Bug in VMM 2012 SP1 disconnect VM nic after cold migration?

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:

Screen Shot 2013-11-08 at 14.42.38

But still inside the VM it said not connected,

Screen Shot 2013-11-09 at 08.33.35

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:

Screen Shot 2013-11-08 at 14.42.09

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.

 

New free Windows Server 2012 R2 book released

Today Microsoft Press released a free book about the features in Windows Server 2012 R2 written by Mitch Tulloch and the Windows Server Team. The book goes through the new features in the latest release and gives you as an IT PRO an oversight and quickly get familiar with the different areas of improvement from the 2012 to R2.

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The book can be downloaded at this link 

The book starts with the Cloud OS vision that is all about mobility and that microsoft already with the 2012 release described, the possibility to move between the different clouds.

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VMware to Hyper-V Migration with Netapp shift and MAT

I have been doing some seminars and presentations on the subject of migration from VMware. My latest seminars was with my colleague Kristian Nese and we were in Stockholm, Oslo and Trondheim talking about the cloud os, the new features in Hyper-V 2012 R2 and System Center VMM 2012 R2 and also migration and the different tools. After the summer camp at Microsoft I did a blog post about my customisations of the MAT that was running with MVMC and my way to solve the IP addresses and after my blog post there have come an updated version of the MAT that do handle the NIC.

If you plan to do a migration and just happens to be one of the lucky guys that have a Netapp box with Data ONTAP 8.2 in Cluster Mode in your VMware environment you can use the MAT for shift that can be found on the gallery. It utilizes the NetApp Data ONTAP PowerShell toolkit and the features in the Netapp storage that converts the vmdk files to vhdx right in the storage and boy do that save migration time as you do not have to move loads of data for your large VM´s over the network and then convert them at the target. As the Netapp software is so intelligent it does not write over the old data and you can quite easily go back if you find any issues after the migration.

Building Clouds have a blog post and Migration Mark has done a funny movie that can be watched on Youtube that explains the procedure and how fast it is!

Hope to start a project really soon with a Netapp customer 🙂

Convert to generation 2 on a VM in Hyper-V 2012 R2 with Powershell

I have done blog posts about why you should create your new VM´s with Windows Server 2012 instead of 2008 R2 or older even if you were not able to create them with the generation 2 at that time as the Windows 2012 R2 was not released back then.

I also did a blog post how to use a third party product to do the migration from generation 1 to 2 with Double Take Move software.

Now I found John Howards script that he has made public that does the migration from generation 1 to 2 🙂 He also has a blog series about generation 2 VM´s that is definitely worth the time to check out.

I got an error when running it though and it seems that it does not work so good with the partition on the gen 1 virtual disk..  It appears that when I have created my virtual machine with the Convert-WindowsImage.ps1 script that only creates one partition the row in the script that checks for $partitions.length fails and I could not get it to continue but when I commented that away I got my first conversion on the way 🙂

Screen Shot 2013-10-30 at 20.40.59

And here you can se in the PowerShell ISE my alteration  🙂

Screen Shot 2013-10-30 at 22.15.58

Now I am sure that John and his team will work and distribute new versions with correct error checking and I am truly glad that they have released this so I could test it right now anyway 🙂 !!

Here is my VM in generation 1

Screen Shot 2013-10-30 at 21.50.07

And here is the converted VM,

Screen Shot 2013-10-30 at 22.21.34

And here you can see that during the conversion that I have two disks attached to my server and that the one at the bottom has got some new partitions for the gen 2 UEFI boot process

Screen Shot 2013-10-30 at 22.15.03

Happy converting and making generation 2 VM´s your standard in Hyper-V

SC VMM 2012 SP1 UR4 – fixes the Cluster resource bug

I have on my blog done a post about how the VMM 2012 Sp1 not updated the cluster resource when doing Live Storage migration from one CSV volume to another in a Hyper-V cluster and now in the Update Release 4 of VMM 2012 SP1 they have finally fixed it!

Here you can see the Issue 13 that has been fixed

Screen Shot 2013-10-29 at 23.08.44

Also as in Issue 15 there was stuff left after a canceled or failed migration

Screen Shot 2013-10-29 at 23.09.00

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 🙁

vmmos

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.

Strange Creation Date on Hyper-V 2012 R2 VM

I have some VM´s on my new Windows 2012 R2 host that have a strange creation date on the properties.

The VM´s have been created on different times and it was a customer that noticed it.

quite fun as there was not computers or even Hyper-V invented in the 17 century or was it? 😉

Here is my lab/demo VMM 2012 R2 virtual machine and as you can see it is created the 1 of january 1601

WOWAn

 

and here is the other virtual machine, a windows 8 template

Screen Shot 2013-10-29 at 21.59.33

 

I have not been able to reproduce it now with either PowerShell or via the GUI, If you have seen the same issue please comment the post 🙂