Dell Storage Replay Manager 7.6.0.47 for Compellent 6.5

Posted on June 22, 2015 by workinghardinit

Recently as a DELL Compellent customer version 7.6.0.47 became available to us. I download it and found some welcome new capabilities in the release notes.

Support for vSphere 6
2024 bit public key support for SSL/TLS
The ability to retry failed jobs (Microsoft Extensions Only)
The ability to modify a backup set (Microsoft Extensions Only)

The ability to retry failed jobs is handy. There might be a conflicting backup running via a 3rd party tool leveraging the hardware VSS provider. So the ability to retry can mitigate this. As we do multiple replays per day and have them scheduled recurrently we already mitigated the negative effects of this, but this only gibes us more options to deal with such situations. It’s good.

The ability to modify a backup set is one I love. It was just so annoying not to be able to do this before. A change in the environment meant having to create a new backup set. That also meant keeping around the old job for as long as you wanted to retain the replays associated with that job. Not the most optimal way of handling change I’d say, so this made me happy when I saw it.

Now I’d like DELL to invest a bit more in make restore of volume based replays of virtual machines easier. I actually like the volume based ones with Hyper-V as it’s one snapshot per CSV for all VMs and it doesn’t require all the VMs to reside on the host where we originally defined the backup set. Optimally you do run all the VMs on the node that own the CSV but otherwise it has less restrictions. I my humble opinion anything that restricts VM mobility is bad and goes against the grain of virtualization and dynamic optimization. I wonder if this has more to do with older CVS/Hyper-V versions, current limitations in Windows Server Hyper-V or CVS or a combination. This makes for a nice discussion, so if anyone from MSFT & the DELL Storage team responsible for Repay Manager wants to have one, just let me know Smile

Last but not least I’d love DELL to communicate in Q4 of 2015 on how they will integrate their data protection offering in Compellent/Replay manager with Windows Server 2016 Backup changes and enhancements. That’s quite a change that’s happing for Hyper-V and it would be good for all to know what’s being done to leverage that. Another thing that is high on my priority for success is to enable leveraging replays with Live Volumes. For me that’s the biggest drawback to Live Volumes: having to chose between high/continuous availability and application consistent replays for data protection and other use cases).

I have some more things on my wish list but these are out of scope in regards to the subject of this blog post.

Hyper-V and Disk Fragmentation

Posted on May 25, 2015 by workinghardinit

There are 3 type of disk fragmentation you might need to deal with in regards to Hyper-V:

Fragmentation of the file system on the host LUN where the VMs reside.
Fragmentation of files system on the LUNs inside of the VM.
Block fragmentation of the VHDX itself. This is potentially more of an issue with dynamic disks and differencing disks.

We deal with the first type by defragmenting the LUN, which might be a CSV, in which case you can take a look here for more information on this Defragmenting your CSV Windows 2012 R2 Style with Raxco Perfect Disk 13 SP2. For more information on fragmentation in general take a look here What’s New in Defrag for Windows Server 2012/2012R. The second type is business as usual and is similar to the first one except that it’s the file system inside a VM.

For the third type we need to create a new virtual disk using the fragmented one as the source. See Checking and Correcting Virtual Hard Disk Fragmentation. This easily done but it does cause down time unless you leverage storage live migration. So that’s my preferred method, especially as I leverage ODX when I do this, so it’s pretty fast. So always leave yourself some margin on storage to be able to perform maintenance operations. That has always been true and still is.

But how do you find out that you have this issue? PowerShell is your friend! Here’s a snippet to show you can check all VMs their vhdx files on a cluster:

$AllVMsOnAllNodesInCluster = Get-VM -ComputerName (get-ClusterNode)
ForEach ($VM in $AllVMsOnAllNodesIncluster)
{
    $VM.Name
    #$HardDrives = $VM.HardDrives
    invoke-command -ComputerName $VM.computername -ScriptBlock {
        param ($VM)
        Get-VM -Name $VM.Name | Get-VMHardDiskDrive | Get-VHD | ft path, fragmentationpercentage -AutoSize
    } -arg $VM
}

Here’s a screenshot of some output of this snippet

As said the best solution that does not incur down time is to storage (live) migrate the virtual disks affected. We can automate this and put in some logic to do this for all virtual hard disks that are more than X% fragmented. Do take care to also check for disk space or the migration will fail.

