Cristian Edwards

Validating Hyper-V 2012 and Failover Clustering Hotfixes and updates with Powershell - Part 2

Cristian Edwards — Fri, 31 May 2013 09:06:53 GMT

Hello again!

During the last week I did some test with the script and I realize that is not handy to type a bunch of server names when you need to analyze big Clusters, so i decided to create a V2 of the script specifically for Clusters. I think this will like to lazy people like me that hates to type 16 servers names when all of them belong to the same cluster.

This V2 script only requires the name of the 2012 Hyper-V Cluster you want to analyze and automatically will collect the hotfixes from all nodes and will compare with the list already mentioned in my last post. http://blogs.technet.com/b/cedward/archive/2013/05/24/validating-hyper-v-2012-and-failover-clustering-2012-hotfixes-and-updates-with-powershell.aspx

Here is the V2 script that only requires the Cluster Name

June 6th 2013 UPDATE: XML files have been updated to include the latest changes and updates from the wiki site.

HyperVCluster2012UpdatesCheck.zip

And here is the code. Enjoy!

        1: param

       2: (

       3:     [parameter(mandatory=$True)]

       4:     $ClusterName

       5:     

       6: )

       7:  

       8: #Getting current execution path

       9: $scriptpath = $MyInvocation.MyCommand.Path

$dir = Split-Path $scriptpath

  

#Loading list of updates from XML files

  

[xml]$SourceFileHyperV = Get-Content $dir\UpdatesListHyperV.xml

[xml]$SourceFileCluster = Get-Content $dir\UpdatesListCluster.xml

  

$HyperVHotfixes = $SourceFileHyperV.Updates.Update

$ClusterHotfixes = $SourceFileCluster.Updates.update

  

#Getting installed Hotfixes from all nodes of the Cluster

  

$ClusterNodes = Get-Cluster $ClusterName |Get-ClusterNode

  

foreach($Node in $ClusterNodes)

{

$Hotfixes = Get-HotFix -ComputerName $Node |select HotfixID,description

  

Write-Host "COLLECTING HOTFIXES ON HYPER-V HOST: " $Node -ForegroundColor Yellow

Write-Host "Listing Hyper-V 2012 Hotfixes" -ForegroundColor Yellow

foreach($RecomendedHotfix in $HyperVHotfixes)

{

        $witness = 0

        foreach($hotfix in $Hotfixes)

        {

                If($RecomendedHotfix.id -eq $hotfix.HotfixID)

                {

                    Write-Host "--------------------------"

                    Write-Host "Hyper-V Host: "$Node

                    Write-Host $RecomendedHotfix.Id "installed" -ForegroundColor Green

                    write-host $RecomendedHotfix.Description

                    Write-Host "--------------------------"

                    $witness = 1

                 }

        }  

        if($witness -eq 0)

        {

            Write-Host "--------------------------"

            Write-Host "Hyper-V Host: "$Node

            Write-Host $RecomendedHotfix.Id "not installed" -ForegroundColor Red

            write-host $RecomendedHotfix.Description

            Write-Host "--------------------------"

        }

  

}

  

Write-Host "Listing Failover Cluster 2012 Hotfixes" -ForegroundColor Yellow

  

foreach($RecomendedClusterHotfix in $ClusterHotfixes)

{

        $witness = 0

        foreach($hotfix in $Hotfixes)

        {

                If($RecomendedClusterHotfix.id -eq $hotfix.HotfixID)

                {

                    Write-Host "--------------------------"

                    Write-Host "Hyper-V Host: "$Node

                    Write-Host $RecomendedClusterHotfix.Id "installed" -ForegroundColor Green

                    write-host $RecomendedClusterHotfix.Description

                    Write-Host "--------------------------"

                    $witness = 1

                 }

        }  

        if($witness -eq 0)

        {

            Write-Host "--------------------------"

            Write-Host "Hyper-V Host: "$Node

            Write-Host $RecomendedClusterHotfix.Id "not installed" -ForegroundColor Red

            write-host $RecomendedClusterHotfix.Description

            Write-Host "--------------------------" 

        }

}

}

Validating Hyper-V 2012 and Failover Clustering 2012 Hotfixes and updates with Powershell

Cristian Edwards — Fri, 24 May 2013 13:44:17 GMT

Hi! I know I didn’t write anything for a long time but now I am back again. The good thing about this long “silence” on my blog is that I’ve been really busy helping customers to deploy Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. This is awesome because the general feeling is that this version is probably the best Hypervisor on the market today. Of course this is a personal opinion and may be influenced by the fact that I work for Microsoft, but it is also true that probably now is the first time I can say it proudly.

