I was talking to some guys with a quite solid VMware background and they were working on setting up a Hyper-V cluster with Windows Azure Pack as frontend.
Their environment was a traditional setup with Hyper-V hosts connecting to a SAN with FC thus using CSV´s for storing the VM´s. All VM´s including their management was configured on these hosts.
As a best practice they ran the Failover Cluster Validation (and yes you should run it or you won’t get support) but as I will show you, they had an unwanted restart of their VM´s including the one they had failover cluster manager started so look and think twice before starting that validation with all tests!
with no HA – VM´s there are not so much to think about but once you add VM´s there is, and it can have some consequences…
If you in the wizard add the CSV volume to the test you can see the warning showing that you will get the VM´s stopped doing the validation,
Going next in the wizard and then going back the warning has disappeared!
But of course in the Confirmation it still says that the VM roles will be stopped but if you are in a hurry and start the validation then all VM´s on the CSV volumes will be stopped and then started and maybe that was not what you had intended from the beginning!
So look and select the options carefully when doing a validation of a cluster with production workloads in 🙂
So you are an IT Pro or maybe an CIO or CTO and have been sleeping under your desk the latest years or so? But the IT Operations departments are under a lot of stress these days coping in being able to deliver the services to the business in the pace that they demand! Do you recognize this? For example your development division request 50 VM´s and wanted them yesterday, Your response is that come back in a week or two….
Many IT departments are seeing their internal customers such as Dev or Business going outside of the organisation and buying their services directly from Azure or another public cloud provider delivered instantly and that also cheaper than you could produce internally..
Here the Hybrid way of thinking becomes important and why, well you will not be able to compete with all the services that the public cloud can give you in a cheaper and more reliable way so IT Operations of tomorrow will utilize the public cloud as their own and be able to use it for their needs where their private cloud lacks functionality or capacity and in that way respond to the requests from the departments.
Giving the users an self service portal where they can order and see the cost of their engagements is an important part of this and when you implement this you have to have automation as a key part because the users want things to happen when they press the build button!
Taking Microsofts Azure data centers as an example, they have automated enormously and that from the physical layer all the way into the virtual machines and networks. How does this automation gain you with your environment and becoming more agile and not just run around putting out fires but being able to address the needs of the company IT challenges today and also tomorrow!
Some say that we are in the second machine age and that the IT will have to change big time. Just look at the public cloud Company’s and their services, if they would have done things in a traditional way they would have to charge xx times the amount the charge for their services and also be xx more manpower on the data centers to cope with the day to day operation.
In the latest year Microsoft have released several automation solutions that have been developed and gives you the tools for this must-have automation platform. First of is the Service Management Automation (SMA) which is a robust orchestration engine based on PowerShell workflows and this has also been released as Azure Automation. Secondly we have Microsofts investment in Desired State Configuration and here this also utilize PowerShell. The DSC have some development left but it is so powerful and really large web services utilize this today and keeping their massive services compliant and up to date! DSC can be used for provisioning different things including third party software solutions and for example, Microsoft Azure offers different web services (jomla, wordpress etc) deployed in an automated way probably with some DSC technology behind the curtains.
Of course this gigantic automation project will not be done over a night and will cost quite a bit of money in initial investment but the winning and surviving IT Department is the one successful in their automation processes!
9 years ago I started an onboarding automation process and on that time I had VB script to work with but that manual labor every time a new employee was hired was painful and so boring and already at that time I found the will and inspiration to learn techniques to automate. Still today there are several processes in companies that are perfect candidates for automation but for some reason still being done manually…
Let me help you get Strategic in your IT (automation) delivery!
Yesterday I was testing Bare-Metal deployment on a VMM 2012 R2 with a new Hyper-v image and got the error 21161 during the process of making a physical machine into a Hyper-V Server.
I did of course check the library server (which was the same as the VMM server) and also that the vhdx that contains the Hyper-V image was in the library. I also checked the profile where the reference to the VHDx is and everything looked good.
The error was resolved when checking out the library server properties and changing to a host group instead of the default.
I have been deploying servers from this VMM before and why it started to complain right now is a mystery and I will dig and see if I can find the reason and if I do you will get an update on the blog, but now you know how to get it running 🙂
Update: Daniel Clarke mentioned my fix, In the VMM I have as this error occured I had not updated to UR3 during the time between the deployments which would otherwise had maybe explained the error. I have now updated the server to UR3 and can still do bare-metal deploy.
I have been helping a customer a while with their Hyper-V environment and now I saw on twitter that HP had new Emulex drivers that could be downloaded so I thought that I should give it a try, there has been quite a storm about the problems with VMQ and Emulex and if you want to read more about that you can check out this link to my friends at Hyper-V.nu . My experience of this problem is that it have been on Gen8 HP blades with a newer Emulex networking on them. Right now I only had G7 to test on.
As a best practice I run the Hyper-V hosts in Core but that did not give me any issues when installing (yes I use VMM bare-metal deployment and will after verified success update that to have this latest drivers )
As it is networking drivers I lost my RDP session for a few seconds before it was fully installed and then I could see the result
And checking with powershell Get-NetAdapter I can verify that the GUI is not lying 😛
And also you can see that the VMQ is enabled for my two NIC´s
I have now in a couple of weeks been testing a Nokia Lumia 930 phone and it is soon time to return it. Importantly that need to be said here is that I have been using iPhones since 2008 and also for a short while I used an Android phone and quite quickly went back to the iPhone.
The iPhone and Apple has been very successful with their devices since the first came out. The amount of apps available for IOS is huge and companies and governments also have adapted and created usable apps for making the life of the user smooth.
The Windows Phone in it´s earlier versions have had its ups and downs and I have not seen it as a possible replacement before the version 8 of the OS and later..
Now as I have lived with the phone and tried to adapt I can really say that I like it.. the build quality is magnificent and the screen looks great, it is fast and I can manage my daily tasks, it is obvious that the development of the OS have got some attention and Microsoft have thought through how the phone should work and with the new features like for instance Cortana it is in the edge of Phone OS development..
Still I miss my banks app but they say that it is coming this year so when that one have arrived I can buy me self a beutiful Lumia 😉
Some of the apps I have installed:
Waze
SAS Scandinavian Airlines
Skype
Spotify
SVT Play
Swish
Yammer
Amazon Kindle
Easy Park
Facebook Beta
GoPro
Instagram Beta
Lync 2013
Netflix
Office Lens
PC Remote
Twitter
WinRunner
There are of course more apps that would make it into the cut and the development of new apps go blazing fast so just because your favorite app right now only exist for Android or IOS that will change in a near future. I think we will see a fast changing map now that Microsoft owns the phone division of NOKIA and can make the momentum for devices and solutions that would attract new users that most likely could have been stuck with an iPhone before..
So when you are going to change device next time, think twice and look at the Lumia phones!
Today I was just checking my tweets and saw that the PowerShell team had released a new build of the Windows Management Framework v5, this time its the September build and it works only on Windows Server 2012 R2 or Windows 8.1 and if you have a previous version that was released in july of the v5 you have to uninstall that first and then you can install this version
