Tag: Windows Server 2008 R2

KB2752183 – Cannot Migrate A W2008 R2 Hyper-V VM From Non-Bulldozer Host To Bulldozer Host

Microsoft has posted a hotfix for a scenario where you cannot migrate virtual machines from a host with one kind of AMD CPU (non-Bulldozer) to another host with a Bulldozer CPU. 

  • You configure a Windows Server 2008 R2-based computer as a failover cluster node.
  • You perform a live migration of a Hyper-V virtual machine from a source node to a destination node.
  • The source node is located on a computer that has an AMD processor that was released earlier than the Bulldozer family of processors. For example, the computer has an AMD Opteron 6100 series processor.
  • The destination node is located on a computer that has an AMD Bulldozer processor. For example, the computer has an AMD Opteron 6200 series processor.

In this scenario, the migration fails, and you receive a message that states that the destination node is incompatible.

This issue occurs because the AMD 3DNow! technology is deprecated in the AMD Bulldozer family of processors. However, Hyper-V virtual machines incorrectly use the AMD 3DNow! technology when they are in compatibility mode.

A supported hotfix is available from Microsoft.

Thinking About Cloud, Self-Service, and Hyper-V Dynamic Memory

I’ve been doing some thinking about how to configure Dynamic Memory (DM) in a Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V cloud.  One of the traits of a cloud is self-service.  And that’s why some thought is required.

If you’re not familiar with Dynamic Memory, then have a look at the paper I wrote on the feature as it was in W2008 R2.  Then take a few minutes to update your knowledge of the changes to DM in WS2012. 

I’ve previously stated that you had to be careful with the Startup RAM setting in a cloud/hosting scenario.  The guest OS can only see the high-water mark of allocated RAM since the VM booted up.  For example:

  • A VM is configured with 512 MB Startup RAM and 8 GB Maximum RAM
  • The VM boots up and the guest OS sees 512 MB RAM
  • The DMVSC integration component starts up
  • Pressure for RAM increases in the guest OS and maybe the VM increases to 768 MB
  • Pressure reduces and the VM is now using 612 MB

Imagine a customer who owns this VM, logs into it, downloads the SQL installer and runs setup.  Setup will fail because the installer requires 1 GB of RAM for SQL to run.  The guest OS can only see 768 MB – the high water mark since the VM booted up.  That’s a helpdesk call.  Now scale that out to hundreds or thousands of VMs.  Imagine all the helpdesk calls.  Sure; you’ve saved some money on RAM, but you’ve had to hire more people to close calls.  Trust me … no wiki or knowledge base article will sort it out.  I’ve been on the hosting service provider side of the fence and I’m a hosting customer too Smile

So my advice for W2008 R2 was to set Startup RAM to be 1 GB of RAM.  Sure, lots of VMs remain idle in a cloud – you’d be amazed how many might never be logged into, even if there is a monthly invoice for them.  You’ve reduced the helldesk calls but you’re still using up RAM.

Enter Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V (and Hyper-V Server 2012) …

We have a new setting called Minimum RAM, allow a VM to balloon down to below the Startup RAM when the VM is idle.  All that idle RAM returns back to the host for reuse.  How about this now:

  • The VM is configured with 1 GB RAM Startup RAM and 8 GM Maximum RAM
  • Minimum RAM is set to 256 MB
  • The VM powers up with 1 GB RAM, goes idle and balloons down to 320 MB RAM
  • After a week, the customer logs into the VM, attempts to install SQL Server.  The RAM high-water mark is 1 GB and the SQL setup has no problems.

No helldesk calls there!  And it’s done without the loss of performance associate with RAM over-commitment and second level paging.

The Great Big Hyper-V Survey of 2012 Has Launched

You can participate in the survey HERE.

 

Just over a year ago, we asked people to answer 80 questions about their intentions and implementations of Hyper-V and System Center in The Great Big Hyper-V Survey of 2011. We learned a lot about how people were using Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and System Center 2007-2010.  Back than, we knew just 2 things about Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and System Center 2012 was still pre-release.  But now, both are generally available, and we want to learn about:

  • Have you learned about these new technologies?
  • Do you already use them?
  • Are you planning on using them?
  • How do you plan to use them?

