Richard talks to Rodney Buike about how System Center 2012 facilitates the construction of private clouds. This is where System Center all comes together – utilizing Configuration Manager, Operations Manager, Virtual Machine Manager, Service Manager and Orchestrator to create effective private cloud infrastructure in your own data center. Rodney talks about how each of the System Center components work together to simplify the deployment of services – beyond the individual VM and into a suite of VM, networking rules, storage, etc. Each of the System Center products bring something to the table in this scenario. You should already be using them for their core purposes, now take it to the next level!
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While at TechDays in Toronto, Richard talks to Rodney Buike about virtualizing desktops. Rodney digs into how Citrix’s XenDesktop can let you use Windows 7 applications on your iPad! The conversation also explores the use of application virtualization to minimize storage use and simplify software updates, as well as an approach to using desktop virtualization to keep older workstations up and running for longer. VDI is coming of age, and Rodney digs into how to get things done. In a typical Hyper-V R2 cluster built on Microsoft’s best practices will have 6-8 NICs depending on the SAN type (iSCSI or FC) including:
One common issue that comes up in this scenario is failed Live Migrations, Quick Migrations will work but live ones will not. When you attempt a Live Migration and it fails due to “A cluster network is not available for this operation” it is caused by improper NIC Binding Order on the Hyper-V Hosts. When this happens two events are created in the Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V High Availability\Admin event log on the destination server. Look for EventID 21126 and 21111
Your first thought will be to check that all the cluster resources are online and you will find they are. When this happens you need Continue reading Live Migration NIC Binding I recently completed a project converting a clients production network of 70+ servers to virtual machines for a lab environment. SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1 was used to perform a physical to virtual conversion of all the physical servers. While the large majority converted without any issues at all there were a few errors encountered along the way that were easy to fix. VSS Writer did not respond within the expected time interval – Error 13243
This was an interesting error that came up twice and both times the fix was the same. While the error looks like an issue with VSS it is actually a profile issue. When I attempted to log on to the server to investigate the VSS issue the logon would fail with a User Profile Could Not Load error. I’ve seen this before on desktop PCs when the user Continue reading Common P2V Conversion Errors When you are deploying new VMs with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 you have the option to mount an ISO image to install the OS from. When you do this the default behaviour is to copy the ISO file from the library to the location where the VM is being created. This causes two things to happen, first you have to copy the ISO over the network and second you end up losing that storage space as the ISO remains in the VM file location. SCVMM allows you the option to share the ISO rather than copying it. While the data in the ISO still gets copied over the network during the install, the ISO isn’t saved to the VM file location and in the long run this will save you some space.
To implement this you need to configure some Continue reading Sharing ISOs in SCVMM Library System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and Operations Manager 2007 R2 can be integrated to provide reporting and a feature called Performance Resource Optimization (PRO). Using PRO, Operations Manager will pass alerts raised in relation to the virtualization hosts and/or VM(s) to the Virtual Machine Manager console through something called a Pro Tip.
Implementing PRO and reporting is pretty straight forward but before you start add the SCVMM Service Account to the SCOM Advanced Operators role as it will require permissions to SCOM. Once complete insert the SCVMM install media into your SCOM server and run the SCVMM Setup.
Select Configure Operations Manager. You will need to provide some basic information including the SCVMM servername, service account credentials and the tool will install the SCVMM Management Console on the server as well as importing the SCVMM 2008 R2 management packs. (Note: You will have Continue reading Using Pro Tips in SCVMM 2008 R2 Sorry for the alphabet soup title but I thought some explanation was due in regards to iSCSI redundancy options and issues you may have with IPv6. Multi-path I/O (MPIO) and Multiple Connections per Session (MCS) are two options you have to provide load balancing and redundancy to your iSCSI connections. MPIO and MCS are the same but different. MPIO leverages Device Specific Modules (DSM) to manage the requests over multiple paths. MCS is part of the iSCSI protocol and allows for teaming of iSCSI connections. In order for this to work your SAN vendor must support it and your virtualization platform must support it as well. VMWare supports MPIO but not MCS and Hyper-V supports both. Whichever you choose is not relevant but there is something you should be aware of in regards to MCS. MCS does not support using both IPv4 and IPv6 with the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator. If you have IPv6 Continue reading MPIO, MCS, IPv6 and iSCSI System Center Virtual Machine Manager uses a service account to complete it’s tasks. You can use LOCAL SYSTEM, which is the default, or a domain account. If you are going to integrate SCVMM with SCOM and enable Performance Resource Optimization (PRO) you will need to use a domain account. Even if you are not going to implement PRO at this time, use a domain account. The domain account does not need any special permissions other than Local Administrator rights on the SCVMM server and it needs to be given priviledges in SCOM. Now here is why you want to do this at the start, even if you are not implementing PRO at this time. Even if you never plan on it, one day you might change your mind and the only way to change the VMM Service Account is to uninstall VMM Continue reading SCVMM Service Accounts I recently posted a set of articles on deploying Citrix XenDesktop. XD can use Hyper-V R2 and SCVMM R2 as it’s virtualization and management layer but doing so does require a few configuration changes to SCVMM for optimal performance. While not mandatory they will ease management especially as your VDI infrastructure grows. In a large (150+ hosts) environments one of the recommendations is to enable Server Optimized Garbage Collection. Enabling this replaces the default Workstation Garbage Collection and reduces the CPU utilization on the VMM server. Even if you do not have that many hosts in your VDI infrastrucutre it is still recommended to enable this to reduce SCVMM CPU utilization. To enable server-optimized garbage collector (GC) on the VMM server, create a file that is named vmmservice.exe.config place it into the %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Program Files\Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2\Bin directory on the VMM server. The file should contain the Continue reading SCVMM VDI Configuration I know a lot of people using XP Mode to solve app compat issues as they move to Windows 7. It is simple enough to deploy and great for the few user scenarios where you don’t want to deploy MED-V. Managing the XP Mode VMs is an important task and the easiest way to manage it, outside of deploying MED-V, is to join it to the domain. That way you can manage it the same way you manage all the other machines in your domain. Joining the XP Mode VM to the domain is done the same way as any other machine but there are a few permissions that need to be configured to get it to work properly once it has been joined. Because the local user context will be changed from the default local account in XP Mode to a domain account you will need to add Domain Users Continue reading Joining XP Mode VM to the Domain |
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