Month: April 2014

Microsoft News Summary-29 April 2014

There is a lot of reading material this morning.

Microsoft Withdraws Update Rollup 2 for System Center 2012 R2 DPM

Why do I tell people not to deploy update rollups until they are one month old? This is why. I have been told that the fix for DPM 2012 R2 UR2 is not a permanent fix, but more like a hack for a short term solution that you will have to repeat.

Microsoft has been forced to pull UR2 for DPM 2012 R2.

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This is a complete mess. It appears that the problems we have been seeing with quality since System Center 2012 SP1 are continuing to cause trouble for customers.

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Microsoft News Summary-28 April 2014

And here’s the news from over the weekend:

KB2927313–Hyper- VM Won’t Start Because The Security ID Structure Is invalid (0x80070539)

Microsoft posted a new support article for when a virtual machine cannot start – The security ID structure is invalid (0x80070539). This affects Hyper-V on WS2012, WS2012 R2, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1.

Symptoms

Starting an imported virtual machine under Hyper-V sometimes fails with an error message that states “The security ID structure is invalid (0x80070539)”.

Cause

This issue is caused when a virtual machine is moved from one environment to another, and Hyper-V cannot remove an invalid security ID from the virtual machine configuration as part of the import operation.

Resolution

A user can reset the state of security IDs in the virtual machine configuration by adding a new, valid user ID. To do this, you will need to:

  1. Open an administrative PowerShell command window
  2. Run: Grant-VMConnectAccess -VMName "Name of VM that is not starting" -UserName "Domain and username of the current user"

The virtual machine should now be able to start successfully.

 

Microsoft News Summary–25th April 2014

Here’s the Microsoft news from over the last 24 hours.

BTW, there’s now some thought that a Microsoft Surface Mini tablet might appear soon. Amazon accidentally put up an item for a 3rd party tablet cover for such a tablet. TechEd or the week after in May would be good timing for such a release. At TechEd they could probably have 3 hour lines and sell 5000+ of them.

Microsoft News Summary–24 April 2014

Here’s some interesting bits from the last few days that I have not blogged:

Other Places To Find My Online Activities

In case you are wondering, I am not blogging everything I come across. Anything that is focused in my key interest areas goes on here. But there are LOTS of other things, and those lots of other things would take up an entire life to blog.

Others have done a good job blogging so why would I waste effort duplicating what they have already done. I tweet as @joe_elway and that’s where you will see everything that I recommend. I’ll link to news, System Center, security, news, and odd-ball stuff. And occasionally, I’ll go off one one Smile

I am also doing a lot of writing and blogging for the Petri IT Knowledgebase. You’ll find 2 long tech articles, 2 op-eds, and 6 KB articles, mainly on Microsoft virtualization and related areas, every month on Petri. My tech stuff has been “back to basics”.

No – I have not stopped writing on this site. This blog continues to be my primary place to write. It is a little quiet lately because there is not much new to write about. I’m continuing to add stuff about fixes, and you’ll continue to find articles on things I’ve learned in the lab or in the field.

I suspect we’ll have new product announcements at TechEd Europe in October (for the alleged “Threshold” releases in April) so expect the pace to pick up then! And I’ll be at TechEd USA next month and I’ll be doing my usual live blogging there. My focus will be anything hybrid cloud – there’s no point in me attending classic WinServ sessions because they were all done last year in one form or another.

Failed to load ClusterAwareUpdating module on "<Node Name>"

I did a rebuild of the Hyper-V hosts in the lab at work last week. I pushed out a bare metal install of the new ISO for WS2012 R2 with “The Update” (April 2014). I used SCVMM 2012 R2 UR1 to push out the image to the iDRAC cards on the Dell R420 hosts. Afterwards I used SCVMM to cluster the two hosts.

I don’t like SCVMM’s patching system – it’s very SMS 2003 R2, requiring waaaay too much clicking every month. I much rather use Failover Clustering Cluster Aware Updating (CAU). I fired up Failover Cluster Manager (FCM) on my central administration machine, and tried to configure CAU self-updating. And I couldn’t because I kept getting this error:

Failed to load ClusterAwareUpdating module on "<Node Name>"

Hmm. It took me a moment or two, and then I knew what was wrong. SCVMM enable Hyper-V OK. And it enables Failover Clustering. But SCVMM does not install the Remote Administration Tools … and that means the PowerShell module for Failover Clustering was missing from both of the hosts. There was no way to configure CAU on the hosts because the requierd PowerShell cmdlets were missing.

Into Server Manager and I enabled the following feature: Remote Server Administration Tools > Feature Administration Tools > Failover Clustering Tools. Now the cmdlets were there and CAU was fine.

Dear SCVMM, please enable the administration bits (or give us an option to do it) when you enable roles/features. Your patching sucks and FCM is much better at it.

IT Pros In Ireland Can Win Xbox One Or Nokia 520 For Evaluating Windows Server or System Center

Microsoft Ireland is running a promotion in the months of April, May, and June for people in Ireland who download and evaluate either Windows Server 2012 R2 or System Center 2012 R2. Download any of the ISOs or VHDs for WS2012 R2 or SysCtr 2012 R2, or even use an Azure trial using the above links.

Once you do that you’ll get an email from Microsoft (check your junkmail folder). Send that email as an attachment to appireland@microsoft.com and send your feedback on the product in less than 140 characters. Alternatively, tweet a screenshot of your download with your live ID to @IEITPRO with this text:

Hey @IEITPRO I just downloaded #WindowsServer2012R2 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/evalcenter/dn205286

Each month through to the end of June 2014 someone will win an Xbox One and someone will win a Nokia 520. You can find terms and conditions here. Remember this is open only to residents of the island of Ireland.

GPT Protective Partition Prevents Creation Of Storage Spaces Storage Pool

I was working on a customer site today on a new JBOD & Storage Spaces installation. It should have been a pretty simple deployment, one I’ve done over and over.  But a simple step couldn’t be done. When we tried to build a new Storage Pool (an aggregation of disks for Storage Spaces) the primordial pool and the blank disks would not appear in Server Manager or in Failover Cluster Manager. PowerShell was no use either.

My first suspects were the LSI SAS cards. After much troubleshooting we found no solution. And then, I was mucking about in Disk Management when I saw something. I could bring disks online but they came up with strange behaviour, especially for new disks.

The disks came online as GPT disks, without any initialization being done by me. And the disks were … read only. They actually had a status of GPT Protective Disks.

A quick google later and I had a fix:

  • DiskPart
  • List Disk
  • Select Disk X
  • Clean
  • Repeat

With a bit of work I could have probably PowerShelled that up.

What do I think the cause was? The JBOD manufacturer supplied the disks. A part of their offer is that they’ll pre-assemble the kit and test the disks – no two disks from the same production run are made equal, and some are a lot less than capable. I think the tests left the disks in a weird state that Windows interpreted as being in this read only position.

The clean operation fixed things up and we were able to move on.