Once again, this is a completely independent survey, run by 3 MVPs (me, Hans Vredevoort, and Damian Flynn), and Microsoft has had no input or involvement. They might help us promote it – because we do know that our findings were read by them and some of the information was a surprise for them.

The goal of the survey is to learn. We’re all bloggers and speakers and we want to deal with what’s relevant. You’re interested in seeing what other people are doing. We all want to learn from each other and we learned a lot last year.

This is a perfect time to speak – if Windows vNext development is like that of Windows Server 2012, then they’ll be spending the next 10-12 months talking, learning, etc. And the same might happen post-SP1 for System Center 2012.

So we ask you to:

  • Respond to the survey and answer all the questions.  There are 72 questions.  I know, it’s a lot but there’s a lot of stuff to ask about.  We’ll only be using complete responses.
  • Share the survey with colleagues, customers, on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, LinkedIn, MySpace, or whatever work-related social network you are on.  We got an amazing response last year and we want to beat that.  The more responses we can use, the more reliable the data will be.

Thank you in advance for taking the 10-15 minutes to respond to the survey.

BTW, we don’t ask for or want any personal data or email addresses. No individual response will be shared.  We will only be sharing aggregate information, e.g. X people responded with Y answer.

The survey will close on October 31st.

 

You can participate in the survey HERE.

 

KB2744129 – Cannot Run Windows 8 Or Windows Server 2012 VM In Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V

Microsoft released an update to deal with an issue where you cannot run a Win8-based or WS2012-based virtual machine on W2008 R2 Hyper-V.

Assume that you have the Hyper-V server role installed on a computer that is running Windows Server 2008 R2. You create a virtual machine that is running Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 on the computer. However, you experience one or more of the following issues:

  • The virtual machine stops responding. 
  • You receive a Stop error message, and the computer restarts. This behavior stops all running virtual machines together with the computer.

The issue occurs because the Hypervisor does not handle the one-shot synthetic timer correctly.
Note The one-shot synthetic timer is also known as the aperiodic timer.

There is a publicly available update that you can download to resolve this issue.

New AD Replication Status Tool

Microsoft has released a new Active Directory replication diagnostics tool called ADREPLSTATUS.  Features include:

  • Auto-discovery of the DCs and domains in the Active Directory forest to which the ADREPLSTATUS computer is joined
  • “Errors only” mode allows administrators to focus only on DCs reporting replication failures
  • Upon detection of replication errors, ADREPLSTATUS uses its tight integration with resolution content on Microsoft TechNet to display the resolution steps for the top AD Replication errors
  • Rich sorting and grouping of result output by clicking on any single column header (sort) or by dragging one or more column headers to the filter bar. Use one or both options to arrange output by last replication error, last replication success date, source DC naming context and last replication success date, etc.)
  • The ability to export replication status data so that it can be imported and viewed by source domain admins, destination domain admins or support professionals using either Microsoft Excel or ADREPLSTATUS
  • The ability to choose which columns you want displayed and their display order. Both settings are saved as a preference on the ADREPLSTATUS computer
  • Broad OS version support (Windows XP -> Windows Server 2012 Preview)

Check out the original blog post by Microsoft to learn much more.

Broken AD replication has proven to be a bit of a curse in the past. I’m amazed at how many sites (not small ones either) don’t monitor this stuff, relying on cheapware ping-based monitoring rather than the application-layer monitoring of something like System Center 2012 – Operations Manager.  They end up with fragmented AD, all sorts of weird crap happening, etc.  If you’re a consultant in a site and you’re deploying/configuring something with a reliance on AD, then here’s a handy warning sign: the customer “approves” security updates manually, and the last update to their PCs/Servers was the most recent Service Pack for the OS (usually for Windows XP).  Take a little time and check the AD replication status before you proceed Smile

Note that this new tool does not support Windows Server 2000 – that’s long since left extended support.

KB2710487 – Error 1359 & Cluster Service Stops In W2008 or W2008 R2 Failover Cluster

Microsoft released a hotfix for failover clustering on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2. 

Assume that you set up a failover cluster in a Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 environment. However, after the Cluster service runs for a long time (for example, 100 days), the service stops. Additionally, the following error is logged in the Cluster event log:

Workitem callback threw exception: InternalError(1359)’ because of ‘internal error'(Reply to can only be invoked for messages sent by Mrr component).

