Virtual Machine Management : Windows Server 2008 R2

Taking advantange of Windows PowerShell Remoting and VMM cmdlets

mlmich — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 18:50:00 GMT

Even though VMM does not officially support the Windows PowerShell Remoting feature of PowerShell v2, you can get this to work by following the guidelines in this blog post. Officially, to execute the VMM cmdlets you need to install the VMM Administrator...(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)

SCVMM 2008 R2 RC Public Release Available Now!

mlmich — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 02:45:00 GMT

hi all, today the VMM team released VMM 2008 R2 Release Candidate. You can read all about it here. http://blogs.technet.com/scvmm/archive/2009/06/06/scvmm-2008-r2-rc-public-release-available-now.aspx Cheers....(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)

New features in VMM 2008 R2

mlmich — Mon, 11 May 2009 20:49:00 GMT

In line with the Rapid Provisioning feature that i mentioned in my previous blog post, Vishwa, a PM from our team, just posted a comprehensive list of new features of VMM 2008 R2. Check it out here: http://blogs.technet.com/scvmm/archive/2009/05/11/scvmm-r2-rc-features.asp...(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)

Using the VMM Self Service Portal from a Win7 computer

mlmich — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 01:49:00 GMT

We have seen a lot of cases of customers trying to view the Virtual Machine Manager Self-Service Portal (SSP) UI from a computer running Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7. If the portal is running VMM 2008, it is likely that you can't view the connections...(read more)

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