Profiles in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012

Posted on April 23, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

Michel Lüscher wrote a very interesting blog post about the new profiles in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012. SCVMM 2012 brings a lot of really cool new features especially for deployment of private and public clouds.

Here are some things I really like about SCVMM 2012:

Host Profiles for Hyper-V Hosts. This is probably the most important and coolest new feature of SCVMM 2012. This lets you create Profiles for your Hyper-V Hosts (like in vSphere) but the best thing is the way you can deploy new hosts. Microsoft uses the Boot from VHD feature to setup new hosts. More on this here.
The Hardware Profile lets you now add an IP addresses to network adapter in a VM
Applications Profiles, select roles and features of Windows Server 2008 R2. For a very quick deploy of new services.

If you wanna read more about the profiles in SCVMM 2012 you should check out this blog post (german).

Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Add Hyper-V Cluster to SCVMM – Part 8

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

In this post we will add the Hyper-V Cluster to our System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 to better manage Virtual Machines and Hyper-V Hosts. We also use System Center Virtual Machine Manager or SCVMM to quick deploy new Virtual Machines.

Download and install System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2
Make sure you don’t have any network problems and a clean Active Directory and DNS environment. This is really important if you work with SCVMM. And remember if something does not really work in SCVMM or SCVMM shows any errors it does not mean that your Cluster is not running perfectly. SCVMM uses DNS for the most things and the Failover Cluster instead uses IP Addresses. So if you see any errors in System Center Virtual Machine Manager first check if there is really a problem in the Failover Cluster Manager.
In the SCVMM 2008 R2 click on the “Add host” link
Select Windows Server-based host on an Active Directory domain and enter the credentials
Search for your Cluster in this case the Failover Cluster is called UCS-HPV-C01. You can also search for a host in this Cluster and it will automatically find the cluster.
Host the host group you where your Hyper-V Failover Cluster should be located in.
Review everything and click next
Now your Cluster will be added to your System Center Virtual Machine Manager and install the System Center Virtual Machine Manager Agent on every host.

After you have done this you should see all your hosts in the SCVMM.

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

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 – Part1

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

This is my first post on a Microsoft Hyper-V Cluster with a Cisco UCS. In the next parts I will write about how to setup a Hyper-V Cluster on a UCS.

After testing and evaluation Bladecenters for our Datacenter, we decided that the Cisco UCS is the best solution for us. There are a lot of reasons why the UCS (Cisco Unified Computing System) is one of the best systems for a datacenter. Some of them are:

Easy cabling
Single Management Console for Switches, Chassies and Blades (UCS Manager)
Hardware Virtualization
Made for Datacenters

About the Cisco UCS (Wikipedia):

The Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) is a data center computing solution composed of computing hardware, virtualization software, switching fabric, and management software. The idea behind the system is to reduce total cost of ownership and improve scalability by integrating the different components into a cohesive platform that can be managed as a single unit. Just-In-Time deployment of resources and 1:N redundancy are also possible with a system of this type.

But lets start with our project. First of all what have we got in our starting configuration.