Hope this helps some of you!

Fixing “Windows cannot find the Microsoft Software License Terms. Make sure the installation sources are valid and restart the installation” Or “Windows installation encountered an unexpected error. Verify the installation sources are accessible, and restart the installation. Error code: 0xE0000100”

Posted on September 5, 2014 by workinghardinit

101

When trying to install a Windows 2012 (R2) or Windows 8(8.1) VM you can encounter the following error:

"Windows cannot find the Microsoft Software License Terms. Make sure the installation sources are valid and restart the installation."

Right after selecting the operating system.

or perhaps even this error

"Windows installation encountered an unexpected error. Verify the installation sources are accessible, and restart the installation.

Error code: 0xE0000100"

The main reason for this on Hyper-V is that you have been to conservative on memory allocation and it could pass some checks. You can hit these errors when you did not assign enough memory to the virtual machine or accepted the default. The default is 512MB and I’ve noticed that on Windows Server 2012 (R2) Hyper-V this can be to little.

So the fix is a easy as upping the assigned amount of memory. I went for 1024MB

Now start the VM again, hit any key to boot form the virtual DVD to start the setup. After selecting the OS version to install you’re now greeted by the screen to accept the license terms instead of a warning.

So click next and install your VM.

Windows NLB On Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V: A Personal Preferred Configuration Using IGMP With Multicast

Posted on March 28, 2014 by workinghardinit

To know and see the issues we are dealing with in this demo, you need to read this blog post first: Windows NLB Nodes “Misconfigured” after Simultaneous Live Migration on Windows Server 2012 (R2).

We were dealing with some issues on on several WNLB clusters running on a Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V cluster after a migration from an older cluster. So go read that and come back Smile .

Are you back? Good.

Let’s look at the situation we’ll use to show case one possible solution to the issues. If you have a 2 node Hyper-V cluster, are using NIC Teaming for the switch and depending on how teaming is set up you’ll might run into these issues. Here we’ll use a single switch to mimic a stacked one (the model available to me is non stackable and I have only one anyway).

Make sure you enable MAC Spoofing on the appropriate vNIC or vNICs in the advanced settings

Note that there is no need to use a static MAC address or copy your VIP mac into the settings of your VM with Windows Server 2012 (R2) Hyper-V
Set up WNLB with IGMP multicast as option. While chancing this there will be some advice warnings thrown at you

I’m not going in to the fact that since W2K8 the network default configurations are all about security. You might have to do some configuration work to get the network flow to do what it needs to do. Lots on this weak host/strong host model behavior on the internet . Even wild messy ramblings by myself here.

On to the switch itself!

Why IGMP multicast? Unicast isn’t the best option and multicast might not cut it or be the best option for your environment and IGMP is less talked about yet it’s a nice solution with Windows NLB, bar replacing into with a hardware load balancer. For this demo I have a DELL PowerConnect 5424 at my disposal. Great little switch, many of them are still serving us well after 6 years on the job.

What MAC address do I feed my switch configurations?

Ah! You are a smart cookie, aren’t you. A mere ipconfig reveals only the unicast MAC address of the NIC. The GUI on WNLB shows you the MAC address of the VIP. Is that the correct one for my chosen option, unicast, multicast or IGMP multicast? No worries, the GUI indeed shows the one you need based on the WNLB option you configure. Also, take a peak at nlb.exe /? and you’ll find a very useful option called ip2mac.

Let’s run that against our VIP:

And compare it to what we see in the GUI, you’ll notice that show the MAC to use with IGMP multicast as well.

You might want to get the MAC address before you configure WNLB from unicast to IGMP multicast. That’s where the ip2mac option comes in handy.

Configuring your switch(es)

We have a multicast IP address that we’ll convert into the one we need to use. Most switches like the PowerConnect 5424 in the example will do that for you by the way.

I’m not letting the joining of the members to the Bridge Multicast Group happen automatically so I need to configure this. I actually have to VLANs, each Hyper-V host has 2 LACP NIC team with Dynamic load balancing connected to an LACP LAGs on this switch (it’s a demo, yes, I know no switch redundancy). I have tow as some WNLB nodes have multiple clusters and some of these are on another VLAN.

