Hugo Monge

Hi,

I'm looking for a simple script to remotely shutdown and startup a virtual machine in Hyper-V 2008 R2.

Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V stand-alone, no cluster. I created new virtual machine. When I rebooted host, I noticed that creation date of the VM becames wrong, something of 01/01/1601.

VM creation date does not persists between Hyper-V host reboots or restarting of the VMM service.

When attempting to attach an existing virtual hard drive I get "Failed to open attachment 'C:\ directory \HV10001.vhd'.  Error: 'The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.'

The file itself seems OK (I can copy it from disk to disk on the host system).  Is there any way to recover this thing?  I'd really like to avoid rebuilding the whole darn thing from scratch...

Thanks,

DvS

Hi folks,

I have an environment that is Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V (some 20 VMs), it is standalone server. I want to migrate to Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V.

What is the easiest way?

Can I update using same hardware? (NO NEW HW)

I will lose something during migration?

Thank you,

Hi everybody,

Got a fun one, kinda. So started to upgrade from hyper-v 2012 core 2012 to R2. Migrated the VMs. Formatted the system drive. Reinstalled from scratch. Added to the domain. Rebooted.

I could remote desktop, connect with Hyper-V manager.

Connected back to the hyper-v 2012 R2 core with RD, installed iSCSI and set the target, installed and configured MPIO. Rebooted.

And I lost access from every where to the Hyper-V Core. The only way I can access them is via remote powershell sessions. Server manager does not work, I can't ping anymore, can't RD to them, can't SNMP either. They are in the same OU as the other servers still running 2012 normal.

Any idea why, after the second reboot most access went down the drain ?

I feel like the system thinks it is not on a domain network anymore and thus the firewall started. But even stopping the firewall did not help for one of the 2 servers. And I d rather not disable the FW anyway. I also tried hvremote, no luck.

Regards,

Hello:

I'm having a problem trying to install Windows 8.1 Professional on a new Gen 2 VM. I created a new Gen 2 VM using Hyper-V Manager running on Windows Server 2012 R2 and then told it to boot off DVD drive which pionts to the ISO file that I copied to the E: drive.  The ISO file mounted in the virtual DVD drive is the Windows 8.1 Professional x64 VL ISO that I downloaded off of TechNet. When I start up the VM to install the OS, I receive this error:

"Synthetic SCSI Controller (Instance ID 7512B228-F7BC-4DD8-B4F4-72A5B042C2E9): Failed to Power on with Error 'The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.' (0x80070570). (Virtual machine ID 4195A398-3531-4A34-8588-D1FC3F3DD2D4)"

Basically the SCSI controller can't read the ISO file. However, the IDE controller on a Gen1 VM can read and boot from the ISO just fine. Has anyone else run into this problem? Is there a way to resolve this issue and allow me to boot the ISO from a SCSI controller?

Or is there a bug with the Hyper-V SCSI controller that makes it unable to boot from ISOs properly?

-JP

If I install hyper V on a small slow dive eg 60gb 5400 RPM Sata but have the DataStores on a 15000 RPM SAS drive

will the slow drive for the hypervisor slow the access down for datastores?

I plan to have 3 win2012r2 separate server installs on the sas drives.

Thanks

I run Windows Server 2012 RTM Hyper-V and I can occasionally not access the second virtual hard drive (dynamically expanding VHDX) attached to the VM through the virtual SCSI controller. I can however access the first hard drive that is connected with the virtual IDE controller.

I get the following warning in the event log under “Administrative Events” every 30 seconds when this happens:

• Log Name: System
• Source: Storvsc
• ID: Storvsc
• Message: “Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort0, was issued.”

I get this error once or twice a week and it has caused serious problems since one of the virtual servers that have this problem is a fileserver and the second hard drive contains all the data.

The only quick solution to the problem that I have found is to force the virtual machine to stop using the “Turn Off” feature since a normal shut down does not work (stops at shutting down the event log or similar) and then start the virtual machine again.

You can also wait for about 30 minutes or longer until the disk for some reason becomes accessible again by itself.

My research into this problem shows that:

• Only 2 of the 10 VMs running Windows Server 2012 RTM that I have, have this problem.
• Both these VMs have a second virtual hard drive (dynamically expanding VHDX) that cannot be accessed for 30 minutes or longer.
• Check Disk of the virtual hard drive shows no errors.
• The second hard drive is attached to the virtual SCSI controller.
• I can find no problems at all with the physical storage on the (not related) 4 hosts that I have. The problem exists only in the VMs.

