vNiklas Virtualization blog

In a recent post I showed how to configure the DHCP server with multiple scopes of subnets with PowerShell and how blazing fast that could be done in the Windows 2012 compared to Windows 2008 R2.

One thing we might forget is to populate the Active Directory Sites and Services subnets with this information to get the clients to access the domain controllers that is nearest. As you can read in this technet post the reason for populating this:

“Domain controllers register service (SRV) resource records in Domain Name System (DNS) that identify their site names. Domain controllers also register host (A) resource records in DNS that identify their IP addresses. When a client requests a domain controller, it provides its site name to DNS. DNS uses the site name to locate a domain controller in that site (or in the next closest site to the client). DNS then provides the IP address of the domain controller to the client for the purpose of connecting to the domain controller. For this reason, it is important to ensure that the IP address that you assign to a domain controller maps to a subnet that is associated with the site of the respective server object. Otherwise, when a client requests a domain controller, the IP address that is returned might be the IP address of a domain controller in a distant site. When a client connects to a distant site, the result can be slow performance and unnecessary traffic on expensive WAN links.”

So as we do not want to update 2016 subnets manually we do this with PowerShell instead, and as you can see with the Windows 2012 it goes quite fast (I have tested on Win 2008 R2 and it works there also).

and here is the small PowerShell bits that do the magic

# Populate Subnets in AD Sites and Services
#
# Niklas Akerlund 2013-05-14 

for($b=1;$b -le 63 ; $b++){
    for($i=0;$i -le 255){ 
        $Name = "10.10.$b.$i" + "/29"
        $Description = "10.10.$b.$i" + "/255.255.255.248"
        New-ADObject -Name $Name -Type subnet -Description $Description -OtherAttributes @{location="RemoteVPN";siteObject="CN=HQ,CN=Sites,CN=Configuration,DC=lumademo,DC=local"} -Path "CN=Subnets,CN=Sites,CN=Configuration,DC=lumademo,DC=local"     
        $i = $i +8
    }
}

And then when you look in the Active Directory Sites and Services you will find all the subnets and that they correlate to the right site.

I have had a lot to do and that is why I have not done so much updating on the blog, soon my third article will be published on Petri IT Knowledge I have also attended the MMS in Las Vegas where I got loads of good information and meet lots of people!

In this post I want to show you the improvements in Windows 2012 and with the PowerShell native cmdlets in this version.

The task was to automatically create 2016 DHCP Scopes for clients on a DCHP server and every scope was a /29 net with 3 lease addresses and one router for each.

I tested this on a Windows 2008 R2 with the community powershell module  and with the following script it took, and I am not kidding, almost 5 hours!! the module utilise the net sh commands with dhcp and probably there could be a lot of improvements for performance, and seriously, just creating one or two scopes can be done in the gui but doing over 2000 will demand a scripted way!

# Massive DHCP Scope 2016
#
# Niklas Akerlund 2013-04-24

write-host (get-date)
for($b=1;$b -le 63 ; $b++){
    for($i=0;$i -le 255){ 
        New-DHCPScope -Server localhost -Name 10.10.$b.$i -Address 10.10.$b.$i -SubnetMask 255.255.255.248 | Out-Null
        $startip = $i+2
        $endip = $i+4
        $router = $i+1
        Add-DHCPIPRange -Server localhost -Scope 10.10.$b.$i -StartAddress 10.10.$b.$startip -EndAddress 10.10.$b.$endip | Out-Null
        Get-DHCPScope -Server localhost -Scope 10.10.$b.$i | Set-DHCPOption -OptionID  003 -DataType IPADDRESS -Value 10.10.$b.$router | Out-Null
        $i = $i +8
    }
}
write-host (get-date)

With the PowerShell DHCP module for WIndows 2012 I have created the following script for creating the same amount of scopes and configuration and running it took only about 1 minute!!

