Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Create Hyper-V Cluster – Part 6

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

After you have installed your Hyper-V Nodes and enabled the Failover Cluster Feature you can now start two create the Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Cluster.

This is not really difficult but you have two know about some important things.

The Failover Cluster Configuration Wizard will validate your Cluster configuration. If you have created a Hyper-V 2008 R2 Image with the latest drivers from Cisco your totally fine in the drivers check.
All SAN Disks have to be offline on the Hyper-V Hosts. Otherwise the Configuration Wizard can not validate the Cluster Disks.
As usual you need a clean Active Directory and a clean and working DNS Zone.
If you use Hyper-V Server Hosts you will get a warning in the network configuration because the standard firewall rule will not allow ICMP traffic (ping) to answer.
On the Cisco UCS you will also get a Warning which says your Cluster Network is maybe not redundant. This is because we added only one Management Network adapter for the Hyper-V hosts and with normal Hardware this is a single point of failure. But with on the UCS Hardware the Network adapter is virtual and the network connections are redundant in the background, so we can ignore this.

Now basically the setup of the Hyper-V Cluster is the same on the Cisco UCS as on every other Hardware.

First start the Failover Cluster Manager, if you use the Hyper-V 2008 R2 Core Server you need the Failover Cluster Manager console on another Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 client. If you need this on a Windows 7 computer you can download the Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7.
Now you first click validate the Configuration or on Create a Failover Cluster (this will also validate the Cluster Configuration)
Select your Hyper-V Host Servers
Run all tests
Now the Failover Cluster Configuration Wizard will validate your configuration.
After the validation you will get a report about the Configuration. Remember you with the Cisco UCS Solution and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 you can get two warnings. The first about ICMP and the second because you have only one network adapter.
If you get no other warnings or errors you can now start to create the Failover Cluster. Add your Hyper-V Hosts.
Create the Access Point for the Failover Cluster (Clustername and IP Address)
Confirm the Configuration
And now the Wizard will create your Hyper-V Failover Cluster
After you have done this you simply have to add a Quorum Disk and activate Cluster Shared Volumes

Windows Live Mesh 2011

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

Microsoft released Windows Live Mesh 2011 last year but I did really spend a lot of attention to it. Until this weekend I needed to conneced to my Lab but VPN didn’t work so I didn’t really had a chance to do that. But after sometime I realized that I have a management computer installed with Windows Live Mesh and I could connect to it using Windows Live Mesh Remote Desktop. This really saved my weekend.

Windows Live Mesh 2011 even more cool features

Sync between computers
Sync program settings
Sync on SkyDrive
Connect remotely to other Computers

PowerShell Integration Into Visual Studio

Posted on February 26, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

The PowerGUI Visual Studio Extension adds PowerShell
IntelliSense support to Visual Studio. This is nothing new but Adam Driscoll just released a new version 1.3 for PowerGUI 2.4. If you work a lot with Powershell and if you do small bigger Powershell projects this will help you a lot.

New Features

PowerGUI Console Tool Window
PowerShell Project Type

Current Features

IntelliSense support through a custom PowerShell editor
Syntax highlighting and script analysis
Supports PowerGUI settings
Supports PowerGUI imported modules
Supports PowerGUI Snippets
PowerShell debugging
PowerGUI Console Tool Window
PowerShell Project Type

In-place Upgrade Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2008 R2

Posted on February 24, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

I’m not really a big fan of In-place Windows Upgrades, specially in the Server Environment. But we had a Server with a small application running Windows Server 2008 so we decided to in-place upgrade this Server to Windows Server 2008 R2. Now guess what it worked. Basically if the Hardware and all applications are compatible with Windows Server 2008 R2 you can try to upgrade.

Start Windows Server 2008 R2 DVD or attached ISO file.
Choose Operation System
Now choose Upgrade
Check the compatibly report
Upgrading Windows
After that Windows reboot and if everything worked, you have now a Windows Server 2008 R2

Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Configure Hyper-V Networks – Part 5

Posted on February 23, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

This How-To shows you how you configure the (Virtual) Network Adapters of the Hyper-V Servers. This is not really heavy, but to complete the UCS Hyper-V Guide I post this. If you use Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 you will find later a post about doing this in SCVMM 2008 R2.

Connect to the Hyper-V Server with the Hyper-V Manager Console
Now you can configure the Networks under Virtual Network Manager on each Hyper-V Host.
What we did is, we added 7 (Virtual) Network adapters to the UCS Bladenodes in the UCS Manager. We added the same on Configuration on the Blades which are using VMware ESXi and on the Blades with Microsoft Hyper-V and thats why we have a Network called vMotion on the Hyper-V Servers. We use the vMotion network adpater for the private Failover Cluster Heartbeat.

Basically we have the following Networks:

1. Network adapter is the Hyper-V Management Network dedicated to the Hyper-V Node
2. Network adpater for Hyper-V Cluster Live Migration
3. Network adapter for private Failover Cluster Heartbeat
4. Network adapter External Network, is used for our main external Network
5. Network adapter Internal Network, is used for our internal Management Network for Servers
6. and 7. Network adapters are used for VLAN Trunks

To get the best performance we don’t share any Network Adapter with the Hyper-V Host and a Virtual Network.

Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Configure Blade Servers – Part 4

Posted on February 22, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

After we have installed the Cisco Blade Servers we now have to do some configuration on the Hosts.

First I activate Remote Management like Remote Desktop, Remote MMC and Powershell.

I add a Firewall rule for Remote Disk Managment

 netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="Remote Volume Management" new enable=yes

After adding this firewall rule, I install the Multipath I/O feature
```
 ocsetup MultipathIo 
```
Now you can use the MPclaim command-line tool to manage Multipath I/O
To view all detected enterprise storage:
```
 Mpclaim -e
```
Add MPIO support for Fibre Channel devices:
```
 mpclaim.exe -r -i -d < _VendorID> < _ProductID>
```
Important: Note that the vendor string length is 8 characters, the product string length is 16 characters, and both fields are padded with spaces as needed.
More Information about the MPclaim command-line tool
With diskpart you can now see the disks. And you can format the disks with NTFS. Important after that you should take the disks offline to use them in the cluster.
In the Configuration Menu enable the Cluster Feature.
On each note the all Cluster disks offline.
```
select disk 2
disk offline
```

In the next post we will configure the Network Adapters of the Cluster notes and create the virtual networks.

Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Install Blade Servers – Part 3

Posted on February 21, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

After you have created a new Hyper-V 2008 R2 ISO Installation image you can now start to install the Cisco Blade Servers. There are many ways (WDS, Virtual Media) how you can deploy the Hyper-V Image on your Blade Nodes. I will use the Virtual Media to install the Blade Notes in this guide.

Start the KVM Console in the UCS Manager
Attach the Hyper-V 2008 R2 Image to the Virtual Media
Now do the standard Hyper-V installation. With the Image we created Hyper-V will have all the drivers you need.
After the Installation is finished and you set the local administrator password. I change the IP Address of the Server and install the latest updates.