Description of Update Rollup 6 for System Center 2012 – Virtual Machine Manager Server

For those who haven’t been able to upgrade System Center 2012 to SP1 Microsoft still provides support. Update Rollup 6 is available and it is only for Virtual Machine Manager and fixes only one issue:

  • When VMWare vSphere 4.1 is updated, the Virtual Machine Manager Service may stop.

If you are experiencing this issue you can find more information and download link here.

VMM 2012 R2 Preview Console Crashes When You Try to Add Logical Switch to Hyper-V 2012 Host

Consider the following situation:

  • You install VMM 2012 R2 Preview
  • You install manually Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Host/s
  • You install manually Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview Hyper-V Host/s
  • You add the Hyper-V 2012 and 2012 R2 hosts to VMM 2012 R2
  • You create Port Profile for teaming with Dynamic algorithm
  • You create Logical Switch to which you add the created Port Profile
  • You open the properties of Hyper-V 2012 host and in Virtual Switches tab you’ve try to add Logical Switch. Immediately the VMM 2012 R2 Preview console crashes with the following error:
  • vmmconsolecrash1

vmmconsolecrash2

Reason:

Dynamic algorithm for NIC Teaming is available only on Hyper-v 2012 R2 hosts. Even if you create a port profile with a supported by Hyper-V 2012 NIC Teaming algorithm and assign it to different logical switch you still might get the error.

Resolution:

Change the port profile with Dynamic algorithm to use Host Default that way when the Hyper-V host is 2012 Hyper-V Port algorithm will be used and for 2012 R2 Host Dynamic algorithm will be used. The console will not crash on trying to add logical switch on Hyper-V 2012 host.

Update Rollup 3 for System Center 2012 Service Pack 1

As we are in the Q3 of the year the third update rollup for System Center is now available. Here are the changes:

App Controller Update (KB2853227)
Issue 1

When you try to add a Microsoft System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) connection by using either the UI or a Windows PowerShell command, the connection is unsuccessful. Additionally, you receive the following error message:

Connection address must be a fully qualified domain name.

This problem may occur when the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) contains a hyphen (-) in the last part of the name.

Issue 2

When a Windows Azure subscription contains a high-memory (A6 or A7) Windows Azure virtual machine, Azure functionality is not available in Microsoft System Center 2012 App Controller. Additionally, you receive the following error message:

Retrieved data is incomplete.

When you click More details, you receive a "Service Unavailable" message. You may also receive a "Requested value ‘A6’ was not found" message.

Issue 3

When you try to use App Controller together with a proxy server, you receive the following error message:

(407) authentication required.

Note App Controller does not use configured proxy settings.

Issue 4

When you view the network properties of a deployed virtual machine and then click OK, the network connection is set to None. For example, the network connection field is empty and does not show the current network adapter.

Issue 5

When you move quickly between virtual machines in a list and then click the Properties task, the properties page for the previously selected virtual machine is displayed.

Issue 6

When you deploy an Azure virtual machine when the User must change password at next logon option is selected, you receive the following error message:

Bad Request

App Controller Setup Update (KB2823452)
Issue 1

App Controller cannot be installed if the Microsoft SQL Server database server name starts with a number.
See Installation of App Controller to a Remote SQL Server fails with Exception Error Code: 0x80131500 for more information.

Issue 2

Setup incorrectly reports that the SQL Server database has insufficient disk space.

Issue 3

Setup on a non-English operating system is unsuccessful when it tries to enable Internet Information Services (IIS).

Data Protection Manager Update (KB2853210)
Issue 1

When you use a tape library that has many slots, the Microsoft System Center 2012 Data Protection Manager database becomes bloated over time. 

Issue 2

When you try to set up library sharing when you use Data Protection Manager SP1 Update Rollup 2 (UR2), you receive the following error message:

Failed to execute RBACRolePermissionOnStoredProcScript.sql on DPMServer\Database

Issue 3

When you run a Windows PowerShell script that retrieves the protection groups, the console crashes.

Issue 4

The VMM Helper Service stops responding, and no virtual machines are backed up. A restart enables the backups to continue.

Operations Manager Update (KB2852565)
Issue 1

The Audit Collection Services (ACS) dtPrincipal tables sometimes are missing a user’s domain name.

Issue 2

If you decide to see more than two days’ worth of data in a Service Level Dashboard view, the data is displayed from the Daily Aggregated data and does not contain the last two days’ worth of data.

Issue 3

The Health Service stops collecting performance data on Windows Server 2008 R2.

Issue 4

The web console crashes when the Active Alerts view and the Windows Computer State view are accessed at the same time when Internet Explorer 9 is used.

Issue 5

A memory leak may occur in the console when the performance widgets dashboard is left open.

Issue 6

When the Operator role is used, many 26319 events are generated. This causes performance problems.

Issue 7

Health Service availability reports are incorrect because of duplicate entries in the HealthServiceOutage table.

Issue 8

When the Orchestrator Integration pack is under a high-load scenario, a software development kit (SDK) process deadlock may occur.