# Massive DHCP Scope 2016
#
# Niklas Akerlund 2013-04-24

write-host (get-date)
for($b=1;$b -le 63 ; $b++){
    for($i=0;$i -le 255){ 
        $startip = $i+2
        $endip = $i+4
        $router = $i+1
        Add-DhcpServerv4Scope -Name 10.10.$b.$i -StartRange 10.10.$b.$startip -EndRange 10.10.$b.$endip -SubnetMask 255.255.255.248
        Set-DhcpServerv4OptionValue -ScopeId 10.10.$b.$i -Router  10.10.$b.$router
        $i = $i +8
    }
}
write-host (get-date)

As you can see, handling lots of changes and configurations can easily be done in the new Windows 2012 and it´s native cmdlets!

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.

Today I bought this book that is written by

• Aidan Finn
• Patrick Lownds
• Michel Luescher
• Damian Flynn

And in part one I found that Aidan had referred to one of my scripts for moving virtual machine storage without leaving anything behind,

since the book got into production I have made an update to do some checking and not deleting to much that could happend in the first version!

I feel really honored to be included within a such complete and thorough book about Hyper-V in Windows 2012!

It takes som extra days before it is going to start being delivered in Europe but You can as I by it directly from the Amazon US Kindle store and get it delivered to your App on a chosen device.

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 have been updating my function that extends the Hyper-V PowerShell module cmdlet Move-VMStorage. A while ago I made a blog post about that I think that the folders on the source directory should be removed when doing a Live Storage Migration or you will get a mess with empty VM folders after a while and that can cause some confusion for the admins.

The updates in this script function are the following:

• I will not delete folders if they do not reside within a folder with the VM´s name (In the earlier version I just deleted and that recursive with no questions asked which could have some consequences )
• And if the folder was the default or named with another name you will get an output that tells you to clean manually
• If you do not give the VM´s Name in the -Path parameter I will add that for you to get a nice and tidy folder structure

Here is a screendump on the updated function in action

And here you can see what happens if I move from a folder that is not named after the VM´s name

And here is a screendump of the folders that are left in the c:\vms that you need to manually delete and you might want to check that not another vm is residing inside these folders before removing them

    <#
    .Synopsis
       An updated Move-VMStorage function
    .DESCRIPTION
       To also remove the folder where the VM was residing this function also deletes the folder after moving the VM
       This function also helps you in creating a folder in the path if forgotten
    .EXAMPLE
       Move-VMStorage2 -VMName test -ComputerName HV02 -Path \\SMB-srv01\VMs\test
    .NOTES
    Author: Niklas Akerlund 20130226
    Version: 0.2
    #>
    function Move-VMStorage2
    {
        [CmdletBinding()]
        [OutputType([int])]
        Param
        (
            # A name of a VM
            [Parameter(Mandatory=$true,
                       ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true,
                       Position=0)]
            $VMName,
            # The name of the Hyper-V host
            [Parameter(Mandatory=$false,
                       ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true,
                       Position=1)]
            $ComputerName = "localhost",
            # The path where the VM is going to be relocated to.
             [Parameter(Mandatory=$true,
                       ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true,
                       Position=2)]
            [string] $Path
        )
    
            # Lets move and tidy the source folder
            $VM = Get-VM $VMName -ComputerName $ComputerName
            # For some reason the path does not get refreshed when moving one VM several times in the same console that is why i do a select *
            $VMOldPath = Get-VM $VMName -ComputerName $ComputerName | select * -ExpandProperty Path 
                    
            if ($Path -notmatch $VM.VMName){
                $Path = $Path + "\" + $VM.VMName
                Move-VMStorage -VM $VM -DestinationStoragePath $Path
            }else{
                Move-VMStorage -VM $VM -DestinationStoragePath $Path
            }
            
            if (($VMOldPath.StartsWith("\\")) -and $VMOldPath -match $VM.VMName) {
               Remove-Item -Path $VMOldPath -Recurse -Force
            }elseif ($VMOldPath -match $VM.VMName){
                Invoke-Command -ComputerName $VM.ComputerName -ScriptBlock {Remove-Item -Path $Using:VMOldPath -Recurse -Force}
            }else{
                Write-Host "The VM :" $VM.VMName " was in the following path " $VMOldPath " Clean it manually!"
            }
            
    }

I have noticed several forum posts about some issues managing the Windows 2012 Hyper-V or the free Hyper-V 2012 Server.