I have now attached the second virtual hard drive to the virtual IDE controller to see if this permanently fixes this problem (i.e. does not happen for at least a week).

Is there something wrong with the virtual SCSI controller or the virtual SCSI device driver that comes with Windows Server 2012 RTM? Does anyone else have this problem?

Hi,

I wonder if anyone can help. In my lab environment I run 2 Hyper V hosts with a 3rd server on SMB (All server 2012 R2). All VMs use the share on the Windows Server 2012 R2 SMB Server. I can move Windows VMs from one host to another with no issues. When I try to move my Vyatta Virtual Router ( a linux box), the move fails with a message about the process failing on the destination host.

Any ideas as to why I can move Windows boxes but not linux? or is it the fact this box is doing all my routing for my VMs (and also host access). I tried this with clustering but I get an issue with the cluster manager being unable to connect to a DC (presumably because the Vyatta router is down as the hosts authenticate with DCs on a separate subnet which is routed via the vyatta).

Any help, as always, appreciated.

We have a server 2012 standard hosting 2 Hyper-V machines, one is our Exchange and the other our App server.

We had a power outage last night and it looks that the host shut down cleanly but the VM's did not.I checked the event logs and the VM's are showing an unexpected shut down exactly the same time as the Host server. The host server event logs is showing "Event 6006" which to me is a clean shutdown.

Hyper-V Guest Shutdown Service is running on both VM's. On the Host that service was set to "Manual (Trigger Start)". I'm not sure what that means but I changed it to "Automatic (Trigger Start)"

Also, I tried to start HV Guest Shutdown Service on the host server but it just starts and stops. Is that because the startup type is set to "Trigger start"?

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks

Hi

I've already made a topic for this while the beta went out:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/fr-FR/winserver8gen/thread/2c29fa7f-0e48-4b2f-bcd3-7ee838b0c6e9

Seems that nobody was able to answer the issue, so I waited for the final release of Win2012 and the release of Hyper-V server core based on 2012 server to make a new try... which failed as early on!

This is the story:

- Setting up a Hyper-V server core 2012 as the Host
- Installation of Windows 2012 server as a guest 
- Using HDD passtrought for the guest to let it access directly to the physical drives
- Setting up a storage pool under the guest OS on the drive that are passed through

So far so good until them everything work fine. The storage pool is OK, etc.

The issue:

- Reboot the host
=> Guest is unable to load, missing SCSi device.

Looking closer: no more disk seen with Diskpart on the Host => Hyper-V Manager doesn't see it and is unable to pass-through it to the Guest.

Seems that the way storage pool is working bypass totally the disk management of the system.
Actually if I plug the drive in my Windows8 desktop, I immediately get the storage space working, without any notification, indication or something asking me if I want to "import" or "use" the storage pool detected on the drive.

There's should be a way to say on the host "do not use the storage pool detected - keep passtrough the drive"

My thought is Pass-trough as to be and stay pass-trough whatever is written on the disk. 

And as I use Hyper-V Server Core, I'm not able to set a storage pool on the host, and using it as a drive on the guest (by the way this is something I doesn't want, I want my guest to manage their own storage space, the host is only here to run the hypervisor)

I really want to use storage pool, but for now it's totally impossible.

Thanks

Hi,

Since when do the VMs change MAC at each reboot ? I just upgraded to 2012 R2 and now I am literally screwed. I can't reboot a server without having to update the whole DHCP configuration or manually set the mac address of the network adapters on the servers. which means I have to keep a MAC database now.

Regards,

There is a tool that can recover logical problems in the VHD structure?

A friend called me and told me that his VS R2 Enterprise with 4 VMs suffered a power falure and after that, one of the VMs does not startup anymore. The erros is the same as using VHDMOUNT, something similar: "VHD file could not be mounted"

There is a CHKDSK for VHD files?

How to "rebuild" a corrupetd VHD file? How to analyze logical structure of a offline VHD file?

Apologies if this is not the right forum.

