Category: Virtualization

Unsupported Cluster Configuration for Virtual Machines located on SMB Share in VMM 2012 SP1

The last issue I’ve stumbled upon with System Center is with VMM component.

Symptoms

  • You have SCVMM 2012 SP1 UR2 installed
  • You have Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V for hosts
  • You use SMB 3.0 share for storing virtual machines
  • Some or all of your virtual machines does not use FQDN path to their vhd/x files
  • You’ve added your File Server in VMM by FQDN or NetBIOS Name
  • You receive the following error: Error (13924) The highly available virtual machine (VMNAME) is not supported by VMM because the virtual machine uses non-clustered storage.
  • Some or all of your virtual machines show as Unsupported Cluster Configuration

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  • You may also have missing appropriate NTFS permissions on the share

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    Resolution

I’ve managed to resolve this issue by executing the following steps:

1. Make sure you’ve added your file server in VMM by FQDN. If it is not added by FQDN you have to add it.

2. Create new share. You can create it on the same server. Give the share appropriate permissions.

3. Locate the new share in VMM. Add it as storage location to your hosts/clusters.

4. After is added make sure it show green in the properties of the hosts/clusters.

5. Storage migrate all your virtual machines from the old share to new share. For the machines with status Unsupported Cluster Configuration you can change the status to Running by live migrating them trough the Failover Cluster console.

6. After storage migration of each virtual machine refresh it and make sure in the properties of the machine in Status tab all is green.

7. After successful migration of all virtual machines you can remove the old share from the hosts/clusters and delete it from the File Server.

 

I’ve also may had problems with the permissions on the old share but it is easier to create new share than fixing permissions on existing share with running virtual machines.

The information is provided ‘AS IS’ with no warranties and confers no rights. Keep in mind that your case may be similar and this solution may not work for you.

Software I’ve used:

  • Windows Server 2012 with latest updates
  • SCVMM 2012 SP1 UR2
  • File Server with SMB share

Infrastructure-as-a-Service Product Line Architecture Fabric Architecture Guide and Management Architecture Guide

If you are working in one of those companies that are building IaaS there are two guides from Microsoft to help you with the basics. Check them out:

Book Review: Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V: Deploying Hyper-V Enterprise Server Virtualization Platform

These days I’ve managed to get my hands on another Hyper-V book and review it. These book reviews aim to give you more insight so you can make your mind if this book is for you.

The books starts at a very basic level by explaining what is Virtualization and the basic concepts of Hyper-V. After that as usual there is a chapter for planning, designing and implementing so you can  get a grasp on the basic features of Hyper-V. The third chapter is for Hyper-V Replica which is a very popular feature since the release of Hyper-V 3.0. Network and Storage have their own chapters as there are a lot of improvements there. Unfortunately in the Network chapter there is not detailed information about Network Virtualization (NVGRE) which is becoming very popular topic. PowerShell is implemented in every enterprise Microsoft product and because of that the author of the book hasn’t missed to place a chapter about automation with PowerShell. The next three chapters include more advanced content. You can find a chapter on how to use VMM 2012 to manage Hyper-V, a chapter on how to achieve high availability with Hyper-V and a chapter with best practices for securing Hyper-V. The last chapter that you will find in the book is about Backup and Recovery. It is interesting how in real world topic like Backup and Recover is also left last Smile. It may not be the most attractive part of Hyper-V and servers in general but it is something that we should take care good.

As a summary the book aims not so much to show you how to configure a certain feature but more to explain you the capabilities of Hyper-V in order to get most of them in your specific environment. I would recommend the book to engineers who just start to work with Hyper-V 3.0, to engineers who had little experience with Hyper-V 2.0 and now are facing the challenge to migrate to 3.0 and at last but not least to engineers who have been working with “the other guys” and now are converting to Hyper-V 3.0. If you think this book is for you can find in one of the following stores:

Registering Stamp in System Center 2012 Service Provider Foundation

System Center 2012 Service Provider Foundation is a new component introduced in SP1. Actually it is still not with status component because it is included in the installation DVD of System Center 2012 Orchestrator SP1. Nevertheless it seems it will key part of System Center Family. And may be the only reason that is not with status component is probably this product will be developed further a lot more.

So what exactly is SPF?

