July, 2014 | Aidan Finn, IT Pro

KB2989384 – Hyper-V Best Practice Analyzer (BPA) Does Not Close

Microsoft published a KB article to help you when the Hyper-V Best Practice Analyzer (BPA) does not exit or appears to hang/crash.

Symptoms

Hyper-V Best Practice Analyzer (BPA) does not exit under the following conditions:

A virtual machine already exists.

The virtual machine is connected to a vhd or vhdx as the hard disk drive. However, the vhd or vhdx file itself is renamed or deleted, and does not exist in reality.

Cause

The PowerShell script as seen here runs internally when running the Hyper-V BPA:

C:\Windows\System32\BestPractices\v1.0\Models\Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V\Hyper-V.ps1

However, due to a defect in the script, the information retrieval process goes into a loop, and the BPA does not exit until timeout.

Workaround

You need to delete the non-existing vhd or vhdx from the virtual machine settings, and then rerun BPA for Hyper-V by following these steps:

Start Hyper-V Manager.

Select the virtual machine that is connected to a non-existing vhd or vhdx, then right-click and open Settings.

From the virtual machine settings window, click on the non-existing hard drive, and then click Delete.

Click OK to close the virtual machine setting window.

Rerun BPA for Hyper-V from Server Manager.

The article claims to apply to Windows Server 2012 (WS2012).

Microsoft News Summary – 30 July 2014

The big news here for MSFT techies are the releases of update rollups for SysCtr 2012 SP1 and SysCtr 2012 R2. Please wait 1 month before deploying to avoid the inevitable issues (history indicates that I am probably right) and use that time to carefully review the installation instructions.

Using PowerShell to Provision Member Servers in Microsoft Azure: How to provision a new member server using a couple of simple commands.
Getting Started with Azure Automation: Automation Assets: What is says on the tin.
New Office 365 admin tools: You can now receive Office 365 service communications in Microsoft System Center by importing the newly available Office 365 Management Pack. And you can integrate Office 365 service communications into your monitoring systems and tools by interfacing with the Office 365 Service Communications API.
How to Setup a Microsoft Azure Virtual Network: This article show you how to setup a Microsoft Azure virtual network and talk about the new Azure point-to-site and site-to-site VPN.
Microsoft Azure Growing Faster than Amazon, IBM, and Google in Cloud Services: A news article I did on Petri.com that also covers Azure in Open Licensing.
Update Rollup 7 for System Center 2012 Service Pack 1: Wait 1 month and read the instructions CAREFULLY before deploying.
Update Rollup 3 for System Center 2012 R2: Wait 1 month and read the instructions CAREFULLY before deploying.
System Center Management Pack for Office 365: Monitor O365 using OpsMgr/SCOM. Through Operations Manager, datacenter admins can monitor the health of their Office 365 subscriptions and provide alerts when subscribed services may be experiencing an outage.
System Center 2012 R2 Management Pack for Virtual Machine Manger Host and Virtual Machine Dashboards: Two new dashboards focused on visualizing resource consumption of virtualization hosts and VMs.
Best Practices for Task Sequences in System Center 2012 Configuration Manager R2: Create and manage SCCM 2012 R2 task sequences using Microsoft best practices.
Avoiding IP Blacklisting with Azure Web Sites: In a multi-tenant environment where customers share a number of IP addresses, it’s not uncommon to have malicious content on a site or two. In some case they may be result of compromise and in other cases this may be intentional. Either way, this can lead to one or more shared IP addresses getting added to the lists of the various black list services that exist on the web. Once a shared IP is blacklisted, this would typically affect innocent sites as well.
Analyst: Cloud Backup Services Should Be a Consideration: Organizations should strategically consider using public cloud services for backup and disaster recovery (DR) scenarios, according to a Tuesday Forrester Research webinar that was sponsored by Microsoft.
MICROSOFT: The (US) Government Has A Sneaky Way Of Forcing Tech Companies To Turn Over Your Emails: Microsoft’s general counsel Brad Smith announced in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Tuesday night that the company will fight a tactic used by the U.S. government to force tech companies to turn over customers’ emails stored on remote servers.