Issue 9

This update includes fixes to the following Advisor Connector issues:

  • Group opt-in
  • Microsoft System Center 2012 Operations Manager gateway and Microsoft monitoring
  • Windows PowerShell cmdlets
  • Health state
  • Microsoft Knowledge Base article links in Operations Manager console alerts
Operations Manager – UNIX and Linux Monitoring (Management Pack Update)
Issue 1

The Solaris agent cannot be installed on Solaris 11.1 because it does not find the prerequisite OpenSSL package.

Issue 2

Knowledge editing pages are not displayed when monitors that were created by the Shell Command templates are edited.

Issue 3

Log files that are encoded in schemes other than ASCII cannot be monitored.

Virtual Machine Manager Administration Console Update (KB2858509), Virtual Machine Manager Server Update (KB2858510), and Virtual Machine Manager Guest Agent Update (KB2858511)
Issue 1

You receive an invalid prefix length error and cannot set migration subnets if the prefix length is not between 4 and 30 characters for IPv4 or between 64 and 126 characters for IPv6.

Issue 2

Migration subnets for cluster and cluster nodes must be read-only.

Issue 3

Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) cannot take any action on Recovery Virtual Machine (VM) post-failover without reverse replication.

Issue 4

In some cases, a virtual machine on an SMB file share that is registered by using a NetBIOS name on a cluster will be in an unsupported cluster configuration state in VMM. This problem may occur even though the virtual machine is healthy and running. Additionally, the virtual machine status cannot be updated after that.

Issue 5

The virtual machine refresher does not correctly update the state of the virtual machine even after an unsupported cluster configuration issue is corrected.

Issue 6

In a bare-metal setup, the VMM service crashes when an out-of-range IP address is specified.

Issue 7

Every time DRA Initialize occurs in the VMM service, a database corruption exception is received.

Issue 8

You receive an "Unable to connect to the VMM DB" exception when you try to publish host and virtual machine network data to the SQL Server Reporting Service.

Issue 9

When you try import a Linux template from VMware in Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Service Pack 1, you receive error 22723.

Issue 10

The Get-SCVirtualMachine cmdlet does not return virtual machines by their IDs when the virtual machines contain clustered pass-through disks.

Issue 11

A user cannot set the domain name in Service Setting.

Issue 12

The VMM service crashes intermittently.

Issue 13

The VMM ID registry subkey value is set to a null value after Update Rollup 1 is applied.

Issue 14

This update fixes some UI text issues in the Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Service Pack 1 console for Disaster Recovery and for the HRM Azure Service.

Issue 15

This update fixes some reports that are not working with SQL Server 2012.

Issue 16

If a virtual machine has a static IP address, Test Failover does not set the IP address on the test virtual machine.

Issue 17

Virtual machine snapshot operations might fail if multiple snapshots are restored at the same time and have the same name.

Issue 18

The VMM server might crash when you create a virtual machine template from a virtual machine that has a previous failed task checkpoint data.

Issue 19

Logical unit numbers (LUNs) for EMC storage cannot be assigned to a cluster in VMM.

Issue 20

The VMM service crashes if a VMWare cluster or host is added by using a local root or administrator account.

Issue 21

Some log information is recorded multiple times in the guest log file.

Issue 22

This update fixes some performance issues in a bare-metal installation.

Issue 23

The placement of the Network Load Balancing (NLB) clusters in a network environment does not work for NLB load balancer and nested host groups.

Issue 24

The VMM service may stop while VMWare vSphere 4.1 is updated.

Issue 25

If Test Failover is initiated while VMM is restarting, the recovery side of VMM crashes.

Installation instructions and download links you can find here.

HP Storage Management Integration with Microsoft System Center

Previously I’ve covered HP Storage Management Pack but now there is another HP Storage tool that integrates with System Center component named HP Storage UI add-in for System Center Virtual Machine Manager. These two tools combined together represent HP Storage Management Integration with Microsoft System Center.

So what is exactly this new tool:

HP Storage UI add-in for System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) enables enhanced integration of SCVMM and HP Storage providing our customers a single pane-of-glass monitoring view of physical, virtual and cloud environments. It automates HP Storage management and provides an integrated view of VMs and associated storage resources.

HP Storage supports all SMI-S-enabled functionality introduced in SCVMM 2012 – Storage Discovery, Storage Classification, Storage Provisioning and Storage Allocation.

HP Storage also provides a new HP Storage UI Add-in for enhanced monitoring, provisioning and control of HP Storage in SCVMM environment.

 

Personally I haven’t the chance to try it but from what I’ve seen from demos and screenshots it is definitely worth a try if you have one of the following storages:

  • HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage – HP 3PAR StoreServ 10000 Storage, HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 Storage, F-Class, T-Class, HP 3PAR OS 3.1.1 and 3.1.2
  • HP StoreOnce Backup – HP StoreOnce Backup: HP D2D 2000, D2D 4000 and HP StoreOnce B6000 Gen 3 Backup Systems

You can download it for free from here.

System Center 2012 R2 VHDs Download

Besides downloading ISO files you can also try System Center 2012 R2 by directly downloading VHDs that offer installed Windows Server 2012 R2 and instructions on how to enable System Center 2012 R2. Here is the full download list:

Note: The download requires registration.

Note: Links are now working.