Category Archives: Hyper-V

First experiences with a rolling cluster upgrade of a lab Hyper-V Cluster (Technical Preview)

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Introduction

In vNext we have gotten a long awaited  & very welcome new capability: rolling cluster upgrades. Which for the Hyper-V roles is a 100% zero down time experience. The only step that will require some down time is the upgrade of the virtual machine configuration files to vNext (version 5 to 6) as the VM has to be shut down for this.

How to

The process for a rolling upgrade is so straight forward I’ll just give you a quick bullet list of the first part of the process:

  • Evacuate the workload from the cluster node you’re going to upgrade
  • Evict the node to upgrade to vNext from the cluster
  • Upgrade (no in place upgrade supported but in your lab you can get away with it)
  • Add the upgraded node to the cluster
  • Rinse & repeat until all nodes have been upgraded (that can take a while with larger clusters)

Please note that all actions you administration you do on a cluster in mixed mode should be done from a node running vNext or a system running Windows 10 with the vNext RSAT installed.

Once you’ve upgraded all nodes in the cluster, the situation you’re in now is basically that you’re running a Windows Server vNext Hyper-V cluster in cluster functional level 8 (W2K12R2) and the next step is to upgrade to 9, which is vNext, no there no 10 yet in server Winking smile

You do this by executing the Update-ClusterFunctionalLevel cmdlet. This is an online process.  Again, do this from a node running vNext or a system running Windows 10 with the vNext RSAT installed. Note that this is where you’re willing to commit to the vNext level for the cluster. That’s where you want to go but you get to decide when. When you’ve do this you can’t go back to W2K12R2. It’s a matter of fact that as long as you’re running cluster functional level 8, you can reverse the entire process. Talk about having options! I like having options, just ask Carsten Rachfahl (@hypervserver), he’ll tell you it’s one of my mantras.

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When this goes well you can just easily check the cluster functional level as follows:

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When this is done you can do the upgrade of the VM configuration by running the Update-VMConfigurationVersion cmdlet. This is an off line process where the VMs you’re updating have to be shut down. You can do this for just one VM, all or anything in between. This is when you decided you’re committing to all the goodness vNext brings you.  But the fact that you have some time before you need to do it means you can  easily get those machine to run smoothly on a W2K12R2 cluster in case you need to roll back. Remember, options are good!

Doing so updates VM version from 5 to 6 and enables new Hyper-V features (hit F5 a lot or reopen Hyper-V Manager to see the value change.

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Note: If in the lab you’re running some VMs on a cluster node are not highly available (i.e. they’re not clustered) they cannot be updated until the cluster functional level has been upgraded to version 9.

Win a free ticket to Experts Live 2014

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As you might already know I’m speaking at the Dutch IT community event Experts Live 2014 in the Netherlands. The talk is about “The Capable & Scalable Cloud OS “ where we’ll highlight and show some of the scalable capabilities in Windows Server 2012 R2 when combined with great hardware.

You can find the program at Experts Live 2014 which is very rich in content. There are 7 tracks and over 40 sessions! Chose a track or mix and match to your hearts content between  Microsoft Azure, System Center, Hyper-V, SQL, Windows, PowerShell and Office365. It’s all good.

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To celebrate the success of the event the organizers have allowed us to give away some free entrance tickets. This is a very nice gift that will allow you to enjoy a full day of learning for free.

So convince me you’re willing to put in the time and effort to learn and we’ll help you do exactly that by making sure you get a free ticket!  Leave a reply to this blog post from Thursday October 9th till Thursday October 16th in which you tell me what blog or blogs of mine you’ve enjoyed most. Leave your name, e-mail, your company and function title so we can arrange things for you. Don’t worry we will not publish these.

There is only one request/condition … if you win a ticket come to the event as a no show means some one else can’t come.

Hyper-V did not find virtual machines to import from the location . The operation failed with error code ‘32784’.