Today I want to share with you a really simple Powershell script that detects if your Hyper-V 2012 hosts have installed the updates listed on the TechNet Wiki site that the Product group is updating regularly. The Wiki Site is this one : http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/15576.hyper-v-update-list-for-windows-server-2012.aspx

Also, the same Powershell script detects if the Failover Cluster 2012 updates listed on this KB article are installed http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2784261. This KB article is also maintained by the PG, so I really encourage you to add both links in your favorites.

UPDATE: Carlos Mayol from our PFE Virtualization team pointed me to this Wiki article as well. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/15577.list-of-failover-cluster-hotfixes-for-windows-server-2012.aspx, so I’ve updated the Cluster XML file to also check these hotfixes . Thank you Carlos ;)

June 6th 2013 UPDATE: XML files have been updated to include the latest changes and updates from the wiki site.

HyperV2012UpdatesCheck.zip

The script load 2 XML files content with the list of the hotfixes for Hyper-V and Cluster (I decided two keep them separate for consistency) and then compares this list with the installed hotfixes on your Hyper-V host. I will keep the XML files up to date so come back here for the latest version in the future. The current version of the script includes hotfixes listed on May 24th 2013.

The output is simple and you will quickly see if you need to install some of them or your hosts are up to date. (Please read if the hotfix applies to your environment based on the comments from the links mentioned before)

One last thing! You can specify more than one server to analyze separating the names with “comas” but will require to have permissions to collect the information remotely. The last consideration is that you must unzip the XML and the PS1 files on the same folder. The script will load the XML files content from the current path of the script.

You can download it from here:

The syntax to execute the script is

"c:\folder\HyperV2012UpdatesCheck.ps1 server1,server2,serverX..”

And here you have the code in case you want to take a look before running it.

        1: param

       2: (

       3:     [parameter(mandatory=$True)]

       4:     [String[]]$HyperHostName

       5:     

       6: )

       7:  

       8: #Getting current execution path

       9: $scriptpath = $MyInvocation.MyCommand.Path

$dir = Split-Path $scriptpath

  

#Loading list of updates from XML files

  

[xml]$SourceFileHyperV = Get-Content $dir\UpdatesListHyperV.xml

[xml]$SourceFileCluster = Get-Content $dir\UpdatesListCluster.xml

  

$HyperVHotfixes = $SourceFileHyperV.Updates.Update

$ClusterHotfixes = $SourceFileCluster.Updates.update

  

#Getting Hotfixes installed on the specified Hyper-V Host

  

foreach($VMHost in $HyperHostName)

{

$Hotfixes = Get-HotFix -ComputerName $VMHost |select HotfixID,description

  

Write-Host "COLLECTING HOTFIXES ON HYPER-V HOST: " $HyperHostName -ForegroundColor Yellow

Write-Host "Listing Hyper-V 2012 Hotfixes" -ForegroundColor Yellow

foreach($RecomendedHotfix in $HyperVHotfixes)

{

        $witness = 0

        foreach($hotfix in $Hotfixes)

        {

                If($RecomendedHotfix.id -eq $hotfix.HotfixID)

                {

                    Write-Host "--------------------------"

                    Write-Host "Hyper-V Host: "$VMHost

                    Write-Host $RecomendedHotfix.Id "installed" -ForegroundColor Green

                    write-host $RecomendedHotfix.Description

                    Write-Host "--------------------------"

                    $witness = 1

                 }

        }  

        if($witness -eq 0)

        {

            Write-Host "--------------------------"

            Write-Host "Hyper-V Host: "$VMHost

            Write-Host $RecomendedHotfix.Id "not installed" -ForegroundColor Red

            write-host $RecomendedHotfix.Description

            Write-Host "--------------------------"

        }

  

}

  

Write-Host "Listing Failover Cluster 2012 Hotfixes" -ForegroundColor Yellow

  

foreach($RecomendedClusterHotfix in $ClusterHotfixes)

{

        $witness = 0

        foreach($hotfix in $Hotfixes)

        {

                If($RecomendedClusterHotfix.id -eq $hotfix.HotfixID)

                {

                    Write-Host "--------------------------"

                    Write-Host "Hyper-V Host: "$VMHost

                    Write-Host $RecomendedClusterHotfix.Id "installed" -ForegroundColor Green

                    write-host $RecomendedClusterHotfix.Description

                    Write-Host "--------------------------"

                    $witness = 1

                 }

        }  

        if($witness -eq 0)

        {

            Write-Host "--------------------------"

            Write-Host "Hyper-V Host: "$VMHost

            Write-Host $RecomendedClusterHotfix.Id "not installed" -ForegroundColor Red

            write-host $RecomendedClusterHotfix.Description

            Write-Host "--------------------------" 

        }

}

}

Listing all your VHD and VHDX files from your Hyper-V Clusters in Windows Server 2012

Cristian Edwards — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 23:09:04 GMT

Hi again,

In my last post I explained how to list all your virtual disks from one standalone Hyper-V Host. Today I want to give you an example of how to get all your virtual disks information from all your Hyper-V hosts that are part of a cluster.

