Today I was in the mood to take a Microsoft exam and as MSFT so generously gives a cert voucher for free it was not so much to argue about 🙂
I already have the MCSE : Private Cloud
But now it was time for Microsoft Certified Specialist: Server Virtualization with Hyper-V and System Center (exam nr 74-409) and this exam reflects and measures the latest releases from Microsoft in Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V and System Center 2012 R2.
I have some knowledge in the subject and have done some implementations before and also had the previous title MCITP: Virtualization Administrator so I thought it should not be too hard, as always some questions have to be read more than once before choosing the right answer.
The last two days I was on the road and presented my session on migrate to Hyper-V and that on the Nordic System Center Summit that was hosted by my company Lumagate. We visited both Stockholm and Oslo.
Both Travis Wright and Chris Ross from Cireson was with us and had some really interesting sessions!
In my presentation I described the different ways to migrate and how to prepare for a large migration and that in different ways of automation.
Last week I was at a customer and worked on setting up an new Hyper-V and SC VMM 2012 R2 environment and also connecting the VMM to their existing VMware. We configured the hosts with Bare-metal deploy and also configured logical switches in VMM. The setup and configuration with both VMM and Hyper-V was very smooth and it seems that they have worked a bit on the R2 release on that part 🙂
When the environment was up and running we also connected it to the customers vSphere 5.0 environment.
In-the-box of the VMM 2012 R2 there is only V2V when moving machines from vSphere to Hyper-V, the P2V function has been removed and is only available in VMM 2012 SP1 and earlier, a microsoft blog has described a way to use a workaround with a VMM 2012 SP1 but that does require a Hyper-V 2012 host and you have to run two VMM servers during the conversion process.
We have tested several VM´s and noticed some disturbing issues in the V2V process.
for a reason unknown the target does not get the source number of vCPU´s and memory setting so a VM that had 4 GB RAM in vSphere would get a static setting of 512 MB RAM, and if it had 2 vCPU in vSphere it got 1 vCPU in Hyper-V.
the next part was that the conversion created VHD´s on the new Hyper-V 2012 R2 and not VHDX for the converted virtual disks… At least it is fixed sized disks so we do not have to worry about partition alignment issues that is the case with the dynamic VHD´s.
And when we tried to migrate a VM with three virtual disks, the v2v process connected all of the to the IDE controllers and not as best practice, the data disks to SCSI… I changed it manually and successfully booted the VM.
at last we found another bug or something regarding the networking and the migrated VM..
And when the VM was migrated it looked like it was connected to the right network in VMM as you can see on the following screendump from the VM network properties in VMM.
but when the VM booted it did not connect to the correct network and I had to go into the Hyper-V manager and look at the VM configuration and there it showed as no VLAN, once I corrected the issue and checked the vlan id and correct vlan number the VM was on the right network.
The Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter (MVMC) that could be used with the MAT has not yet come in a new version that supports vSphere 5.1/5.5 and equally important, the Hyper-V 2012 R2 hosts.. With the MAT you can customise it to set and configure both network inside of the VM´s and also configure correct vlan settings in the VM´s network card based on what the vSphere is configured with.
Maybe I have just been unlucky but all of these issues with the VMM V2V makes it a less desired solution when migrating from VMware in a larger scale.
Yesterday I was at a customer and working on configure their off site Hyper-V cluster. I was setting up live migration settings to be able to do shared nothing live migrate the VM´s between the data centers. I was setting up kerberos authentication and also delegation in the active directory but did not think of the 10 hours (600 minutes) time that a kerberos ticket could live and got some errors regarding constrained delegation, as it says if reading a bit more carefully in this technet page on how to configure live migration outside of clusters :”A new kerboros ticket has been issued. “, I did not think of this at first and checked the hosts settings and the active directory objects twice 😛 but it did not work and I did not think of the time…. If you want to purge the kerberos tickets you can use the klist command line tool.
Well during the error search I had to test to do a cold migration from SC VMM between the clusters and that looked like no problem at all. It should also be said that both clusters was configured with the same logical network, vm networks, logical switch and uplink so it was the same conf! SC VMM have been updated with the latest CU 4.
When the VM had been migrated i started it and tried to ping the IP address but got no response.. strange I thought, looked in VMM on the properties on the VM and it said that the network card was connected:
But still inside the VM it said not connected,
And then going into the Hyper-V manager and looking at the VM´s properties from there I could also see that it was not connected. I did a VM refresh also in VMM but it did not change the connection status on the VM object to reflect the status as the screen dump below from the properties in the Hyper-v Manager:
Once I connected it to the (logical) virtual switch on the host with Hyper-V Manager it started to respond to ping of course.
I will continue to exam this further and maybe it has been fixed in the VMM 2012 R2.
Also as in Issue 15 there was stuff left after a canceled or failed migration
One thing that could have been a wish was that they in this UR would have added the Windows 2012 R2 as an operating system, you can run Windows 2012 R2 as virtual machines in your 2012 Hyper-V but not assign the right OS on the properties on the VMM 2012 Sp1 🙁
In Hyper-V this does not have an impact for the successful boot as in VMware VM´s where you set the best matching OS for the boot process to work flawlessly. In Hyper-V it uses the same BIOS for all your VM´s and this list is something for VMM and the database.
So as everyone else (at least an ITPRO with some dignity and self respect) I have started to download the System Center 2012 R2 as it was released just some hours ago! The link appeared on my technet subscription page about 1 PM in Swedish time
I started to Install the VM for my VMM and of course I created it as an Generation 2 VM on my Hyper-V R2 host.. In the preview, VMM could not manage gen2 VM´s but now we will see about that. Before installing VMM I had to download and install Windows 8.1 ADK and an SQL server.
And then when I had an successful installation I wanted to add at least one Hyper-V server, the funny part here is that I have activated Hyper-V on this Windows 2012 R2 and why it is saying unknown hypervisor beats me 🙂 . Fortunately I could proceed to add the host
And then I wanted to check the Gen2 VMM server I had created and see if it was viewable in the VMM console and also the system volume could be expanded when the VM was powered on (in earlier versions of VMM that has sometimes been a nono for example with VM additions )
As you can see there is no possibility in the VMM console to shrink the disk so there I have to use the Hyper-V Manager.. ( I have tried to enter a lower value but the gui won’t allow me to do it) So much for one place for all management.. In the following screendump you can see the option to shrink the storage from the Hyper-V manager wizard.
And as you remember one of the new fine features in the Hyper-V R2 was the full feature RDP access to the VM through the VMbus, why has that not been implemented in the VMM??
This old vmm viewer reminds me of the VMM 2008 with no additional features that I get in the Hyper-V Virtual machine connection..
I will continue to explore the VMM 2012 R2 and there might be some more blog posts coming and until then, good luck in your deployments 🙂
