Category Archives: Upgrade

In place upgrade of RD Gateway farm nodes to Windows Server 2016 removes the Loopback adapter for UDP load balancing

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s a quick heads up to anyone who’s involved in upgrading existing Windows Server 2012 (R2) RD Gateway farms to Windows Server 2016.

In my recent experiences the in place upgrade (VMs) works rather well. Just make sure the netlogon service is set to automatic (a know issue and a fix is coming) after you upgrade and install all updates. Also make sure that you don’t have this issue

Windows Time Service settings are not preserved during an in-place upgrade to Windows Server 2016 or Windows 10 Version 1607

There is however one networks specific issue specific you’ll need to deal with when leveraging UDP with a load balancer via Direct Server Return.

When you have a RD Gateway farm you load balance it with a (preferably high available) load balancer like a Kemp Loadmaster. I have described this in these blogs/videos Load balancing Hyper-V Workloads With High To Continuous Availability With a KEMP Loadmaster and Quick Demo Video Of Site Failover With KEMP Loadmaster Global Balancing

What you also do is load balance both HTTPS (TCP, port 443) and UDP (port 3391). For UDP we use Direct Server Return ((DSR) as described in my blog post Load balancing UDP for a RD Gateway farm with a KEMP Loadmaster. This requires a properly configured loopback adapter.

image

During the in place upgrade to Windows Server 2016 this loopback adapter is removed form the nodes. So you need to add it back just a described in my original blog post. Normally it will find the settings for it in the registry but it’s bets you check it all out as I’ve found that the loopback adapter did have “Register this connection”s address in DNS” enabled as well as NETBIOS over TCP/IP. So, per my blog post, check it all to make sure. Other than that, after installing all the Windows Server 2016 updates all works smoothly after an in place upgrade.

Hope this helps someone out there!

In Place upgrades of cluster nodes to Windows Server 2016

Posted on by
5

You will all have heard about rolling cluster upgrades from Windows Server 202 R2 to Windows Server 2016 by now. The best and recommend practice is to do a clean install of any node you want to move to Windows Server 2016. However an in place upgrade does work. Actually it works better then ever before. I’m not recommending this for production but I did do a bunch just to see how the experience was and if that experience was consistent. I was actually pleasantly surprised and it saved me some time in the lab.

Today, if you want to you can upgrade your Windows Server 2012 R2 hosts in the cluster to Windows Server 2016.

The main things to watch out for are that all the VMs on that host have to be migrated to another node or be shut down.

You can not have teamed NICs on the host. Most often these will be used for a vSwitch, so it’s smart and prudent to note down the vSwitch (or vSwitches) name and remove them before removing the NIC team. After you’ve upgraded the node you can recreate the NIC team and the vSwitch(es).

Note that you don’t even have to evict the node from the cluster anymore to perform the upgrade.

image

I have successfully upgrade 4 cluster this way. One was based on PC hardware but the other ones where:

  • DELL R610 2 node cluster with shared SAS storage (MD3200).
  • Dell R720 2 node cluster with Compellent SAN (and ancient 4Gbps Emulex and QLogic FC HBAs)
  • Dell R730 3 node cluster with Compellent SAN (8Gbps Emulex HBAs)

Naturally all these servers were rocking the most current firmware and drives as possible. After the upgrades I upgraded the NIC drivers (Mellanox, Intel) and the FC drivers ‘(Emulex) to be at their supported vendors drivers. I also made sure they got all the available updates before moving on with these lab clusters.

Issues I noticed:

  • The most common issue I saw was that the Hyper-V manager GUI was not functional and I could not connect to the host. The fix was easy: uninstall Hyper-V and re-install it. This requires a few reboots. Other than that it went incredibly well.
  • Another issue I’ve seen with upgrade was that the netlogon service was set to manual which caused various issues with authentication but which is easily fixed. This has also been reported here. Microsoft is aware of this bug and a fixed is being worked on.

 

.

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

Posted on by
2

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.

image

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

image

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.

image

image

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.

Exchange 2010 SP3 Rollup 5 Added Support for Windows Server 2012 R2 Active Directory

Posted on by
3

6 weeks ago (February 25th 2014) Microsoft finally took away the last barrier to upgrading some of our Windows Server 2012 Active Directory Environments to R2.  Most of them are still running Exchange 2010 SP3 and not Exchange 2013. The reason is that Exchange 2013 was not deployed is whole other discussion Eye rolling smile.

However that dis mean that until the release of  Exchange Server 2010 SP3 Update Rollup 5 last month we could not upgrade Active Directory to Windows Server 2012 R2. Rollup 5 brought us support for exactly that. We can now:

  • Support Domain Controllers running Windows Server 2012 R2
  • Raise the Active Directory Forest Function Level and Domain Functional Level to Windows Server 2012 R2

Please note that you cannot deploy Exchange Server 2010 (SP3 RU5) on Windows Server 2012 R2 and you’ll probably never will be able to do that. I’m not sure Microsoft has any plans for this.

Now our office moves have been concluded, meaning I can get back to IT Infrastructure instead of being an glorified logistics & facility peon, we’re doing the upgrade.

This also means we can move the Active Directory environments to the latest version so we have the best possible position for any future IT projects at very low risk. The environments are already at W2K12 functional level. If the budgets get so tight they lose/scrap EA or volume licensing it also allows them to run at this level for many years to come without causing any blocking issues.