I like the idea of maintenance mode in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2. You simply put a host into maintenance mode and it uses Live Migration to flush all the VM’s to the most suitable hosts in the cluster. Intelligent placement ignores that host until maintenance mode terminates. You can then work away on it, e.g. patch it or do hardware maintenance.
The first time I tried it in anger in production I forgot to set maintenance mode in OpsMgr. As you can expect, a few alerts went out and my boss contacted me pretty quickly. That’s because VMM maintenance mode has nothing to do with Operations Manager’s maintenance mode. OK – I’ll have to remember that from now on.
On a tangent: we patch almost everything automatically on a scheduled basis. Scripts run on a scheduled basis to trigger maintenance mode. That prevents most of the noise but still some gets through. Our Hyper-V hosts are patched manually. Live Migration enables this to be done during the day.
I watched the System Center Influencers (only) demo of the Virtual Machine Servicing Tool V3.0 beta the other evening. It adds functionality to patch clustered W2008 R2 Hyper-V hosts in an automated scheduled basis. Sweet! It uses VMM to put each host, one at a time, in VMM maintenance mode and patches it. Immediately I asked about OpsMgr. There is no integration.
So I asked the question of MS and Michael Michael (MS VMM teams and author of Mastering Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2) responded with a solution. There is an OpsMgr 2007 and 2007 R2 management pack that will detect VMM 2008 R2 maintenance mode on your VMM server. It will use this to put the relevant host into maintenance mode in OpsMgr. Nice!
I’ve yet to test this so I cannot say how successful it will be. I also don’t know if it will do anything to quieten down the Failover Clustering management pack which will create some noise when a clustered host reboots. It should be noted that the developer provides it as is with no support statements. That means it is not an official MS product. Test it before you use it.