Technorati Tags: PowerShell,Scripting,Azure,Cloud,Cloud Computing,Office 365,Networking,System Center,ConfigMgr,Configuration Manager,Operations Manager,OpsMgr,Deployment,Backup,Microsoft

My Site Appears To Be Healthy Again

I do not know what the root cause of my location-specific outage last Friday was. I know that my Vodafone Ireland broadband at home was affected. I also know that Sky Ireland broadband was affected. But others internationally and the ISPs at work had no issues. It was all very strange … and the problem appears to have sorted itself out today (the following Wednesday).

Anywho, business (and sarcy posts) as normal!

Microsoft News Summary – 28 July 2014

It was a quiet weekend. Note a useful scripts for health checking a Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) by Jose Barreto.

How to Reserve Public Virtual IP Addresses in Microsoft Azure: Using the new feature to reserve a public IP for your cloud service – recommended!
Microsoft Working on Hotfix for Windows Server 2003 Migration Problem: Users sometimes aren’t able to log into their machines under this scenario because of a mismatch between the encryption types used by Kerberos in the two servers.
PowerShell script for Storage Cluster Health Test published to the TechNet Script Center: Storage PM, Jose Barreto, published a PowerShell script to check the health and capacity of a Storage Cluster based on Windows Server 2012 R2 Scale-Out File Servers.
How the Test-StorageHealth.ps1 script checks for Storage Cluster health: How the above script by Jose Barreto works.
Xbox-Produced “Atari: Game Over” Documentary Gets First Trailer: Microsoft has released a trailer for Atari: Game Over, the first part of its documentary series Signal to Noise (out this Fall, despite the closure of Xbox Entertainment Studios).

Technorati Tags: Azure,Networking,Windows Server 2003,Windows Server 2012 R2,PowerShell,Scripting,Scale-Out File Server,Storage,Storage Spaces,Failover Clustering,Hardware

KB2986895 – VMs Lose Network Connection on WS2012 or WS2012 R2 Hyper-V When Using Broadcom 1GbE NICs

If you’re affected by this issue then you should have read this post. Microsoft posted a KB article for when virtual machines lose network connectivity when you use Broadcom NetXtreme 1-gigabit network adapters on Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V or Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V.

Symptoms

When you have Hyper-V running on Microsoft Windows Server 2012 or Windows Server 2012 R2 together with Broadcom NetXtreme 1-gigabit network adapters (but not NetXtreme II network adapters), you may notice one or more of the following symptoms:

Virtual machines may randomly lose network connectivity. The network adapter seems to be working in the virtual machine. However, you cannot ping or access network resources from the virtual machine. Restarting the virtual machine does not resolve the issue.

You cannot ping or connect to a virtual machine from a remote computer.

These symptoms may occur on some or all virtual machines on the server that is running Hyper-V. Restarting the server immediately resolves network connectivity to all the virtual machines.

Cause

This is a known issue with Broadcom NetXtreme 1-gigabit network adapters that use the b57nd60a.sys driver when VMQ is enabled on the network adapter. (By default, VMQ is enabled.)

The latest versions of the driver are 16.2 and 16.4, depending on which OEM version that you are using or whether you are using the Broadcom driver version. Broadcom designates these driver versions as 57xx-based chipsets. They include 5714, 5715, 5717, 5718, 5719, 5720, 5721, 5722, 5723, and 5780.

These drivers are also sold under different model numbers by some server OEMs. HP sells these drivers under model numbers NC1xx, NC3xx, and NC7xx.

Workaround

Broadcom is aware of this issue and will release a driver update to resolve the issue. In the meantime, you can work around the issue by disabling VMQ on each affected Broadcom network adapter by using the Set-NetAdapterVmq Windows PowerShell command. For example, if you have a dual-port network adapter, and if the ports are named NIC 1 and NIC 2 in Windows, you would disable VMQ on each adapter by using the following commands:

Set-NetAdapterVmq -Name “NIC 1” -Enabled $False
Set-NetAdapterVmq -Name “NIC 2” -Enabled $False

You can confirm that VMQ is disabled on the correct network adapters by using the Get-NetAdapterVmq Windows PowerShell command.

Note By default, VMQ is disabled on the Hyper-V virtual switch for virtual machines that are using 1-gigabit network adapters. VMQ is enabled on a Hyper-V virtual switch only when the system is using 10-gigabit or faster network adapters. This means that by disabling VMQ on the Broadcom network adapter, you are not losing network performance or any other benefits because this is the default. However, you have to work around the driver issue.

