As VMM 2012 is almost complete, I started to upgrade to the RC Version. I thought I’ll share some of my learnings: A major new feature is Service Templates , here’s my first use of it: Here is a VM template to deploy a single virtual...

Recently, we worked on an issue with time drift in a VM, and my colleague Johann Binder had an interesting finding I‘d like to share with you: The issue was with a VM that had SQL Server 2008 installed. In the eventlog of the machine we found...

Hi, today my collegue Bernd Högen has interesting finding that he would like to share: Recently, I faced the following Issue: On a W2k8 R2 SP1 Hyper-V Host Cluster with 2 CSV´s only the Coordinator Node was able to access the CSV. The...

Hi, often, I’m getting asked how to configure Time Synchronization for Hyper-V VM’s that run the Domain Controller (DC) Role. Our original recommendation was to disable the time synchronization and leave it up to the DC’s own functionality...

Hi, Recently, I’ve been working on several issues where customers reported poor network throughput. This happened on recent and performant hardware, that showed in benchmarking the 10GBit Ethernet connection, or slow Live Migration. The throughput...

Hi, If you add a NIC to a VM, it needs a MAC address that should be unique (at least in the network segment) to avoid duplicate MAC conflicts. In the properties for the VM you choose between a Dynamic or Static assignment. In case you select a Static...

Hi, I've been asked this a couple of times, and thought it might be interesting to blog.. If you have a R2 Hyper-V Host cluster, the Virtual Machine Resource has a property on the Settings page named "Heartbeat Setting" with an associated check...

Hi, Scripting time again! Really often, I need to check if the Integration Services Version of the Hyper-V guests are up to date. Some Updates für Hyper-V update the vmguest.iso on the Host. So you need to manually go the VM's afterwards and...

Hi everyone, I run a 2 node cluster with Hyper-V. While debugging and testing, i often have to reboot a node and end up with all my VM's on one node, and find myself moving them arround manually. So i came up with the below script to automate this...

Hi, Recently, I had some customers which could not Quick or Live Migrate their VMs in a Hyper-V Cluster. Although the Cluster Nodes where the same manufacture and type, migration was not possible because the destination server reported a different...

Recently, I worked on the below issue and though this might be worth to blog: On a Hyper-V Server, existing VMs where running just fine, however, we could not create new VMs. The error at the final stage of the Wizard was: The server encountered...

Recently, I've seen some problems related with BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service) during VM creation from SCVMM. One error I've seen is that the process appears to hang but was indeed extremely slow (1MB in 1 hour), the other was an error...

Hi, we just release a guide on how to configure your Network Cards with Hyper-V http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff428137(WS.10).aspx I had the chance to check this out up front, and if you just don't have plenty of NIC's (>3), the...

This tool saved me lots of time. So I thought I point you to it: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/vhdtool Among some other nice features, my favorite is repair Repairs a broken Hyper-V snapshot chain where an administrator has expanded the size...

I often have the need to get more info on the .vhd and .avhd (Snapshots or Differencing) files. I use the below .vbs script to read the info from the file. Here's a sample output: C:\VMs\mergetest\> cscript vhdinfo.vbs C:\VMs\mergetest\mergetest...

Update: Meanwhile there is a further Februar Rollup available: Description of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 hotfix rollup package: February 9, 2010 http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;978560 Please note...

SCVMM R2 has a nice new feature to migrate the storage location of a VM. The move is done on one particular host from one drive to another. The move can be done while the VM is offline, in safe state, or even online. What I’ve seen recently,...

Well, the title says it all. If the host you're trying to install SCVMM on has a name that contains "-SCVMM-" in upper case letters, setup fails with Error 257. Example: MUC-SCVMM-1 Resolution: Use a slightly different name, like "MUC-SCVMMR2-1...

I had a large customer where some Host occasionally where reported with an Error during Host refresh: The Error in SCVMM was: Error (2927) A Hardware Management error has occurred trying to contact server <your host name comes here>...

Hi, Windows Server 2008 R2 has a new feature component: Bits Compact Server! This is a lightweight Server for Background Intelligent Transfer Service. SCVMM 2008 R2 makes use of it and enables this feature on the Hyper-V Hosts during Agent installation...

Hi, Recently, I had some customers with VMs they just P2V'ed, or even had them running already on Virtual Server or Hyper-V. Now, they installed the latest Integration Components that came with the R2 Release. After the required reboot, the...

While Service Pack 2 contains many fixes that I recommended earlier, I intend to post here some recent fixes that helped in newer situations: 1. Occasional crashes of Vmwp.exe http://support.microsoft.com/kb/972045/en-us especially because it contains...

In a large SCVMM environment we noticed that the SCVMM Service (vmmservice.exe) allocates lots of memory (>4GB). You may notice that you are unable to create new console sessions or existing sessions lose their connection when all available memory...

Recently we published a Rollup for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 on Microsoft Update. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961983/en-us When your SCVMM Server is not directly connected to the Internet you may have the need to download the...

Recently I saw some strange errors: - A complete VM was not listed in Hyper-V Manager anymore. -or- Making changes to a VM and clicking Apply caused error messages like: The requested operation cannot be performed on a file with a user-mapped...