Posts made in July, 2011

After only 6 weeks working on the new Beta builds of Orchestrator 2012; I have to admit this is one suite which has a lot of potential. Sure, there are things which could be changed, and would make the tools even better, however due course will sort these issues for sure, For now we can learn about the benefits of using a simple suite to help automate task without a major investment in learning curves. My initial experience with the suite has been illuminating, the scale of opportunities to change the manner and process of how different task and jobs can be address is just amazing. Every time I open the Run book Designer, even more ideas spring to mind; but the real magic is within the simplicity of using the designer to simply draw your process on the canvas,...

This evening Microsoft have announced the release of SCVMM SSP2.0 SP1, (yep that’s a mouth full) in its full glory for you to deploy and use with your System Centre Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2  environment. Suveen and the Team announced this Solution Accelerator at Tech-Ed Europe last year, and today deliver the announcement that “System Centre Virtual Machine Manager Self-Service Portal 2.0 SP1 is a partner-extensible toolkit that enables customers to dynamically pool, allocate, and manage their datacentre resources, to offer infrastructure as a service for their organization. The self-service portal is a free Solution Accelerator, and is fully supported by Microsoft. In addition to providing users the ability to import virtual machines created...

So, I have been teasing with the plan of enabling the  newly integrated Dynamic Optimization functions in SCVMM which as I evaluated, led me to want some answer’s. On of the first things you will notice is that the Dynamic Optimization options are no longer in the properties of your VM Cluster! Really,  this setting pair has now moved back to the parent level, the Host Group only; so if you have been scratching your head as to where to find this stuff, now you know; go check the properties of the Host Group while in Fabric View. So, I asked the SCVMM team why this is the case, and they honestly replied citing time as the enemy! but its on the radar to be reintroduced on the cluster level at a later time. So, this lead to another question, If i have...

So, some genius on you environment needs to do work on your Hyper-V host, but is oblivious to all the magic which is going on in the back room with SCVMM to keep the private cloud ticking; which is only elaborated with a refresher bug still in 2008 R2 which decides to mark these moved VMs as missing. This is the typical command we see the guilty use, which will in sequence move all the VMs from one Cluster node to another; and yes this has no error correction for when the node will be fully occupied etc. #Prepare the PowerShell Environment, and connect to the relevant services Import-Module FailoverClusters #Execute the commands to find and move the VMs Get-ClusterNode 2K8-HyperV-01 | Get-ClusterGroup | where-object {$_.Name –match “df-*“} |...

If you have been playing with the Physical deployment options for new Hyper-V hosts in SCVMM 2012, you might already learned the hard way that the process will run almost to completion, but never reach the final goal. What you will find is that after the new OS has been deployed, the physical server runs a reboot process, and start’s up again from the new deployed VHD. However after a few minutes you will be presented with a stinker that the process has failed with the Customization process in the Specialization step. This one, we are attributing to the version of the AIK used on SCVMM been designed for the RTM build of Windows 2008 R2, and not the SP1 version; to address this we need to use the newer AIK, however this is not yet supported by the SCVMM team....