So I was preparing a new server to host virtual machines. This is a Dell PE r710, Dual quad-core Xeon processors, 48 GB RAM, 2x 72 GB SAS drives. The server has Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 installed. iSCSI volumes hosted in a Dell EqualLogic SAN will host the actual virtual machines. We have 5 of these with similar setups, 3 of which are setup in a cluster. We have 2 set aside for additional projects. These will not be clustered as they will be hosting Lync virtual machines. Anyway we have 1 server setup and working with 2 VM's. The 2nd server will initially host 2 additional VM's. My goal was to format the iSCSI volume on the 2nd server and prepare it to host VMs. Except I accidentally logged into the 1st server (it's one of those days - I was interrupted as I was typing in the server name into Remote Desktop and it auto-populated the first server instead of the 2nd) and begin formatting the volume. Needless to say Lync stopped working and the VMs crashed. I immediately recognized my mistake and stopped the format but obviously it was too late.

I was hoping I could recover the data on that volume. We have a trial of this software called GetDataBack NTFS edition. It can recognize the volume ok and it can scan it and see files. Unfortunately it does not see actual VHD files. Instead what happens is that it sees the VHD files as separate volumes/partitions/etc and recovers the data within the VHD files. Not sure if it should do that, waiting on a response from Runtime. Kind of cool in a way if we ever needed to recover data within a VHD file. Anyway, does anyone know of software that can recover data from a volume but not scan the contents of the vhd file and include that data in the recovery? By this I mean I want to recover the actual VHD files, not the data within. Perhaps Virtual Machine Manager can do something? We do have it installed and manage our VM's with it. It would save us the trouble of re-deploying Lync. Apparently there's a lot of ADSI edits needed to undo the changes Lync did to AD/ Even migrating users back requires some ADSI edits. Trying to find those online someplace just in case.

We did not have backups yet of these 2 VMS as we just recently got them setup and have moved a few users over (some of us from IT). We still had some configuration/tweaking/adjustments to make before migrating the remainder of our OCS users. I know, I know, backup backup backup. The SAN we have can even do snapshots of iSCSI volumes but we didn't even think of enabling it yet.

Regardless in what happens with the VM's, I enabled Windows Server Backup and will immediately setup nightly backups once the VM's are operational again. I will also have our SAN admin enable snapshots, and just for laughs I will also enable snapshots on the individual VM's. We're also currently testing out Data Protection Manager. Kind of wish we already had it implemented....sigh...

Thanks,

Banging my head against a board with a nail in it...

Hi,

I've built a test cluster in my lab. The kit consists of:

2 Hosts (5 X 1GB nics each).

1 X 16 port switch

1 server with 2012R2 (has the iSCSI target installed.

1 VM on another host which acts as a DC/ DNS for the cluster.

 on each host server, nic allocation is as follows:

nic1 (USB): Management network (host 1:192.168.2.40, Host2: 192.168.2.41)

nic2&3 (team): VM Access Network (no ip as it's just a virtual switch)

nic4: iSCSI1 (Host1: 192.168.50.10, Host2: 192.168.51.10)

nic5: iSCSI2 (Host1: 192.168.50.20, Host2: 192.168.51.20)

MPIO is installed and configured. 

On the iSCSI target, I have 1 nic for the network and 2 nics for iSCSI (192.168.51.30, 192.168.50.30).

All three servers run Windows Server 2012R2 Enterprise and the two hosts have failover clustering and the hyper-v role installed. All the iSCSI traffic is VLAN'd on the same switch (VLAN50).

There is a Quorum disk on the iSCSI target and a CSV for Virtual Hard Disks. The Quorum disk shows on the owner as Drive Q. The CSV drives can only be seen in disk management or server manager>disks. on both hosts

To test I've created 2 HA VMs and live migrated VM's them between both hosts and that works fine.

I've powered down each host and the VMs come up on the other host(For example, VMs are on Host1 and I power it down. If I log onto host 2, they will then power up).

I've tested the teaming by removing 1 nic cable at a time and that's fine as well. I've tested MPIO/ iSCSI by removing 1 cable at a time and everything is ok.

The issue is as follows:

Scenario1: Disk Quorum Owner is Host 2, I have a running VM on host 1. If I unplug the cables from both iSCSI nics on host 1, Host2 goes offline (I can't ping or connect to it, VMs on Host 1 go off, VMs on Host 2 go off, failover clustering manager on host one cannot find the cluster). If I reboot Host 2, everything works fine. The VMs startup on Host1. Not sure why host2 goes offline. Can anyone please advise?