As you probably know System Center Virtual Machine Manager does not have SDK so SPF is the SDK of VMM. This is of course the short explanation. Basically in order to develop web portal that will expose and interact with VMM data you need some programming language so you can write your code and connect to VMM. As VMM is based on PowerShell developers can actually use PowerShell to do that but PowerShell is not a programing language and this is the problem. Of course there are probably a lot more reasons why PowerShell is not the right way. So Microsoft created SPF that is basically API over a Representational State Transfer (REST) web service and this web service actually uses PowerShell to interact with VMM. REST web service is basically the standard for web services. As I am not developer and I might be in mistake for some of the terms but this is the way I understand it from IT Pro perspective. But the capabilities of SPF doesn’t end here. While the other System Center components have their own SDK each (exception is Orchestrator that have REST web service also) that can be used for developing web portals the SDK isn’t so appealing for web developers. For now SPF currently can be connected to VMM only but there are plans to be able to connect SPF to OpsMgr and DPM. With such plans why not in the distant future see also SPF to be able to connect to Service Manager and Configuration Manager.

With this short description let’s see what is Stamp and how we can connect SPF with VMM?

As there are other people who can describe better than me what is Stamp I will just borrow the description from Technet Wiki:

Management Stamps, or stamp, is a new concept introduced with Service Provider Foundation. A stamp represents a unit of virtualized platform infrastructure that includes System Center Virtual Machine Manager, one or more virtual machine hosts and the virtual machines that are managed in the context of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager instance within the stamp. Each stamp also includes the configuration unique to each stamp such as service accounts and user roles.
Stamps must be capable of being monitored; therefore a stamp also includes an instance of System Center Operations Manager. However an instance of System Center Operations Manager may provide monitoring for multiple stamps so there is not necessarily a 1:1 relationship between the number of stamps and instances of System Center Operations Manager.
Put another way a stamp is an instance of System Center that supports a virtualized platform infrastructure up to the maximum number of virtual machine hosts and virtual machines supported by System Center.

 

With this description in mind you can probably think of that you can use stamps do define different Datacenters. Let’s say have Datacenter in Europe that is managed by one set of System Center components and you have another datacenter in USA that is managed by another set of System Center components. You create two different Stamps for those datacenters so you can connect a different set of System Center to each Stamp. Imagine that you have a global web portal like Windows Azure and from that portal your customers deploy virtual machines. USA customers deploy virtual machines to USA datacenter and Europe customers deploy virtual machines to the Europe datacenter. This distinguishment is based on the Stamps that you have defined.

Now that we know what is Stamp we can create it.

Create the stamp is quite straightforward and it is document in in Technet. It can be done by PowerShell. What is not documented is that you have to import SPF PowerShell module first in order to use the cmlets. So to import open PowerShell as Administrator and execute this:

Import-Module spfadmin

Than in order to create Stamp you first have to create connection to a VMM server. This can be done by executing this command:

$server = New-SCSPFServer -Name "VMMserver.contoso.com" -ServerType 0

In your case please the FQDN of your VMM server instead of VMMserver.contoso.com. By pointing out Servertype 0 you are indiciating it is VMM sever. 1 is for OpsMgr and 2 is for DPM but for now they cannot be used. Next command creates the stamp:

$stamp = New-SCSPFStamp –Name "Stamp_Europe" –Servers $server

spf

You can put whatever name you want for your Stamp. Besides the name when the Stamp is created a unique identifier is assigned to it.

On the Technet link that I’ve provided you can see how you can create tenant, associate that tenant with a stamp and create Tenant Administrator role in VMM based on that Tenat you’ve created in SPF.

Note that by executing the commands for new server and new stamp you are creating records in the SPF database for them.

Definitely SPF is a interesting software that can be the key for the future of System Center family.

Poster: Networking in Virtual Machine Manager

If you are confused with VMM 2012 Networking in SP1 there is a new poster on the horizon that will help you:

  • Plan your VMM networks using a logical view of VM networks, logical networks, and logical switches using a variety of configurations including VLAN-based configuration, no isolation, network virtualization, external networks, and with no virtual networking.
  • Configure networking in VMM using configuration steps by roles including fabric administrators, tenant administrators, or by any user.
  • Understand the network object model with diagrams of objects showing the relationships between objects.
  • Extend VMM with options including using a vendor network-management server with extensions, connect a VM network to other networks by configuring the VM network with a gateway, and load-balance requests to VMs that make up a VMM service tier by adding a load balancer to VMM.

 

Grab it from here.