I was pretty silent the last months but this will change again. I was contributing for two books about troubleshooting Hyper-V. These two books are no available

Optimizing and Troubleshooting Hyper-V Networking - https://shop.oreilly.com/product/0790145383068.do

Optimizing and Troubleshooting Hyper-V Storage - https://shop.oreilly.com/product/0790145382924.do

This is really a must have read for Cloud Admins

Thomas

I just posted a new blog post over on our team blog for how to implement ARP Spoofing with Port ACLs in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V

Go and check it out https://blogs.technet.com/b/wincat

Cheers

Thomas

Cheers

Thomas

A great document is now on TechNet that explains in detail how to setup a Private Cloud Infrastructure with Windows Server 2012.

Go and check it out

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831829.aspx

It walks you through how to do networking teaming, carve out isolated networks using QoS and much more

During my Christmas holidays I had time and also hardware to work on the bare-metal deployment feature of SCVMM 2012.

The result is a nice checklist and some considerations that hopefully help you in your own environment

The hardware I used is DELL PowerEdge M600 blade server. All servers have been updated to the latest Bios 2.4.0 and iDRAC 1.60 A13 firmware.

These are the detailed steps I followed for bare-metal deployment (These steps do not include all prerequisites I configured before but will be in the checklist at the end of this blog post)

1. Open SCVMM 2012 Console

2. Go to Fabric

3. Add Resources  --> Hyper-V Hosts and Clusters

4. Select Physical computers to be provisioned as virtual machine hosts

5. Select Run As account with Remote Management Board credentials and BMC protocol. DELL Servers do IPMI

6. Enter IP-Address of the server remote management board

7. Select the Host group where the server should be placed and your Host Profile

8. Specify a hostname for the server that you pre created in AD

9. Press Finish to start the deployment

This is the whole process in SCVMM 2012 to do bare-metal deployment in a nutshell.

Now let us see what happened at the physical server in the background. I did that via the remote management board.

1. Server does a reboot and start booting from PXE

2. Now I got an error configuring the Disk and the SCVMM job aborted.

Error (21113)

Unable to configure disk on physical machine 4C4C4544-0042-5110-8057-CAC04F424731 as requested in host profile

3. After checking the X:\vmm\vmmAgentPE.exe.log file, saying that my DISK 0 is offline. I launched diskpart.exe and the list disk command showed the result. The log was right, because I had SAN Volumes attached to the server. The only way to fix that was to disconnect any FC ports.

4. Now I had to restart my SCVMM bare-metal deployment job without any FC ports connected and the job finished successfully.

Some additional consideration:

The SCVMM bare-metal deployment process does not enable Remote Desktop so this should be done with a Group Policy linked to the OU where you place your Hyper-V Hosts.

Finally I wrote this checklist that hopefully helps you to sort all show stoppers for a successful bare-metal deployment 

1. Mount Server into Rack
2. Connect Network Cables and configure Remote Management Board with IP Address
3. Do not connect any FC ports !!
4. Configure Raid Controller to have volume available for VHD placement and BCD
5. Enable PXE Boot in Bios
6. Update Remote Management Board to latest available vendor Firmware
7. Update Server Bios to latest available vendor version
8. Create Hyper-V Host OU in AD (not a hard requirement)
9. Create Hyper-V Host Computer Account in AD
10. Create Group Policy for enabling Remote Desktop (not a hard requirement)
11. A configured PXE server in SCVMM 2012
12. Create Run AS Account for Remote Management Board credentials
13. A running DHCP Server is always required
14. A sysprep’ed Windows Server 2008 R2 VHD in the Library and make sure the maximum VHD size fits to your physical Disk.
15. Create Host Profile
16. Download and place drivers for your server Hardware in the Library

A couple of days ago I worked with a customer to deploy a Service. In this case the customer deployed a Tier 1 Service with 10 virtual machines.

The purpose to have these virtual machines is for Software testing and the reason to use Service Templates is to scale it out based on the need of software testers.

After deploying the service my customer wanted to grant access to the virtual machines via the Self Service Portal for their developers.

This is where the interesting part starts.

The way to publish a virtual machine in the SSP is to assign it to a private cloud and configure the access (Self-Service Owner) of the virtual machine.

This pictures shows how to assign it to a cloud (Tom Cloud)

And this one here show how to configure the access (Self-Service owner)

Important change information here we now support nested groups as Self-Service owner

Now after everything is configured the right way it is time to see if the virtual machine that is part of a Service is published in the Self-Service Portal.

As you can see the virtual machine that is part of a Service is not visible in the SSP. This is by design!

I hope this helps you to save time and not banging your head against a wall trying it :-)

So what is the solution here?

The solution is called System Center APP-Controller 2012.

In a next blog post I will show APP-Controller 2012.

My name’s Thomas Roettinger and I am a private cloud and virtualization Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft.

I was working on creating a service template in SCVMM 2012 and figured out an interesting fact that I would like to share with all of you.

The idea was to create a service template to deploy a service with RDS - Session Host Role installed . This would help me to setup a farm and scale it out depending on the user need.

When setting up the service template and selecting the roles that I require I did it like I am used to do it via Server Manager:

I selected the top category Remote Desktop and the bottom Role Service that I want

Deploying the service template failed with error: 20400 & 21952

The ServerManager.log from the Operating System inside the virtual machine gave me the following error message:

[ServerManagerPS] Error (Id=0) Hyper-V cannot be installed The processor on this computer is not compatible with Hyper-V. To install this role, the processor must have a supported version of hardware-assisted virtualization, and that feature must be turned on in the BIOS.

[ServerManagerPS] Error (Id=0) Install was cancelled.

So I went back to the VM Template and checked my role selection because I thought maybe I selected  the Hyper-V Role by mistake. But everything was right there. So what happened?

When selecting a Role and the specifying a Role Service at the same time, SCVMM 2012 checks all required Role dependencies. And because of selecting the Role itself, Hyper-V is a requirement for the Remote Desktop Virtualization Host Role Service.  The Hyper-V Role was installed in my virtual machine what is supposed to fail because of missing hardware virtualization feature. So the Server Manager log is right there

So after changing my service template to install only the Role Service - Remote Desktop Session Host , my deployment worked perfectly.

I hope that helps you to understand the dependencies of Role and Role Service to each other and the different behavior compared to Server Manager.