Changes to Hyper-V Setup

In 4.5 we've completely overhauled the Setup_hyperv.py scripts and moved most of them into Prism! Check out the new workflows:

One note - SCVMM setup is still done from the command line, so if you're using SCVMM in your environment simply login to one of your CVMs after running through these steps and run "setup_hyperv.py setup_scvmm"

Advantages of the whitebox appliance model

Recently I saw the following tweet from a well-known VMware blogger

And had flashbacks to some nightmares I had back while working at Cisco.  At Cisco we commonly had to build custom ISOs to handle a variety of custom drivers (Nexus 1000v VEM, VIC drivers for Eth/FC, VM-FEX driver, etc).  If you didn't do this right you were SOL, and if you did choose "ignore compatibility warnings" to upgrade anyway, then you were likely going to have to reinstall.  Looking at the official guide to creating a custom ISO, you've got a lot of steps to get right and won't know if you were successful until you try to install.

Tech TopX: ESXi performance troubleshooting

One of our RTP SREs covers ESXi Performance troubleshooting in this episode of Tech TopX!

Tech TopX: Erasure Coding

In this most recent episode of Tech TopX, I cover our new technology Erasure Coding.  Check it out!

Acropolis - Installing a Windows VM

Check out Sean Watkins in our newest TechTopX - installing Windows as an Acropolis VM!

Tech TopX: Live Migration

As a compliment to my previous posts on the topic, we now have the a Tech Topx to explain it as well!  Check it out for  a detailed overview!

Live Migration Overview Post
Live Migration Configuration Script

Tech TopX: Configuring Remote Sites

In our first 2 part Tech TopX we cover Remote sites, a critical component for our DR configuration.  Check them out!

Get Ready for .NEXT!

So as many of you know, .NEXT is coming up fast!  June 8-10th in Miami - we're going to have a ton of really cool products and announcements so I hope to see you there!

Hyper-V Cloning a VM in 4.1.2

In NOS 4.1.2 we introduced an easy way to clone VMs from Powershell.  There's a couple of advantages of using our cmdlet:

1. No need for SCVMM.  No more messing around with libraries and ODX!
2. Since we have native access to the data, we can very quickly clone VMs
3. Better space utilization.  Once again, since we have native access to the VMs we don't need to replicate everything, only keep track of the changes.  In VMware this is known as a VAAI clone

When I say very quickly, I mean QUICKLY.  I'm talking 100 VMs in 2 minutes.

Here's the command we used (pulled from the docs)

New-VMClone -VM vm_name -CloneNamePrefix  clone_name_prefix`

-CloneNameSuffixBegin clone_name_suffix_begin -NCopies n_copies`

-ComputerName computer_name -DestinationUncPath destination_unc_path -PowerOn`

-Credential prism_credential -MaxConcurrency max_concurrency

So as a test, I took a windows 2012 machine, and then ran:

New-VMClone -VM clone-base -CloneNamePrefix  clone -CloneNameSuffixBegin 1 -NCopies 100 -ComputerName cbms-1 -PowerOn -MaxConcurrency 10

It then popped up a window asking for my prism creds.  I logged in and off it went!  10 copies were made at a time, and after 2 minutes I had 100 VMs running!  Other advantage of this?  The VMs were perfectly deduped so all 100 VMs used up hardly any more then the space of a single windows install.

Next step?  Properly sysprep the VM and see how long it takes to get my VMs running at that point.  I'll even record it so keep an eye out here!

Live Migration Configuration Script

In one of my previous posts I went over how to configure live migration (for all three types).  One of the biggest pain points there is setting up the Constrained Delegation and Live Migration Authentication (needed for Hyper-V Manager Migration/move-vm), so I've written up a script to simplify the setup.  Take a look below the break for more!

Tech TopX: Navigating Server Core

In this episode of Tech TopX we will be covering how to get around Server Core and the tools that are available to you.

This is a continuation of a previous Tech TopX, so make sure to check it out!

Removing and Readding a cluster to SCVMM without downtime (with logical switches)

This is going to be a short post today, but I wanted to share something that I found really cool.

So you just spent all this time getting the your Hyper-V networking juuuuuust right or getting a Hyper-V logical switch working in SCVMM and now you need to remove and readd the cluster to SCVMM (maybe you are hitting a bug and that's the workaround).  Now you've got to undo and redo all your hard work (like you would if you were using a dVS on vCenter).  There goes the weekend!

Not so fast!  SCVMM is simply a management layer, unlike vCenter which is a management and feature layer.  This means that all of the config is stored on the host.  Short story?

You can remove a host that is using a logical switch and add it back to SCVMM without any need to change the configuration!  SCVMM will automatically pick up where it left off when you add it back!

Hopefully that can save you a few hours (days?) of work!

Tech TopX: Hyper-V Initial Install

We have another new entry in our Tech TopX series.  I'm pretty happy with this one - it's a basic overview of Hyper-V installation.

Most of this is focused around Nutanix (as I use our custom Nutanix scripts) however some of the info is going to be useful no matter what Hyper-V system you are installing.

Hyper-V Live Migration

Hyper-V Live Migration is significantly more complex then ESXi.  In this post we will go over the types of live migration, how to configure it, and how to handle common errors.

Types of Migration

There are 3 main types of live migrations:

1. Hyper-V Manager Move VM.  This can be a shared-nothing move.  Non-HA VMs only
2. Failover Cluster Manager Live Migration.  HA VMs only
3. SCVMM Migrate Virtual Machine.  Any VM, only from SCVMM

Tech TopX: Port-Channels

In this episode of Tech TopX I cover port-channels - check it out!

Setting up Automatic Windows Updates using Cluster Aware Updating (CAU)

Applying Windows Updates is always a pain - it seems like there's always another patch to install and reboot that is required.  Add in clusters where you have to manually move the load around to ensure that nothing goes down and it gets far more complex.

Starting in Server 2012 Microsoft significantly simplified life for cluster admins by introducing Cluster Aware Updating (CAU).  This tool will drain all the roles from one node in the cluster, patch it, reboot and check for more patches repeated until there are none left.  It will then repeat this for the other nodes in the cluster.  Even more awesome, you can set this to run automatically allowing your Windows hosts to stay fully patched (with all the bug fixes and security fixes that entails) without affecting your VMs at all.  We'll cover how to get this setup here in this post

Tech TopX: Hyper-V Networking

This was actually one of our first ones released, but I've been slacking.  Check out this video for an overview of networking both with and without SCVMM.  SCVMM is particularly complex so definitely watch this to get an overview!

Make sure to check out my cheatsheet as well for a quick overview of Hyper-V networking!

Tech TopX: Metro Availability

Newest entry in our Tech TopX series: Metro Availability!

Check out the official documentation on Portal for more information!

Hyper-V Playbook

So you just got a Nutanix cluster and want to install Hyper-V?  This guide goes over the steps 

you need to do and how to manage this new cluster.  We also cover some normal operations such as patching.

Testing SNMP in Nutanix

I've been spending a lot of time recently working with SNMP on Nutanix and wanted to collect an overview of the pages and how to test your configuration.