I create a Bridge Multicast Group. For this I need the VLAN, the IGMP multicast MAC address and cluster IP address

When I specify the IGMP multicast MAC I take care to format it correctly with “:” instead of “–“ or similar.

You can type in the VIP IP address or convert is per this KB yourself. If you don’t the switch will sort you out.

The address range of the multicast group that is used is 239.255.x.y, where x.y corresponds to the last two octets of the Network Load Balancing virtual IP address.

For us this means that our VIP of 172.31.3.232 becomes 239.255.3.232. The switch handles typing in either the VIP or the converted VIP equally well.

This is what is looks like, here there are two WNLB clusters in ICMP multicast mode configured. There are more on the other VLAN.

We leave Bridge Multicast Forwarding here for what it is, no need in this small setup. Same for IGMP Snooping. It’s enable globally and we’ve set the members statically.

We make unregistered multicast is set to forwarding (default).

Basically, we’re good to go now. Looking at the counters of the interfaces & LAGs you should see that the multicast traffic is targeted at the members of the LAGs/LAGs and not all interfaces of the switch. The difference should be clear when you compare the counters adding up before and after you configured IGMP.

The Results

No over the top switch flooding, I can simultaneously live migrate multiple WLNB nodes and have them land on the same switch without duplicate IP address warning. Will this work for you. I don’t know. There are some many permutations that I can’t tell you what you should do in your particular situation to make it work well. I’ll just quote myself from my previous blog post on this subject:

“"If you insist you want my support on this I’ll charge a least a thousand Euro per hour, effort based only. Really. And chances are I’ll spend 10 hours on it for you. Which means you could have bought 2 (redundancy) KEMP hardware NLB appliances and still have money left to fly business class to the USA and tour some national parks. Get the message?”

But you have seen some examples on how to address issues & get a decent configuration to keep WNLB humming along for a few more years. I really hope it helps out some of you struggling with it.

Wait, you forgot the duplicate IP Address Warning!

No, I didn’t. We’ll address that here. There are some causes for this:

There is a duplicate IP address. If so, you need to address this.
A duplicate IP address warning is to be expected when you switch between unicast and multicast NLB cluster modes (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/264645). Follow the advice in the KB article and clearing the ARP tables on the switches can help and you should get rid of it, it’s transient.
There are other cause that are described here Troubleshooting Network Load Balancing Clusters. All come down to the fact that somehow you’re getting multiple MAC address associated with the same IP address. One possible cause can be that you migrated form an old cluster to a new cluster, meaning that the pool of dynamic IP addresses is different and hence the generated VIP MAC … aha!
Another reason, and again associated multiple MAC address associated with the same IP address is that you have an old static ARP entry for that IP address somewhere on your switches. Do some house cleaning.
If all the above is perfectly fine and you’re certain this is due to some Hyper-V live migration, vSwitch, firmware, driver bug you can get rid of the warning by disabling ARP checks on the cluster members. Under HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesTcpipParameters, create a DWORD value with as name “ArpRetryCount” and set the value to 0. Reboot the server for this to take effect. In general this is not a great idea to do. But if you manage your IP addresses well and are sure no static entries are set on the switch it can help avoid this issue. But please, don’t just disable “ArpRetryCount” and ignore the root causes.

Conclusion

You can still get WNLB to work for you properly, even today in 2014. But it’s time to start saying goodbye to Windows NLB. The way the advanced networking features are moving towards layer 3 means that “useful hacks” like MAC spoofing for Windows NLB are going no longer going to work. But until you have implement hardware load balancing I hope this blog has given you some ideas & tips to keep Windows NLB running smoothly for now. I’ve done quite few and while it takes some detective work & testing, so far I have come out victorious. Eat that Windows NLB! I have always enjoyed making it work where people said it couldn’t be done. But with the growing important of network virtualization and layer 3 in our networks, this nice hack, has had it’s time.

For some reasons developers like Windows NLB as “it’s easy and they are in control as it runs on their servers”. Well … as you have seen nothing comes free and perhaps our time is better spend in some advanced health checking and failover in hardware load balancing. DevOps anyone?

Working Hard In IT

My view on IT from the trenches

Category Archives: Hypervisor