Virtual Machine Management : Hyper-V

How to properly share ISO files in VMM with Hyper-V

mlmich — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 23:20:00 GMT

In this blog post, I will talk about what is the proper way to share ISO files with VMM and Hyper-V when the ISO files reside in the VMM library (i.e. a file server share). First, you need to follow Jose Barreto's blog post on how to properly enable constrained...(read more)

SCVMM 2008 R2 Release Date

mlmich — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 23:12:00 GMT

hey guys, If you are wondering when VMM 2008 R2 will release, this latest blog post by Rakesh will give you the inside track. http://blogs.technet.com/rakeshm/archive/2009/07/13/scvmm-2008-r2-release-date-information.aspx cheers....(read more)

How to get data (like the integration services version) from Msvm_KvpExchangeDataItem in Hyper-V

mlmich — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:12:00 GMT

Today, if you are using VMM, you can quickly and easily find out if your VM has the integration components installed by using this simple PowerShell script. << PS D:\Windows\system32> get-vm | select name, hostname, hasvmadditions, vmaddition...(read more)

Utilizing Virtualization and boot-from-vhd for making a dual-boot laptop

mlmich — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 05:20:00 GMT

I received my brand new Dell Latitude E4300 laptop today and I wanted to make sure i could boot both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 on it. Here is how virtualization came in handy. Instead of partitioning my laptop using two partitions (one for...(read more)

Rapid Provisioning in VMM 2008 R2 using the UseLocalVirtualHardDisks and SkipInstallVirtualizationGuestServices flags

mlmich — Thu, 07 May 2009 13:46:00 GMT

At MMS 2009, our team announced a new feature of VMM 2008 R2 called Rapid Provisioning. This feature is not available in VMM 2008 R2 beta, but it will be available in the upcoming release candidate and in the RTM version. This feature was implemented...(read more)

How to detect if your hardware can run Hyper-V

mlmich — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:29:00 GMT

The Virtualization Detect (DetectVp.EXE) tool is the logo test for checking if the system meets the requirements for Microsoft Virtualization Software. This test checks virtualization support for both Intel and AMD processors.

You can find this tool here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd424588.aspx

Issues with adding a host to VMM when the computer has more than 16 processors

mlmich — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:58:00 GMT

It has come to our attention that trying to add a computer with more than 16 processors (for example a quad six-core machine with 24 processors) is crashing the VMM server with the following exception:

System.InvalidOperationException: Nullable object must have a value.

at System.Nullable`1.get_Value()

at Microsoft.VirtualManager.Engine.Adhc.WindowsHostDataProperties.GetProcessorData()

at Microsoft.VirtualManager.Engine.Adhc.WindowsHostDataProperties.PopulateProperties()

From a Hyper-V perspective we support up to 24 cores (requires a QFE http://blogs.msdn.com/taylorb/archive/2008/09/23/24-core-support-for-hyper-v-hosts.aspx). We have a few workarounds for VMM to work in this case (either do #1 or implement #2 and #3):

You can limit the number of CPUs via msconfig to 16 (we know this solution is not ideal in this case, but wanted to document it anyway)
Go to BIOS, then navigate to Advanced Setup>Clustering Mode and set it to Physical (default is Logical)
Use Bcdedit to add USEPHYSICALDESTINATION and set to YES. This forces the physical APIC to be used.

cheers.

Trying to add Windows Server 2008 R2 as a host to VMM 2008?

mlmich — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 22:59:00 GMT

we have several customers that tried to add a Windows Server 2008 R2 as a host in VMM 2008.

Our team has not validated that R2 will work with VMM 2008 and it is officially not supported. However, for the few of you that tried to add a Windows Server 2008 R2 Core edition as a host in VMM and failed, you need to first enable WOW64. This is needed for Hyper-V on R2. To do that, run this command from the hyper-v server.

ocsetup ServerCore-WOW64

Once that is done, try to add this host in VMM again and that should work.

Before you run the command above, you could get the following errors when trying to add this host under management:

Error (410)

Agent installation failed on <servername>.

(Not enough storage is available to process this command (0x8))

The windows installer service could not be accessed. This can occur if you are running Windows in safe mode, or if the Windows Installer is not correctly installed....