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I got contacted by some people how ran into some issues importing VMs from W2K12R2 Hyper-V into W2K12 Hyper-V. They got bitten by this “little” issue: Importing a VM that is exported from Windows Server 2012 R2 into Windows Server 2012 is not supported

This means you get greeted by

Hyper-V did not find virtual machines to import from the location <folder location>.
The operation failed with error code ‘32784’.

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No the trick of not exporting the VM but doing an “in place” registration doesn’t cut it. That’s great for W2K8R2 to W2K12 or W2K12 to W2K12R2 but not from W2K12R2 to a lower version. In that way the title of the KB article could be seen as a bit misleading or incomplete, but the contents is pretty clear.

And that’s it. Woeps! What you have 200 VMs on the LUNs form the old cluster you already blew away to build the new one? You do have a tested exit plan for this right? Uh no?

Facepalm Combo

Oh MAN, NOOOOO!

Now if it’s only one or two VMs you can always work around this by creating new VMs using the old VHDXs. This will leave you to deal with networking cleanup inside of the VMs and configuring TCP/IP. PowerShell can help here but in large volumes this remains as serious effort. This is also the time that documentation pays!

Now what if this happens to you when you’re trying to roll back a migration of a hyper-V cluster (revert W2K12R2 to W2K12 for example). Well for one you should have know as you did test all this right? Right?!

What are your other options to roll back other than  the above? From the top of my head and without details?

  • Move back to your old cluster Smile You didn’t already nuke it, I hope.
  • If you have a SAN take a snapshot of the LUNs before you move them to Windows Server 2012 R2 for faster fall back. But beware, if you’re running applications that require some tender loving care in relation to snapshots like Exchange  or Active Directory in those VMs … shutting all VMs down before you create the can help snapshot mitigates issues but is not a full proof approach! “Know thy apps”!
  • A great backup & RESTORE solution to get you back up and running also comes in handy but don’t forget that it requires you to know your apps as well here. Yes, it’s not always just “CLICKEDYCLICKCLICKDONE”
  • Perhaps it’s now time to activate your paused replicas on the DRC cluster or hosts?  You did test this didn’t you?

Now for anyone involved in a migration to Windows Server 2012 R2 there is no excuse not to know this in advance and to test out the new cluster hardware as much as you can. This minimizes the chance you’ll need to fall back. And please test your exit scenarios, really, I mean it.  Also please, you can migrate one LUN/CSV at the time. Try to run the VMs on the first migrated LUN/CSV before you do all the others. That way you can do some damage control.

Now, this is not great but it is what it is and at least now you know before your migrate Winking smile. We’ve also asked MSFT to make falling back a bit less “"involved” in future versions. Perhaps they’ll do that, I’m pretty sure they’ll consider it. And by what we’ve seen in the recently available Technical Preview they did!

Microsoft Hyper-V S3 Cap warning when upgrading a Hyper-V Virtual Machine

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When you do an in place upgrade of a Hyper-V virtual machine you’ll get a warning that Microsoft Hyper-V S3 Cap may not work after the upgrade and that you need to update the driver prior to the upgrade.This warning is logged to the Windows Compatibility Report.htm.

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Microsoft Hyper-V S3 Cap is an old S3 Trio 765 emulated video device and the driver isn’t included anymore so you’ll get this particular warning. This will never give you an issues, all drivers needed are indeed in the install bits. You can safely ignore this and successfully upgrade.

Some people uninstall the device via device manager but basically that’s pure cosmetics & doesn’t really serve a purpose.

This warning is an artifact of the generation 1 virtual machines who still have this device on a PCI bus.  Below is a screenshot of a VM with W2K12R2, generation 1. As you can see the Microsoft Hyper-V S3 Cap is perfectly fine. No worries.image

As a matter of fact you will not even see this device on a generation 2 virtual machine and we should not see this with an upgrade of those.

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I will have to wait on a public preview of Windows vNext to test an upgrade of a generation 2 machine to prove my thinking that this cosmetic error won’t be there anymore.