Powershell in Windows Server 2012 is amazing and with this small script you can quickly get the information

$nodes = Get-ClusterNode

Foreach($node in $nodes)

$VMs=Get-VM -ComputerName $node.name

foreach($VM in $VMs ){Get-VHD -ComputerName $node.Name -VMId $VM.VMId}

The ouput will be the same as the last script for standalone Hyper-V hosts, but you can filter by those attributes that may be relevant for you instead of dumping all the information. For example

$nodes = Get-ClusterNode

Foreach($node in $nodes)
{
    $VMs=Get-VM -ComputerName $node.name
    foreach($VM in $VMs )
    {
        $vm.VMName
        Get-VHD -ComputerName $node.Name -VMId $VM.VMId | ft vhdtype,path -AutoSize
    }

}

Note:

Constrained delegation for CIFs will be required if your virtual disks are stored on SMB shares to make this script work. If not, the script will only list those virtual disks of the host from where you are running the script and will give you an Access Denied for the other hosts.

Stay tuned. After christmas I will blog how to get this information using WMI.

Merry Christmas and Happy 2013!

Listing all your VHD and VHDX files from your Hyper-V Hosts in Windows Server 2012

Cristian Edwards — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 22:17:06 GMT

Hello Hyper-V fans!

As you know, Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V is available since past October and comes with hundreds of new features and improvements. Today I want to give you a small bite of what you can do with the new native PowerShell module for Hyper-V that includes more than 300 cmdlets. Nowadays, all of you that are using Hyper-V, probably have an increasing number of VMs with their own virtual disks that may be difficult to track or remember where they are stored. Of course we can go to each VM on the Hyper-V Manager and check the settings of the virtual disks to see where they are and what type of VHD or VHDX…. But this can be annoying and time consuming right? So here is all what you need to do to get a complete list of all your virtual disks in your Hyper-V hosts in Windows Server 2012.

· Step 1: Open Powershell or the new Powershell ISE console

· Step 2: Type the following commands

$VMs=Get-VM
foreach($VM in $VMs ){Get-VHD -VMId $VM.VMId}

The output of this command will enumerate all your virtual disks of all your VMs in your Hyper-V host and will also give detailed information about each of them. Here is an example of the output of one VHDX file in my lab.

Hope that it was useful and see you in my next post.

Cheers,

Cristian Edwards

Hyper-V Management Pack Extensions RTM released

Cristian Edwards — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 00:18:14 GMT

Hello,

I am glad to announce the RTM release of the Hyper-V Management Pack Extensions for Hyper-V. The main purpose of this custom Management Pack for Hyper-V is to extend the official Management Pack and provide performance monitoring. Note that this management pack is not supported by Microsoft but it was created with the help of several engineers to guarantee an accurated performance monitoring. I want to give and special thank to Diego Martinez Rellan and Kevin Holman who help me to develop most part of the MP.

Installation Requirements:

SCOM 2007 R2 with CU5 (http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26938)
Windows OS Management Pack 6.0.6958.0 (http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=9296)
Hyper-V Management Pack (http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=14268 )
Cluster Management Pack (http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=2268)

Features:

Live Migration failures monitoring
Per Logical Processor Monitoring
Per Virtual Processor Monitoring
Per VM Dynamic Memory Monitoring
Per VHD Monitoring
Per Physical and Logical Disk Monitoring
Hyper-V Virtual Networks monitoring
NUMA remote pages monitoring
SLAT enabled processor detection
Physical and Logical Disk monitoring
Host Available Memory monitoring
Stopped and Failed VMs monitoring

You can download the MP here:

http://hypervmpe.codeplex.com/releases/view/83609

Tree summary view on SCOM 2007 R2:

Happy new year and stay tuned for what is coming with W8 and SCVMM 2012

Cristian Edwards — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 10:14:07 GMT

2011 is finishing and I am really happy to see how Microsoft Virtualization is being consolidated and adopted by thousands of customers around the globe. 2012 promise to be an exciting year with the launch of Windows Sever 8 and SCVMM 2012 so let me give you 2 recommendations:

Be sure to take your time to learn these coming products. A lot of features and architecture designs have changed and need to be re-learn

Try to follow the Product Groups blog posts because a lot of interesting information is already there

An small piece of what is coming can be found on Thomas Roettinger new blog http://blogs.technet.com/cloudytom

Enjoy 2012!