VMM vNext will have full support for Windows Server 2008 R2. We will have announcements about that release in the next few weeks.

Running the Virtual Machine Manager server component inside a Virtual Machine

mlmich — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 22:16:00 GMT

Running VMM inside a Virtual Machine is a fully supported way of running VMM. Our team tests this scenario and we have some customers deploying VMM in such an enviroment. If you would like to deploy VMM in such an environment, it is recommended to place the SQL server in a separate server, especially if your environment size will be substancial. SQL server can either be on a physical machine or on a virtual machine. Guidance on running SQL server as a virtual machine on Hyper-V can be found here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/d/9/4/d948f981-926e-40fa-a026-5bfcf076d9b9/SQL2008inHyperV2008.docx.

Because the VMM server component does not offer any high availability options, you can't make VMM a highly available application. However, there is a way to accomplish that by running VMM inside a Hyper-V Virtual Machine that is highly available. That way, when that VM fails over to another host, the VMM server fails over as well and can survive a hardware failure on the source host. This is a supported configuration for VMM. However, there are some gotchas that you have to be careful of in this scenario:

Make sure you don't migrate the Virtual Machine VMM is residing on from within VMM. This will fail the task and kill the VMM service in the process.
As per my comment above, the same restrictions on the DB apply here as well. Keep SQL in a remote server. SQL can also be clustered for high availability.

By keeping the VMM component inside a VM that is highly available, it means that on failover the VMM server's name and identity are left intact. Users can still connect to it and the host machines will authenticate the same server, so everything from a VMM perspective will work the same.

Update: With VMM 2008 R2 and Hyper-V R2 in Win2k8 R2, we are able to add two more scenarios to running the VMM server inside an HA VM:

Now the VM containing the VMM server can be live migrated from one host to another without any loss of service and no Jobs will fail
If you have installed the Administrator Console to a remote machine, it will not lose connection to the HA VM containing the VMM server during the live migration

Azman permissions for VMM-managed Hyper-V hosts

mlmich — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 21:18:00 GMT

When VMM starts managing a hyper-v host, it takes full control of the Azman XML file that contains the permissions for Hyper-V. In fact, VMM will create a new copy of the file in a separate directory location and point hyper-v to that file (the file name is HyperVAuthStore.xml and is located inside the installation folder of VMM).

This, however, has some implications to 3rd party software that also want to have privileges to execute WMI calls against Hyper-V (if, however, this 3rd party software runs as local system or as a local administrator then everything works fine :) ). When VMM creates this new file, the only permissions listed are the ones VMM knows about and are as follows:

VMM Administrators are given full access to the VM/Hyper-V, including console access to the VM
VMM Delegated administrators have no access to the VM or Hyper-V
End User Role members are given console access to the VM if their User Roles has this privilege defined

This means that any privileges defined in the old Azman file will be lost once VMM takes control of the host. Every 30 minutes, VMM will also run a refresher that will update this file and ensure that the only privileges to VMs are the ones that VMM knows about. However, if any 3rd party software makes any changes to role definitions or role memberships in the root scope of the file, VMM will preserve them. So if you want to integrate with a VMM managed Hyper-V host, you can make your changes as listed above after VMM takes control of the host and VMM will preserve them.

In the next release of VMM, we are making a few changes in this area. Instead of ignoring all changes from the AZMAN XML file when we add a host in VMM, we will instead import any role definitions and role memberships from the root scope of the existing XML file (initialstore.xml) and add them to HyperVAuthStore.xml's root scope. No other scopes will be preserved.

When you remove a hyper-v host from management, in VMM 2008 we will revert the pointer from HyperVAuthStore.xml to initialstore.xml (or whatever the previous azman store was for hyper-v). This means that any changes made to HyperVAuthStore.xml while this host was under management in VMM are lost. You will need to ensure that the proper privileges are applied after the fact.

In the next release of VMM, we will solve this problem as well, making sure that any changes made to the root scope of HyperVAuthStore.xml are preserved during the removal of a host from management. The root scope changes are the only privileges that will be left behind for Hyper-V.

