Hyper-V Guest Protected Network Testing Tip

Posted on November 10, 2014 by workinghardinit

I’ve been pinged a few times over the years with people saying that the new protected network feature does not work for them. This setting is set per vNIC of the virtual machine.

The issue lies in how & what people test, bar any number of other reasons why a live migration might not start or complete. What people tend to do is disable a NIC to which the vSwitch is connected. But a Protected Network is about media sense loss detection of network disconnects and this requires the NIC to be actually there and enabled. Remember, we’re talking about the NIC on the host connected to the virtual switch. A physical link failure here, meaning that the virtual switch the protected virtual network adapter no longer has network connectivity, will lead to all the VMs with the protected network enabled do be live migrated to another node in the cluster that still has a connected virtual switch for the same network. The latter is to avoid senseless virtual machine migrations to other nodes that might also have lost connectivity due to a failed physical switch.

So the point is that testing by disabling the NIC in the OS will not do. You need to unplug the cables to the virtual switch or disable the port on the switch or even shutdown the switch (a bit drastic).

Do note that it can take a little time for the live migration to kick in, it varies a bit, but it beats having to wait for the issue to be resolved. You’ll see event id 1255 logged when the VMs lose network connectivity:

In this day and age with NIC teaming to redundant switches & the fact that you might be using converged networking these tests aren’t as simple as you might think. Also don’t pull out all if the cables used for clustering if you want the cluster to be able to help you out here with a live migration. Because when the other cluster nodes can’t talk to the node your testing in any way it will be kicked out of the cluster, the VMs will go down, be moved to another node and started. This might seem obvious but if you a are using a teamed 10Gbps solution in a converged setup this might cause exactly that.

Another thing to note is that if you have a virtual switch with a dedicated backup network exposed to hosts & VMs that can tolerate down time you might want to disable protected networks on that vNIC as you don’t want to live migrate the VMs of when that network has an issue. It all depends on your needs & tastes.

Last but not least please behave, and don’t do anything silly in production when testing this. Be careful in your testing.

Golden Nuggets: Windows Server 2012 R2 Failover Cluster CSV Placement Policy

Posted on November 4, 2014 by workinghardinit

Some enhancements only become truly evident to people when they see them in action. For many features this means something need to go wrong before they kick in. Others are more visible during normal operations. This is the case with the CSV enhancements in Windows Server 2012 R2 Failover Clustering.

One golden nugget here is the CSV placement policy (which really shines in combination with SOFS/Storage Spaces). This will spread ownership of the CSV amongst the cluster nodes to ensure a balanced distribution. In a failover cluster, one node is the “coordinator node” (owner) for a CSV. The coordinator node owns the physical disk resource that is associated with a logical unit (LUN). All I/O operations for the File System on that LUN are are through the coordinator node. In previous versions there is no automatic rebalancing of coordinator node assignment. This means that all LUNs could potentially be owned by the same node. In storage spaces & SOFS scenarios becomes even more important.

The benefits

It helps all nodes carry their share of the workload as it load balances the disk I/O.
Failovers of CSV owners are potentially quicker and more predictable/consistent as an even distribution ensures that no one node owns a disproportionate number of CSVs.
When losing storage access the number of CSVs that are in redirected mode is potentially less as they are evenly distributed. In an unbalanced cluster it could be for all of them in a worse case scenario.
When using SOFS with Storage Spaces it makes sure the Storage Spaces Ownership is distributed fairly.

When does it happen

Each time a node leaves or joins the cluster. This means you don’t need to intervene manually or via PowerShell to get an even distribution. This goes for both exiting nodes as when adding a new node. The new node will get a CSV assigned if there is any on surplus on one of the existing nodes.
The process also works when you start a failover cluster when it has shut down.

When customers see this in action (it’s most obvious when then add a node as then they are normally watching) they generally smile as the cluster does it job getting the best possible results out of their hardware.

The Hyper V Amigos Showcast Episode 6: Storage Spaces

Posted on October 23, 2014 by workinghardinit

Everybody is very busy and I’m a bit tires but here’s the 6th episode of the Hyper-V Amigos show cast. In this episode we get to play a bit with storage spaces in Carsten’s lab.

As always we had a lot of fun doing so and thanks to Carsten Rachfahl and the assistance of Kerstin (his charming wife, also an MVP, in Office 365) we could simulate hardware failures & film them for you!

Carsten & I discuss several scenarios and what’s happening during failovers. Carsten is assisting customers with this a lot so he has some of the most varied experience with storage spaces and SOFS out there! Interesting stuff and for people who haven’t even looked at Windows Server 2012 or later yet a wake up call to start as the world is not limited to what we once knew. It’s not your daddy’s Windows anymore Winking smile

I hope you enjoy it and we’re already planning for the next one!

Windows Server 2012 R2 Clustering brings improved CSV diagnosability

Posted on October 15, 2014 by workinghardinit

Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) have can go into different redirected access modes for several reasons. Now a lot of people get (or got) worried about seeing “redirected access” in the GUI. Most of the time however this is due to normal operations such as backups or maintenance (defragmentation) not only losing disk access.

To remediate unneeded troubleshooting, sometimes leading to real issues, calls to MSFT support and so forth it was hidden from the Failover Clustering GUI in Windows 2012 R2. OK, so goal achieved but how do we now troubleshoot and view redirected access that might indicate the presence of real issues? The answer to that is the Get-ClusterSharedVolumeState PowerShell cmdlet. It displays the state of the CSVs on a per node basis for a cluster. You’ll see the type of the IO (Direct, File System Redirected and Block Redirected), if it’s completely unavailable as well as the reason.

This is what the output looks like on a two node cluster where node A has lost it’s storage path or paths (MPIO) to the CSV. You’ll see that both CSV are in redirected access. Not only that but you can see what type (block redirected) and why (no disk connectivity).

Pretty neat and clear. I love this functionality by the way and It’s why I’m leveraging 10Gbps Ethernet extensively to make sure that CSV traffic get’s the bandwidth & latency to handle what it has to. If you realize it leverages SMB3 which provides SMB Multichannel and SMB Direct you know it will get the job done for you in your time of need.

While this is happening in the GUI you’ll see this

Nothing is going on … it would seem so a bit of monitoring and alerting would be of use here. The good news is finding out what’s up is very straight forward now.

Now there is still a case where you’ll see that the CSV is in redirected access mode and that when you’ve put it in there yourself via the GUI

or via PowerShell for maintenance reasons.

As you can see the Icon has change to a networked disk one and it states “Redirected Access”. With Get-ClusterSharedVolumeState the output looks like this.

You’ll always see warnings in the event logs.

So monitor those with SCOM or another tool that suits your taste and you’ll be in good shape to react when it’s needed and you now know how to find out what’s going on.

Working Hard In IT

My view on IT from the trenches

Category Archives: Windows Server 2012 R2