Scenario2: Disk Quorum Owner is Host 2 owner of data CSVs is Disk 2, I have a running VM on host 2. If I unplug the cables from both iSCSI nics on Host 2, Host2 does not go offline. Instad all CSVs and Quorum move to Host1 ( VMs on Host 1 run as normal, VMs on Host 2 run as normal, failover clustering manager on both hosts work as normal and the csvs are shown as mounted on host2). How is this possible/ is this expected behavior?

Thanks very much,

Regards,

HA

Hi,

I have taken backup of my VHD using Volume shadow copy (VSS - vshadow.exe). Now i want to restore the vhd to a new or existing machine. What im currently doing now is attaching the backped up VHD to a new new machine or change the vhd to exiting machine. Is this the standard procedure of restoring the a hyper-v from vhd? OR is there something better and different way of doing it. 

System config:

Host (Hyper-V manager): Windows 2008 R2 Standard

Guest (VM): Windows 2008 R2 Standard.

Hi,

Just found a blog about fixing corrupt VHDs.

How to Fix a Corrupted Hyper-V VHD File

http://blogs.technet.com/b/tonyso/archive/2011/12/06/how-to-fix-a-corrupted-hyper-v-vhd-file.aspx

Enjoy!

Best Regards,

Vincent Hu

Hi,

I am looking for some advice on what the best way to configure my disk system is for performance when using Hyper-V. Currently I have two midline 7.2k SATA disks used for the hyper-V OS in RAID 1, and then 14 x 10k 600GB SAS enterprise disks in RAID 10. The RAID 10 is where all my VM’s exist on, but not directly on the physical disk, I use a product called StarWind which consumes almost all of the physical disk space, this is a virtual SAN and I use this for my CSV in the cluster, the VM’s all exist on this starwind disk, there is a tiny amount of overhead but I don’t think that’s really where my problem lies. We have 12 Virtual machines, so there is 1 spindle per VM, however it’s in RAID 10 so does this actually mean I have 7 spindles for 12 VMs?

The entire system almost grinds to a halt whenever I am copying new VM’s onto this host. I can’t use any other RAID type except for RAID 1 or 10. I know RAID 0 would give me better performance but we are not willing to take the risk. Now, it is my understanding that RAID 1 and 10 are essentially the same with the same performance and capacity, because of this I chose RAID 10 so I can take advantage of the combined capacity, but I am wondering if this is the best configuration.

I can think of a few other variations:

• A single RAID 10 with one large partition but multiple CSV’s instead of one large one
• A single RAID 10 with multiple partitions and a CSV on each partition
• Multiple RAID 1, each having a single partition and a single CSV

Reading this site, there are a few pointers I have taken away regarding disk performance, a couple below I have questions about.

http://www.altaro.com/hyper-v/23-best-practices-improve-hyper-v-vm-performance/

Point 6 says “Use separate volumes for each VM. Since the administrative tasks of a virtual machine are controlled by its own process (VMWP.exe), keeping several virtual machines on a single volume will cause more Disk I/O operations from each worker process. Hence, it is recommended to use separate volumes for storing virtual machine files (VHD, VHDx, checkpoints, and XML).”

Does this mean the arrangement I propose in my second point above – multiple partitions and a CSV on each partition? The term “Volume” seems to be a bit ambiguous depending on where you read

I believe point 14 to be incorrect though. “De-fragment Hyper-V Server regularly or before creating a virtual hard disk. It is advisable to defrag Hyper-V Server disks where the VHD and virtual machine configuration files are stored regularly or before creating a large virtual hard disk file.”

It is my understanding that defrag only tends to work well if there are many files on the disk, on the physical disk in my case there is one massive starwind file so I don’t think defrag on the physical will do anything, defrag in the starwind disk might help but it is mostly large VHDX files – will defrag really make much difference?

Additionally, I don’t have any generation 2 VM’s and there’s nothing I can do about this right now, all data disks use SCSI channels on the VMs, all VHDX are fixed size.

Also, a slight side question but kind of related – I have both an exchange server and SQL server running as VM’s (the log files already exist on separate VHDs, but on the same physical RAID 10 disk), does my physical disks used for log files need to match those used for the DB, or can they be slower lower class disks… for example, if I place a 7.2K disk in with a RAID made up of 10K disks, it is my understanding that the entire RAID will lower its performance of the slowest member – is this true with log files and databases, if the log files are on slow disks will the database also go slower to match the pace of log files being written?

many thanks

Steve