To find our the current Azman file that Hyper-V uses, you can query this registry key on the Hyper-V host: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Virtualization\StoreLocation

Getting an error when trying to connect to a VM using the Virtual Machine Connection tool

mlmich — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 02:59:00 GMT

If you are trying to connect to a Virtual Machine using VMConnect.exe (a Hyper-V tool), you might get an error that says "An error occured when trying to register for IME events for ....." and it indicates that an Access Denied has occured. If this happens, it is possible that the cause is DCOM configuration. Open DCOMCNFG, click on my computer, properties, COM security, click on Access Permissions limits, and make sure that Anonymous Logon has Remote Access enabled.

Hyper-V Server 2008 is now available

mlmich — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:09:00 GMT

Are you wondering when to use Hyper-V Server 2008? This product is a great choice for customers who want a basic and simplified virtualization solution for consolidating servers as well as for dev/test environments. For more information on this product, visit www.microsoft.com/hvs

How to get the BIOS GUID from a Hyper-V VM

mlmich — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 06:13:00 GMT

Hi all, the below vbscript (save as sample.vbs and execute using "cscript.exe sample.vbs"), will give you a list of all VMs in a hyper-v system as well as their respective BIOS GUIDs. This can help in troubleshooting VMM 2008 beta for the cases where more than 1 VM on the same hyper-v host is having the same BIOS ID.

Option Explicit
Dim WMIService
Dim KvpComponents
Dim VMList
Dim VMSettingList
Dim VM
Dim item
Dim setting
Dim component

'Get instance of 'virtualization' WMI service on the local computer
Set WMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\.\root\virtualization")
'Get all the MSVM_ComputerSystem object
Set VMList = WMIService.ExecQuery("SELECT * FROM Msvm_ComputerSystem")
For Each VM In VMList
if VM.Caption = "Virtual Machine" then
WScript.Echo "========================================"
WScript.Echo "VM Name: " & VM.ElementName
WScript.Echo "VM GUID: " & VM.Name
WScript.Echo "VM State: " & VM.EnabledState

' Now get the BIOS GUID for this VM
Set VMSettingList = WMIService.ExecQuery("SELECT * FROM Msvm_VirtualSystemSettingData")
For Each setting In VMSettingList
   Dim tempVMname
   tempVMName = "Microsoft:" + VM.Name
   if setting.InstanceID = tempVMName then
    WScript.Echo "VM BIOS GUID: " & setting.BIOSGUID
   end if
Next
end if
Next

Ports being utilized by VMM 2008

mlmich — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:45:00 GMT

Before our official documentation for VMM 2008 comes out, I wanted to outline for everyone all the ports that VMM 2008 RTM will use (almost all of these are the same for beta). Some of these ports are configurable during VMM setup – for those ports, I listed the default option.

SQL ports required by VMM:

Port 1433 for remote SQL instance

Port 1434 for SQL browser service

VMM server ports required:

Port 80 for Windows Remote Management (wsman)

Port 443 for BITS

Port 8100 for WCF connections to PowerShell/GUI

VMM Agent (host or library) ports required:

Port 80 for wsman

Port 443 for BITS

Port 3389 for regular RDP if you are connecting to a VM from the VMM Administrator Console on a PC that is not running Win2k8 or Vista SP1

Port 2179 for glass console view of VMs (VMConnect.exe equivalent) for Hyper-V hosts (this is where you connect to a VM by RDP’ing to the host)

Port 5900 for VMRC on virtual server hosts

Virtual Center ports required by VMM:

Port 443 for VI

ESX 3.0, 3.5 ports required by VMM:

Port 443 for VI

Port 22 for SSH

ESX 3.5i ports required by VMM:

Port 443 for VI

Hyper-V is now RTM

mlmich — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:47:00 GMT

Hyper-V is now RTM and you should be able to find it on Microsoft Download Center shortly. This is a great release and the cornerstone for Microsoft's virtualization efforts. If you are wondering how VMM 2008 beta and Hyper-V will play together, read this blog post by Rakesh. http://blogs.technet.com/rakeshm/archive/2008/06/26/hyper-v-is-released-and-what-that-means-for-scvmm-beta.aspx

The press release for Hyper-V is here http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2008/jun08/06-26hyperv.mspx