Most of the cases are because people try to use the Hyper-V manager in Windows 2008 R2 or the Hyper-V manager from the RSAT tools in Windows 7.

As you can see on this screendump, you can successfully connect to a 2012 Hyper-V from a Win7 Hyper-V manager. But the features offered in the new Hyper-V is not accessible in this GUI, this causes some confusion when handling the VM´s and the Hyper-V role!

And here you can see that the server HV03 really is a 2012 version:

So for example, when you are going to edit the VM and add a new virtual harddisk you will notice that the new VHDX is not available

And as you can see in the following screendump from a new Hyper-V manager:

Some things work though, you can set more memory than the Windows 2008 R2 limit and also set more than 4 vCPU´s!

The ability to setup Hyper-V replica and to move VM´s are absent from the GUI as these are new features.

Yes It works to manage some stuff in the old Hyper-V manager but not all so my recommendation as it is not supported you should install a Windows 2012 or a Windows 8 to manage your new Hyper-V 2012 and also more importanly you will get the powershell module to manage it!

I have made a blog post about how to enable the Hyper-V manager and the Powershell module on the Windows 2012 and Windows 8!

If you by some reason need to kill the process that is handling the VM in Hyper-V which is the Virtual Machine Worker Process, it can be handy to also know what vmwp process that correlates to what VM or you could accidently restart the wrong VM. Restarting the VM is the default behavior when the process dies.

If you look in the task manager of the Parent Partition you can see the processes.

If you look a bit deeper into the task manager you can see that each process in the command line have the virtual machine ID and then digging into this with PowerShell you can find out what VMWP process each VM has. I have been trying to use the Get-Process Cmdlet but that left me with no luck, then I found this post by Ravikanth that uses the Get-WmiObject instead, so I used that and altered what process to get.

I have made a oneliner that does this and as you can see on the following screendump I get a list of the VM´s and the Process Id´s.

Get-WmiObject Win32_Process -Filter "Name like '%vmwp%'" | Select-Object ProcessId, @{Label="VMName";Expression = {(Get-VM -Id $_.Commandline.split(" ")[1] | Select-Object VMName).VMName}} | ft -AutoSize

Last week on the NIC keynote we could hear Jeffrey Snover talk about Windows 2012 and also that the preferred version when installing is Core, but then you will not have the Hyper-V manager locally (yes you could use the PowerShell module….).

So how do we enable our management station for remote Hyper-V tasks…

If you have a Windows 2012 you can easily just enable the Remote Server Administration Tools for Hyper-V and that preferably with PowerShell

And if you want to check if you have the Hyper-V management features installed you can use the Get-WindowsFeature

I usually also add the Failover cluster RSAT feature also to be able to manage the cluster.

Add-WindowsFeature RSAT-Hyper-V-Tools -IncludeAllSubFeature
Add-WindowsFeature RSAT-Clustering -IncludeAllSubFeature

If you want to add the Hyper-V tools in a Windows 8 you would guess that you have to use the DISM tools and there are some DISM cmdlets, You might have noticed that the Hyper-V tools are not part of the RSAT package for windows 8 this as the client Hyper-V role is part of the OS. But either I am doing something wrong or someone in Redmond has not thought this part through regarding the enabling of features in PowerShell for Win8!

because when I try the following Cmdlet with parameters

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -FeatureName Microsoft-Hyper-V-Tools-All

The PowerShell console barf out an error because when trying to add the Management tools with the powershell cmdlet I get info that it needs a parent feature which would be the Hyper-V feature and in this virtual windows 8 client that is not what I want,

When using the Control Panel, Add/Remove software/Windows Features you can add the Hyper-V Management tools in your Windows 8 without adding the Hyper-V Platform!

I will pursue this with some smart PowerShell gurus and see if they have an answer to why this happens

In the meantime good luck in creating your management pc!