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Earlier this week, I had the privilege of living through a living hell whereby I was wondering what exactly would happen when our development engineering team had to figure out how to rebuild 53+ virtual machines hosted on a Failover Cluster with Clustered Shared Volumes (CSV) enabled.  The first...

In our group, we have several highly-available sets of clusters that service various needs.  We have one cluster dedicated to running our Team Foundation Services (TFS) and all the System Center management infrastructure to support all clusters.  These clusters include our Development teams...

As I’ve started exploring System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2012 , the first task I took as an action item is to learn how to configure active management for our engineering EMC Clariion AX4-5 .  I’ve personally been slacking a bit in getting VMM 2012 up & running.  As you probably...

We recently had a change take place in our engineering lab that included a large set of layer 3 changes (IP, VLANs , Subnets, etc.) that caused us some downtime.  Although most of the issues are well documented, I found though that there was one that simply plagued me in finding the resolution. ...

As is usual for many of my posts, I like to document things that become somewhat as a “reference” for me because I know I will forget it.  The one side benefit to this is the fact that many of you might be looking for similar documentation.  This is a win-win for us – so let’s do this together...

There are often times where you have a need to expand a LUN when running enterprise systems.  This is a trivial action in most cases because you simply add physical drives to the array and then use Disk Management to extend the drive to encompass the newly expanded volume.  Unfortunately, on...

It is possible, albeit an edge case, that you have both clustered (highly available) and non-clustered virtualization farms in your data center. You’ve got your virtual machine (VM) configurations and hard disks stored on Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) and your non-clustered VMs stored elsewhere (potentially...

As many of you already know, Microsoft is preparing for next week’s Management Summit 2010 in Las Vegas . This is a great event, not only for his content but also its incredible knowledge transfer capabilities. As a team member in the greater Management & Services Division (MSD) at Microsoft I can...

You often do your job of “planning” for your virtualization farm well in advance of when you can realistically foresee the amount of storage you will need. If you like me, you often take the amount of known needed space and you triple it – shh, don’t tell management. This technique works great until...

I recently had a Windows Server 2008 R2 server running the Hyper-V role with some Internal NICs created for private “sandboxing” of some VMs. After adding some additional virtual machines to utilize the Private NICs, I was up and running. This turned out to be a temporary situation until we put another...

Recently, I had a server that I had to forcibly evict from our Hyper-V Cluster farm due to some downtime for hardware failures. Instead of having it serve as offline, I simply migrated the clients off before the failure occurred using System Center Virtual Machine Manager R2’s Maintenance mode. Then...

You’ve recently had a request to add a few virtual machines to your Clustered Hyper-V farm and you’ve obliged them and created it using SCVMM’s administrator console.  You’ve created the network as a “Local Only” meaning that the VMs can communicate with each other as well as the Parent partition...

My secondary job is to maintain our engineering lab (part of the mantra of “Do More with Less”) as we don’t have anyone dedicated to this role.  This lab is running completely virtualized minus our SQL infrastructure which is running on a 2-node Failover cluster since so much of our infrastructure...

In today’s post, I thought I would share some insight into how to effectively migrate to Storage Area Network’s (SAN) after you’ve already got an SCVMM environment up and running.  You found yourself with several Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V hosts and you were moving along with very little issues;...

As I’ve mentioned several times, we run our engineering lab on much of the latest & greatest.  There are many who would argue that this is a luxury (one afforded to those who work at a Software company such as Microsoft) and I wouldn’t have a solid argument against their argument.  However...