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We recently had a situation with our System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) that literally frustrated the crap out of me.  Don’t take that wrong, the product didn’t really cause the frustration instead it was the mis-use of the libraries in 2012 that did .  You see, you live &...

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...

As you already know, Windows 8 Consumer Preview hit the market just over a week ago.  The 1 million downloads in the first day sheds some light on the demand and I’m sure that many of you are clambering to get it on your devices and find out what all the buzz is about.  Same here. The risk...

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...

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. ...

In the past two posts , I’ve focused on the first two capabilities provided in the Configuration Manager Physical-to-Virtual Migration Toolkit .  The primary scenario for this toolkit is to offer customers the ability to virtualize their physical servers when they don’t readily have System Center...

During a ask-the-experts at Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2011 in Las Vegas, a customer asked a question of how to utilize Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010 Update 1 to install Windows Server 2008/R2 and enable the Hyper-V role .  The customer had tried several things but to no avail as...

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...

Recently, I was doing some Hyper-V physical hosts moving and I found that one Hyper-V host getting managed by VMM got in a state whereby it found itself “sick.”  I describe sick meaning that Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 (VMM) could no longer manage the host (who was actually getting managed by...

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...

There are situations, especially when running your virtual infrastructure on Storage Area Networks (SANs), that you are unable to effectively delete a virtual machine.  There are many reasons why your VM is no longer needed such as you’ve moved to another farm or you simply don’t need the virtual...

Recently, I had the unfortunate task of moving the System Center VMM Database off of a SQL cluster over to a stand-alone version of SQL 2008 SP1.  This sounds extremely simple though it is unfortunate that it isn’t quite as simple as it possibly could be.  In this blog, I thought I would share...

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...

I recently was privy to a situation whereby an individual (this person’s identity is concealed to protect the innocent) realized that a virtual machines dynamically expanding disk simply wasn’t large enough.  This person realized this during some upgrades to key components running on the server...

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...

Recently, I had a rather simple demo for an audience that required me to have multiple systems running simultaneously and at different phases of a 2 hour migration to Windows 7.  The original plan of attack was to use a single base image, Windows XP SP2, and create differencing disks for each of...

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...

I spent most of my secondary schooling fearing the library. I didn’t want nor have time to read as I was busy socializing and when I wasn’t at school I didn’t want to think about reading. Fast forward a number of years and you will find that, oddly, I’m in love with the library and pretty fond of the...

The primary thing that took some digging up when starting to use System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 was understanding of Network Locations & Tags. There is a great blog on this topic but I want to make sure that we extend this a bit taking into account yesterday’s post of enabling of VLAN...

A few months ago I was scrambling around trying to locate documentation on this feature called “VLAN” trunking. You see, we had this environment that we did our engineering testing in that consisted of multiple VLANs all serving various purposes and we needed an efficient way to get VMs on the network...