Category Archives: Clustering

Moving Clustered Virtual Machines to Windows Server 2012 with the Cluster Migration Wizard

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As you might remember I did a blog post on transitioning from a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V cluster to Windows Server 2012 (well I was using the beta at the time, not the RC yet):

  1. Part 1 Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows Server 2012 (Beta) – Part 1
  2. Part 2 Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows Server 2012 (Beta) – Part 2
  3. Part 3 Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows Server 2012 (Beta) – Part 3

Microsoft has now blogged about the process themselves and they use the migration wizard in Failover Cluster Manager to get the job done where I did this using the Import, “register only” functionality.

This is the first step by step that describes the official way. You can read about the process here:

How to Move Highly Available (Clustered) VMs to Windows Server 2012 with the Cluster Migration Wizard

Windows Server 2012 Cluster Reset Recent Events Feature

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There are various small improvements in Windows Server 2012 Failover Clustering that make live a little easier. When playing in the lab one of the things I like to do is break stuff. You know, like pull out the power plug  of a host during a live migration or remove a network cable  for one or more of the networks, flip the power of the switch off and on again, crash the vmms.exe process and other really bad things …Smile Just getting a feel for what happens and how Windows 2012 & Hyper-V responds.

As you can imagine this fills up the cluster event logs real fast. It also informs you in that you’ve had issues in the past 24 hours. Those recent cluster events could not be cleared or set to “acknowledged” up to Windows 2008 R2 except by deleting the log files. Now this has to be done on all nodes and is something you should not do in production and is probably even prohibited. There are environments where this is indeed a “resume generating” action. But it’s annoying that you can leave a client with a healthy looking environment after you have fixed an issue.

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For the lab or environments where event log auditing is a no issue I used to run a little script that would clear the event logs of the lab cluster nodes not to be dealing with to much noise between tests or to leave a GUI that represents the healthy state of the cluster for the customer.

This has become a lot easier and better in Windows Server 2012 we now have a feature for this build in to the Failover Cluster Manager GUI. Just right click the cluster events and select “Reset Recent Events”.

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The good thing is this ignores the recent events before “now” but it does not clear the event log. You can configure the query to show older events again. This is nice during testing in the lab. Even in a production environment where this is a big no-no, you can’t do this you can now get rid of noise from previous issues,focus on the problem you working on or leave the scene with a clean state after fixing an issue without upsetting any auditors.

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Transition a Windows Server 8 to Windows 2012 Release Candidate Hyper-V Cluster

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For those of you interested in moving their lab from Windows Server 8 beta to Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate I can refer you to my 3 part blog series on Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows Server 2012 (Beta).

  1. Part 1 Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows Server 2012 (Beta) – Part 1
  2. Part 2 Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows Server 2012 (Beta) – Part 2
  3. Part 3 Upgrading Hyper-V Cluster Nodes to Windows 8 (Beta) – Part 3

So the entire process is very similar but for the fact that to go from Windows Server 8 Beta you have to do a clean install on every node you evict during the process. An upgrade is not supported and not possible. I even tried the old trick of editing the cversion.ini file in the sources folder to lower the supported minimum version for an upgrade, but no joy.imageimage

You probably remember this trick to enable an upgrade form the beta/RC  to RTM with Windows Server 2008 R2/Windows 7  But that doesn’t work and even if it did it would not be supported.

But just follow the 3 part series and do an fresh install instead of an upgrade of the cluster nodes and you’ll be just fine.

Failover Cluster Node Names in Upper & Lower Case In Window 2012 with Cluster.exe, PowerShell & GUI

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Cluster Node Names Can Be Inconsistently Named

A lot of us who build failover clusters are bound to run into the fact that the node names as shown the Failover Cluster Management GUI is not always consistent in the names format  it gives to the nodes. Sometimes they are lower case, sometimes they are upper case. See the example below of a Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 cluster.

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Many a system administrator has some slight neurotic tendencies. And he or she can’t stand this. I’ve seen people do crazy things like trying to fix this up to renaming a node in the registry. Do NOT do that. You’ll break that host. People check whether the computer object in AD is lower or upper case, whether the host name is lower or upper case, check how the node are registered in DNS etc. They try to keep ‘m all in sync at sometimes high cost Smile But in the end you can never be sure that all nodes will have the same case using the GUI.

So what can you do?

  1. Use cluster.exe to add the node to the cluster. That enforces the case you type in the name!  An example of this is when you’d like upper case node names: 
    cluster.exe /cluster:CLUSTER-NAME /add /node:UPPERCASENODE1
  2. Some claim that when you add all nodes at the same time and they will all be the same. But ‘m not to sure this will always work.

Windows 2012

In Windows 2012 PowerShell replaces cluster.exe (it is still there, for backward compatibility but for how long?) and they don’t seem to enforce the case of the names of the node. For more info on Failover Clustering PowerShell look at Failover Clusters Cmdlets in Windows PowerShell, it’s a good starting point.

Don’t despair my fellow IT Pros. Learn to accept that fail over clustering is case insensitive and you’ll never run into any issue. Let it go …. Well unless you get a GUI bug like we had with Exchange 2010 SP1 or any other kind of bug that has issues with the case of the nodes Smile.

If you want to use cluster.exe (or MSClus) for that matter you’ll need to add it via the Add Roles and Features Wizard / Remote Administration Tools /Feature Administration Tools / Failover Clustering Tools. Note that there are not present by default.

clusterdotexe

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On an upgraded node I needed to uninstall failover clustering and reinstall it to get it to works, so even in that scenario they are gone and I needed to add them again.

MSClus and Cluster.EXE support Windows Server 2012, Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 2008 clusters. The Windows Server 2012 PowerShell module for clustering supports Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2008 R2, not Windows Server 2008.

For more information see the relevant section at Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) for Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Server “8” Beta (dsforum2wiki). You’ll have to live with the fact that a lot of documentation still refers to Windows Server 8. As of his post, it’s only been a week that the final name of Windows Server 2012 was announced.

 

 

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