New Virtualization PFE blog

Cristian Edwards — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 22:39:15 GMT

Hello virt community,

Today I am happy to announce that a great resource was born few days ago. The World Wide Virtualization PFE team decided to share experiencies and best practices to the Virtualization Community. It’s going to be a nice resource plenty of collaborations of talented people.

I am lucky to be one of the contributors so now you can also follow me at:

http://blogs.technet.com/virtualpfe

My first contribution talks about Hyper-V VHDs alignments and the content is here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/virtualpfe/archive/2011/08/08/hyper-v-virtual-machine-vm-partition-alignment.aspx

Enjoy!!!!

Hyper-V Networking Optimizations part 6 of 6 (Monitoring Hyper-V Network consumption)

Cristian Edwards — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 06:44:36 GMT

On this last post I am going to talk about what counters should be used to monitor the Network performance of your Virtual Machines, your Virtual Switches and your Physical Network Adapters. Performance monitor is a very powerful tool that is included OOB with Windows and can be used to figure out if your Networking Stack is saturated or not.

Monitoring the physical layer

The first place where you may want to take a look is at the Physical layer. This can be done using the already known \Network Interface\ Performance object counter. This object has several counters inside that will show us if our physical adapter is saturated or not and how much traffic is handling. The reason why we should monitor this counter even when talking about Hyper-V is because this counter tell us the total throughput of the hardware and if this counter shows some kind of bottleneck we should think on adding more physical NICs or load balance the workloads. (i.e. separate network traffic from different VMs across different physical NICs that are used by Hyper-V External networks )

The most relevant counters of this object are:

\Network Interface(*)\Bytes Total/sec

This counter indicates the total input and output bytes per second. You can use the next table as the limit reference depending on the speed of the adapter.

\Network Interface(*)\Current Bandwidth

This counter indicates the speed of your physical network adapters. This will depend on the adapter speed and the physical switch network speed. If your NIC is a 10GB NIC but the switch where is connected only works at 1GB this counter will show 1GB as the bandwidth of your adapter.

\Network Interface(*)\Output Queue Length

Indicates the length of the queue in packets. This counter should be 0 at all times. If for some reason this counter is above 0 you may want to follow the steps from this blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/yongrhee/archive/2010/07/07/network-interface-output-queue-length-values-extremely-high.aspx

Monitoring the Virtual Switch layer

The second place where we can monitor Hyper Network traffic is at Virtual Switch level.

You should be aware that Hyper-V permits to create 3 different kinds of networks with their respective Virtual Switches.

External Network will require a Physical NIC to be created.

Internal Network will not require any Physical NIC but will create a logical adapter in your host

Private Network will not require any physical NIC and will be used only by VMs.

So if you want to monitor how much traffic is sent and received across your virtual switches you can use the following counters. Each Virtual Switch will have they own counters.

Hyper-V Virtual switch\Bytes/sec

This counter indicates the total bytes per second (received and sent) on all ports of your Virtual Switch.

Hyper-V Virtual switch\Bytes received/sec

This counter indicates the total bytes received per second on all ports of your Virtual Switch.

Hyper-V Virtual switch\Bytes sent/sec

This counter indicates the total bytes sent per second on all ports of your Virtual Switch.

There are other interesting counters inside the Hyper-V Virtual Switch Object but are for other reasons rather than capacity and consumption.

Note that this counter may show the double consumption compared with the \Network Interface\Bytes Total/sec because it counts the Input and Output traffic of each port. If a Virtual Machine that is connected to an External Switch is sending 1000 bytes/sec this will means that the Virtual Switch is seeing 1000 bytes/sec on the port where the VM is connected and also 1000 bytes on the port of the switch that is connected to the external world.

Monitoring the VM layer

Finally you can monitor the exact amount of network traffic that is using each of your VMs. This is really useful because helps you to understand what VMs are consuming more bandwidth and when, so you can balance your VMs across your switches if needed and also give you a central point to monitor the network utilization baselines of each VM.

