

I was talking to a customer today about an issue they had with their SC VMM 2012 SP1 and when they where doing some storage migrations between their CSV SAN volumes in the Hyper-V cluster.

Move-SCVirtualMachine -VM (Get-SCVirtualMachine VMtest) -VMHost (Get-VMHost HV02) -Path "C:\ClusterStorage\Volume2" -UseLAN

Everything looks good inside VMM and also the VM works nicely but when looking at the failover cluster manager the resource is not updated which resulted in failure in backup with DPM and probably more issues.

Here is a screendump of the VM in failover cluster manager and also an screendump of the VM in VMM after the migration, as you can see these values does not match

There is a way to solve this but that will mean that we have to use the failover cluster and Hyper-V cmdlets. Also should be noted that if we use the failover cluster manager it works so it is a bug in VMM.

So I opened a new PowerShell console and typed the following:

Get-VM VMtest -ComputerName HV02 | Update-ClusterVirtualMachineConfiguration -Cluster HVCL30

And here you can now see that the cluster resource reflects the right data

There is actually one more solution and that is to remove the VM from the cluster and then add it again but it is easier to just update the cluster virtual machine configuration

On the management computer I always install the RSAT tools for Hyper-V and also Failover Cluster along with the VMM console to be able to do all management from one place even if I cannot do it all in VMM.

Today when I was going to test the P2V functionality of the VMM 2012 SP1 I found a strange issue.

walking through the wizard for the p2v migration, it gave me an error that I first did not understand, but as it did not allow me to continue the wizard I had to start searching. Based on the object name VMNetwork I concluded that it probably had something to do with the VM Networks.

Using PowerShell with the VMM module and the cmdlet Get-SCVMNetwork gave me the following error, and that did not look so good, it should be working right?!

And looking in the VMM console over the VM networks showed me the following, and yes it is not possible to create a VM Network that has no name but somehow it had happend in my system!

When I restarted the VMM Console the whole list was empty so surely the system did not like this..

So how did I fix it? As all data except the library files are stored in the VMM database I went in there. Here is an excellent place for a reminder for you guys out there that not yet have set up any backup for your VMM servers and particularly the DB, DO IT!

Now my system is a test/lab so if I would break it there is no production systems that will be dependent of any errors or failures.

To be on the safe side I stopped the VMMService before I edited the database and that of course with PowerShell:

And when that was done I opened the SQL Management Studio and expanded the VMM database, they have a good best practice in naming the tables so it did not take so long time for me to find the one that I wanted to edit, in this case dbo.tbl_NetMan_VMNetwork , right click and chose the edit top 200 rows (if you have more than 200 vm networks you will have to do a query instead )

And as you can see on the rows in this table there is one that has in a mysterious way gone blank on the name field, I edited it with the name “Internal” as that was the name I had before and then hit Enter, closed the table and then I started the VMMService again.

And in the VM Networks view of the VMM Console everything was back to normal again:

Now I will look at some logs and try to find out why the VM Network´s name disappeared in the first place

I was going to download the evaluation VHD´s for System Center 2012 SP1 and doing that the manual way by clicking on each of the links on the download pages and that for all SC 2012 products could seriously give you mental illness, If I counted the files correct it is 99 total + documents.

I found this guest post on the ScriptingGuys page where Marco did a PowerShell line how to not only find the files but also add them to BITS for download.  This script only works on PowerShell v3.0 because it is using the new Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet, and as you can see on the screendump how easily you can get all download links.

I have set the new url´s for SC 2012 SP1 RTM eval vhd´s  and added the .docx files and also do a check that in the volume you will store them have enough space, I made the assumption that it is approximately 70 GB total (99 files * ~700 MB each)

Here You can copy this and run on your environment, It will take some hours but at least it saves you the time in clicking

# Download all SC 2012 SP1 VHD Eval
#
# Niklas Akerlund / Lumagate 2013-02-04
#

# Downloadfolder
$Dest = "D:\VHDEVAL"
$SizeOfSCSP1 = 70GB

# Get Space on volume
$SpaceRemaining = (Get-Volume $Dest.Split(":")[0]).SizeRemaining

if($SpaceRemaining -gt $SizeOfSCSP1){
# SCVMM
((Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36435").links | ? href -match "rar$|exe$|docx$").href | %{Start-BitsTransfer -Source $_ -Destination $Dest}
# SCOM
((Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36424").links | ? href -match "rar$|exe$|docx$").href | %{Start-BitsTransfer -Source $_ -Destination $Dest}
# SCORCH
((Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36426").links | ? href -match "rar$|exe$|docx$").href | %{Start-BitsTransfer -Source $_ -Destination $Dest}
# SCAC
((Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34781").links | ? href -match "rar$|exe$|docx$").href | %{Start-BitsTransfer -Source $_ -Destination $Dest}
# SCDPM
((Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36423").links | ? href -match "rar$|exe$|docx$").href | %{Start-BitsTransfer -Source $_ -Destination $Dest}
# SCCM
((Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36428").links | ? href -match "rar$|exe$|docx$").href | %{Start-BitsTransfer -Source $_ -Destination $Dest}
# SCSM
((Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36427").links | ? href -match "rar$|exe$|docx$").href | %{Start-BitsTransfer -Source $_ -Destination $Dest}
}else{
[int]$Sum = ($SizeOfSCSP1 - $SpaceRemaining)/1GB
Write-Host "Free up at least $Sum GB and try again!"
}

I have today tested to upgrade the Beta/CTP version of SC 2012 SP1 to the newly released SP1 RTM version for

• SC Orchestrator
• SC Virtual Machine Manager
• SC Operations Manager (Community Technology Preview)

As the articles on technet tells you it is not supported but I wanted to try and see how I could do it in my lab environment and what consequences it would have . I have one DC Server, one VMM/ORCH/SCOM server (maybe not best practice to have all three roles on the same server but it works ) and one Hyper-V host with some lab-VM´s

I started with the Orchestrator and when I connected the ISO to the server/servers and try to install I got an dialog that I already have it installed, but it is the wrong version so I have to uninstall everything first, So did that and then during the installation selected the old DB in the wizard and after that I could see all my runbooks and IP´s still are there.

Then It was time for the SC VMM, but now the installation guide clearly told me that I had to uninstall the product, although as you can read on the screen dump: if I am running SC 2012 I can retain the database when uninstalling.

In the uninstall wizard, be sure to check this box:

And then during the new installation be sure to point out the old database

The installation wizard will then check and ask if you want to upgrade it, pretty nice and for not supporting an upgrade they have made it quite easy to do it anyway!

Also, the wizard recognizes the library share that I had configured before. In the last step I get an summary that tells me what potential issues might occur with this upgrade, As you can read in the first part it is important to use the same server as the vmm was installed on before and that you use the same service account for VMM this for the Run-As accounts to work!

When the installation is complete I had to update the Agent on the Hyper-V host.

After this I continued to upgrade the SCOM, when starting the installation wizard I did not need to uninstall anything and right away the SCOM accepted an upgrade to the RTM version.

After successfully “upgrading” these components there are some more work that needs to be done, such as the SCOM-SCVMM integration that need upgrading and also Orchestrator IP that should be taken care of but that in another blog post