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.
I ran into the SAME problem…Clustering with SCVMM is VERY easy, but it didn’t install the Admin Tools…very odd to leave those out…
I agree!
There’s a lot of things missing from SCVMM… CSV Cache configuration, NIC Binding orders for hosts, CSV Network selection… the list goes on.
Would be nice if there was a CAU plug-in for ConfigMgr, that would make patching a lot easier!
Agreed. I’d also like to see much more control over QoS.
The Hyper-V Powershell Cmdlets should also be enabled during VMM bare-metal builds (for those critical troubleshooting times).
I find VMM update management can do much the same of CAU, yes there are a few clicks (or shift-clicks) but its fairly easy to create baselines up to date (remembering to patch one month behind so you, Hans, and co can find the odd nasty patch!)
Please read above.