Depending if your virtual machines are using synthetic, legacy or both network adapters you should use the following counters. Each VM will have they own counters:

Hyper-V Virtual Network Adapter\Bytes/sec

This counter indicates the total bytes received and sent of the selected VM

Hyper-V Virtual Network Adapter\Bytes received/sec

This counter indicates the total bytes received of the selected VM

Hyper-V Virtual Network Adapter\Bytes sent/sec

This counter indicates the total bytes sent of the selected VM

Hyper-V Virtual Legacy Network Adapter\Bytes sent/sec

This counter indicates the total bytes sent of the selected VM

Hyper-V Virtual Legacy Network Adapter\Bytes received/sec

This counter indicates the total bytes received of the selected VM

Note that the Hyper-V Legacy Network Adapter is a little bit tricky because you have to SUM both counters if you want to know to total amount of network utilization.

You can use the following thresholds as reference for all network counters mentioned above except for Current Bandwidth, and the Output Queue length counters from Network Interface object.

Healthy: less than 60%

Warning: between 60% and 80%

Critical: more than 80%

Now that you are familiar with this counter let’s show you a possible workflow to troubleshoot or detected network bottlenecks on your Hyper-V hosts or your Virtual Machines

Hyper-V Networking Optimizations part 5 of 6 (Features compatibility matrix)

Cristian Edwards — Tue, 31 May 2011 13:53:52 GMT

Once you have configured each feature on your Hyper-V Servers maybe you are wondering how they interact with each other.

In the following table you are going to see how each feature interacts with others under Windows Server 2008 R2. As I already blogged before, WS2008 R2 add some features like VMQ support, but also expands features like Chimney and Jumbo Frames to the VMs.

You can read the table through the columns or through the rows. The result will be the same. I don’t want to forget to mention that this table depends directly on the manufacturers drivers and maybe some restrictions or incompatibilities are already fixed with the latest drivers. I encourage you to send me any update that you are aware that can modify the table content.

This second tables shows you the same compatibility matrix but now for Windows Server 2008 RTM. (with or without SP2). In this case there are features like Chimney and Jumbo frames that will be only available at parent partition level.

I hope this can be useful to quickly define what features are you looking for and how they will interact with other advanced network optimizations for Hyper-V. Again, please send me any update or information that can modify these table contents because each new driver affects the content directly.

See you in the last series post…. maybe at the end of june

Hyper-V Networking Optimizations part 4 of 6 (Jumbo Frames)

Cristian Edwards — Thu, 05 May 2011 14:03:12 GMT

One network optimization that we can configure on Hyper-V are the Jumbo Frames. Although we can take benefit of Jumbo Frames on different scenarios the most common use is to optimize iSCSI network traffic. This traffic is often used to connect the Hyper-V hosts to the SANs but can also be used to connect SAN LUNs directly to the VMs (Passthrought disks).Depending on your scenario you will need to configure the above parameters on the Hyper-V host, inside the VMs or at both levels.

The table below is focused on Intel and Broadcom network adapters but maybe you will need to speak with your vendor if you are using other NIC models. The first setting defines the maximum MTU packet size at OS level on the specified NIC and is 1500 by default. The second setting is to enable Jumbo Frames at NIC driver level and each vendor have their own configuration. You will find specific information for each vendor on the listed links inside the table.

Note that Jumbo Frames feature inside VMs was introduced with Hyper-V R2. Don’t try to find or enable Jumbo Frames feature inside Hyper-V v1 VMs because will not be available.

Finally remember to validate that Jumbo Frames are enabled and working on the SAN, on the physical switch, at OS Level (first setting from the table) and at NIC level (second setting from the table).

You can find more information about MTU on the following document:

TCP/IP Registry Values for Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=12AC9780-17B5-480C-AEF7-5C0BDE9060B0&displaylang=en

Jumbo Frames

NIC adapter Level feature

Collector Script = AdvancedNet_Features.ps1

THIS SETTING MUST BE CONFIGURED ON PARENT PARTITION and/or INSIDE VMs

Command to validate MTU config:

netsh int ipv4 sh int

Command to change MTU config:

netsh interface ipv4 set subinterface "Local Area Connection X" mtu=9000 store=persistent

(the MTU value is 9000 in this example but can be different based on your needs)

THESE REGISTRY KEYS MUST BE CONFIGURED ON PARENT PARTITION and/or INSIDE VMs

Registry Key for Broadcom NICs

"\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class

\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\xxxx\*JumboMTU"

Broadcom Jumbo frames Settings

Registry Key for Intel NICs

"\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class

\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\xxxx\*JumboPacket"

Intel Jumbo Packet settings