This issue occurs because the value of the Multicast-Request-Reply (MRR) ID changes to -1. This value cannot be processed.

A supported hotfix is available from Microsoft.

KB2738482 – W2008 R2 Cluster Validation Indicates Unsigned ACOIPMI Driver

A new KB article for Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Cluster validation was posted overnight. 

When you run the Failover Cluster Validation Wizard, the report indicates that one or more nodes contain an unsigned acpipmi.sys driver. However, the actual driver is a signed driver. The validation warning message may resemble the following:

The node ‘node1.contoso.com’ has unsigned drivers.

Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Power Meter Device SYSTEM 6.1.7601.17514 6/21/2006 12:00:00 AM Microsoft acpipmi.inf ACPIACPI000DPMI Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Power Meter Device

This issue occurs when the acpipmi.inf file is missing from the C:WindowsInf folder. The reason why the acpipmi.inf file is missing has not been determined.

To resolve this issue, follow these steps:

  1. On a server that is running the same version of Windows Server 2008 R2, has the same architecture, and the same version of Windows Server 2008 R2 service pack installed, locate the acpipmi.inf file in the following folder:

    C:WindowsInf

  2. Copy the acpipmi.inf to a flash drive or to a network share.
  3. On the server that is experiencing this issue, copy the acpipmi.inf file into the following folder: C:WindowsInf

KB2715472: Virtual Machine Configuration Resources Online Failure During Migration or Startup

Microsoft has just posted a new KB article for a clustered Hyper-V host scenario:

Assume you have a 4 nodes Hyper-V cluster with more than 200 Virtual machines and 10 physical network adapters installed on the cluster node, each virtual machine is configured with 2 virtual network adapters; if you start 50 virtual machines on a single node at the same time or you failover 50 virtual machines to another node, you will find virtual machine configuration resources fail to be online after pending state.

When a virtual machine configuration resource is online, multiple WMI queries will be sent to query the network properties. The number of queries is decided by the number of virtual machines in the cluster and physical network adapters on the cluster node. In the scenario described in Symptoms section, it takes more than 10 minutes for all virtual machine configuration resources online. However, the default resource deadlock timeout is 5 minutes, so you will see resource online failure due to timeout.

The solution is:

Change the virtual machine configuration resource DeadlockTimeout and PendingTimeout value. The exact value depends on the cluster environment.

Microsoft Is a Virtualisation Leader – Gartner

I saw something about this last week but didn’t pay much attention until this morning.  Gartner has ranked Microsoft as a leader in their Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure.

Figure 1.Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure

They are just behind VMware.  Here’s the fun bit: this is based on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and System Center “2007” versus vSphere 5.0.  Wait until they get a load of System Center 2012 and Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.

The cautions that Gartner have for the Microsoft platform are all compete and market awareness based, rather than technical.  And whereas Microsoft have gone for heterogeneous in System Center 2012, Gartner has a caution about the homogeneous virtualisation nature of VMware’s management/cloud vision … customers are concerned about vendor lock-in.

Roll on next year.  By the way, who owns Netscape now?

Altaro Blog Post – Hyper-V Guest Design: Fixed vs. Dynamic VHD

I still encounter people who are confused by the disk options in Hyper-V.  Altaro have updated their blog with a post, discussing the merits of passthrough (raw) disk, fixed VHD, and dynamic VHD and it’s worth a read.  Being a storage company, it’s worth paying attention to their observations.

Further to their notes I’d add:

  • Windows Server 2012 adds a new VHDX format that is 4K aligned and expands out to 64 TB (VHD max is 2040 GB and VMDK is 2 TB).
  • Storage level backup cannot be done using passthrough disks so you have to revert to traditional backup processes.
  • Passthrough disks lock your VM into a physical location and you lose flexibility.
  • Advanced features like snapshots and Hyper-V Replica cannot be implemented with passthrough disks.
  • In production I always favour Fixed VHD over Dynamic.  However, I can understand if you choose Dynamic VHD for your OS VHDs (with no data at all) and place these onto a dedicated CSV (with no data VHDs on it) – assuming that data VHDs are fixed and placed on different CSVs.

Have a read of the Altaro post and make up your own mind.