Get-NetAdapterVmqQueue shows the virtual machine queues (VMQs) that are allocated on network adapters. You will not see any virtual machine queues that are allocated to 1-gigabit network adapters by default.

Sigh. I hope Broadcom are quicker about releasing a fix than Emulex (customers are waiting 10 or 11 months now?).

Technorati Tags: Hyper-V,Windows Server 2012,Windows Server 2012 R2,Networking,Virtualisation

How My Site Went Offline On Friday, July 25th 2014

My site is hosted on Azure in the Dublin (Europe North) region. On Friday morning, I was checking something when I saw my site was not loading correctly – it was either offline or VERY slow. So I check the Azure status and saw it was offline. I restarted the application pool and the problem remained. I rebooted. MySQL took an age to load, but the site was still not loading … from home.

I have endpoint monitoring configured. Notice that Amsterdam was showing an issue and Chicago was not. Strange, eh? I’ve worked in hosting and I know how localised these problems can be. So it was time to start digging.

I asked online and people in Denmark were OK. Folks in Belfast and Netherlands had connection problems. Later, Denmark went offline and Amsterdam came back!

From Home (Vodafone Ireland – very slow/no access) I ran a tracert:

From the lab at work (Magnet ISP – access OK) I had different results:

From a VM with an ISP (Blacknight – access OK) I had different results again:

It was very odd. Nothing was red on the Azure status site. I’m guessing there was a localized issue within Azure that affected just a subset of us, or there was an external routing issue that affected some ISPs.

It’s still like this as I post … in other words, the site is fine for some and offline for others.

EDIT (30/7/2014):

I came home today to find that my site was once again available via my ISP.

Technorati Tags: Azure,Networking

Today’s “Let Me Google That For You” Winner Is Simon Holman

Well done, Simon! You win this award because you:

You asked someone else to do your searching even when the answer is easy to find.
Even when I responded with a LMGTFY response where the first 5 links gave you your answer, you still wanted me to do the clicking and reading for you.
And then you go uppity about it

Heck, 2 of the links were written by Microsoft, one by me, one on Hyper-V.nu and one by Thomas Maurer. We community contributors spend a lot of time writing this stuff. Please don’t expect us to read it to you too.

You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink.

Two New Books By Hyper-V MVPs

Congratulations to my MVP colleagues, Alessandro Cardoso and Benedict Berger on the recent publication of their respective books.

System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Alessandro wrote this second edition book to focus on SCVMM 2012 R2, available from Amazon:

Overview

Create, deploy, and manage datacenters and private and hybrid clouds with hybrid hypervisors using VMM 2012 R2

Integrate and manage fabric (compute, storages, gateways, and networking), services and resources, and deploy clusters from bare metal servers

Explore VMM 2012 R2 features such as Windows 2012 R2 and SQL 2012 support, converged networks, network virtualization, live migration, Linux VMs, and resource throttling and availability

What you will learn from this book

Plan and design a VMM architecture for real-world deployment

Configure network virtualization, gateway integration, storage integration, resource throttling, and availability options

Integrate SC Operations Manager (SCOM) with VMM to monitor your infrastructure

Integrate SC APP Controller (SCAC) with VMM to manage private and public clouds (Azure)

Deploy clusters with VMM Bare Metal

Create and deploy virtual machines from templates

Deploy a highly available VMM Management server

Manage Hyper-V, VMware, and Citrix from VMM

Upgrade from previous VMM versions

Hyper-V Best Practices

Benedict wrote this book, available from Amazon:

This is a step-by-step guide to implement best practice configurations from real-world scenarios, enhanced with practical examples, screenshots, and step-by-step explanations.This book is intended for those who already have some basic experience with Hyper-V and now want to gain additional capabilities and knowledge of Hyper-V.If you have used Hyper-V in a lab environment before and now want to close the knowledge gap to transfer your Hyper-V environment to production, this is the book for you!

Congratulations to both authors!

Before anyone asks – no, I am not planning an update to the WS2012 Hyper-V book. It’s too much work for too little return in too small a window (Windows Server vNext Preview will be announced in October, 12 months after the RTM of WS2012 R2).

Technorati Tags: Books,Hyper-V,System Center,Windows Server 2012 R2