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.

 

.

Episode 11 of the Hyper-V Amigo Showcast

Posted on by
2

Hello there! Carsten Rachfahl and I have a new Hyper-V Amigo showcast out. In this Hyper-V Amigo Showcast Episode 11 we talk about Hyper-converged Storage Spaces Direct in Windows Server 2016 installed.

image

Carsten has a nice demo system to play with and we have some fun playing with it. We’ll see the outstanding performance S2D can deliver and how resilient is. On top of this we also talk about Distributed Storage QoS, Node Isolation and Node Fairness.

The show some crazy performance numbers and even turn 2 of the 4 nodes off. While playing with the Cluster we see also some new Features like Distributed Storage QoS, Cluster and VM Isolation and Node Fairness.

Enjoy!

Activating Windows Server 2016

Posted on by
26

Activating Windows Server 2016

So it’s time to make sure we start thinking about activating Windows Server 2016 in our environments.

If you manage on premises environments with one or more AD domains or even forests you might be in a situation where Active Directory Based Activation (ADBA) is the easiest solution. If you set this up you’ll enjoy automatic activation of the OS after joining domain configured with ADBA.  This is what I use for the Office and Windows editions that support it. It’s fast and easy to set up.

image

Now when you’re hosting IAAS services this might not be your best approach as that means it will need to be set up in the AD of your tenants. Something your most often don’t manage or control if an AD is even present. You also need the right versions of both AD and client software and operating systems to use this. That can also be an issue on premises. But don’t worry. Both Key Management Service (KMS) and Automatic Virtual Machine Activation (AVMA) will work for IAAS and for on premises in these situations.

I actually support 2 on premises environments where ADBA is being used for the recent OS  and Office versions while KMS is still around for the older OS versions. That way as the old OS versions are phased out the KMS infrastructure can be retired as well.

KMS Server  activation

You can use a Windows Server 2012 R2 or 2016  server as a KMS server. I just made sure my KMS server was fully patched before I attempted to install and activate the Windows Server 2016KMS key. That means that on Windows Server 2012 R2 you want KB3172614 installed as this enable support for Windows Server 2012 R2 as a KMS server host to activate Windows Server 2016. See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/24717/windows-8-1-windows-server-2012-r2-update-history. For Windows Server 2016 this means don’t do anything unless you have all the zero day patches installed.

First we take a look at the current situation by running slmgr.vbs /dlv
image

Uninstall the current KMS key using slmgr.vbs /upk, please use an elevated command prompt Winking smile

image

Now you can install the new Windows 2016 KMS key on your KMS server. If you run in to any issues here, restarting the KMS Service can help ((“net stop sppsvc” and “net start sppsvc“) . Try that first.

slmgr.vbs /ipk JOINT-THENA-VYBOY-SNOCR-ACKS!

image

The key listed here is for all you wannabe pirates out there, sorry, this is the navy. If you’re, looking for illegal keys, cracks, keygens, activators or dodgy KMS virtual machine for Windows activations and such this is not the place Winking smile.

If you now run slmgr.vbs /dlv you’ll see that the license status is “notification” as the server hasn’t been activated yet.

image

You now need to activate your server with the KMS key first by running slmgr.vbs /ato

image

We can now look at what’s installed now by running slmgr.vbs /dlv again. As you can see we’re in business to activate all our Windows Server 2016 and any OS version below that if t supports KMS activation.

image

Now in Windows 2012 R2 and later we also have the Volume Activation Tools feature you can install and use to do this, just like you use this for the ADBA setup.

image

 

Activate guest VMs on Hyper-V hosts

Configure Guest VMs activation with AVMA

If you’d like to leverage AVMA, which is especially handy as a IAAS hoster, you’ll need to use Windows Server 2016 or 2012 R2 Datacenter on your Hyper-V hosts and activate them by your chosen method (MAK, KMS, ADBA). You also need to use Windows Server 2016 or 2012 R2 Standard/Datacenter in the guest VMs. As long as your Hyper-V hosts is activated, every new guest deployed on them will be activated automatically. That’s it. There’s no need for a KMS or ADBA configuration for the guest (tenant VMs) or even an internet connection. The later is great for more secured environments. Easy peasy.

The only thing you need to do is use the AVMA client key in the slmgr /ipk. These are public ones actually just like the KMS clients keys.

image

There are two things to note: The first,a s you can read in the link to the AVMA documenation above:

“AVMA requires a Microsoft Virtualization Server running Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter or Windows Server 2016 Datacenter. A Windows Server 2016 AVMA host can activate guests that run the Datacenter, Standard or Essentials editions of Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2012 R2. A Windows Server 2012 R2 AVMA host can activate guests that run the Datacenter, Standard or Essentials editions of Windows Server 2012 R2.”

This means a Windows Server 2012 R2 Host cannot activate Windows server 2016 VMs. You can upgrade “cheaply” that way, let’s put it like that.

Secondly make sure the VM has Data Exchange turned ON in Integration Services. That’s the mechanism leveraged to make AVMA work. You should have that on anyway, really, I mean it 🙂

Configure Guest VMs activation with KMS

The public client KMS keys for VLK media can be found here: Appendix A: KMS Client Setup Keys I’ve only included a screnshot of the Windows Server KMS client keys here. More info is in the TechNet page.

image

To make sure a Windows Server 2016 Datacenter VM can activate via a KMS serer install use the below commands to replace a MAK key for example:

slmgr.vbs /ipk CB7KF-BWN84-R7R2Y-793K2-8XDDG
slmgr.vbs /ato

NOTE: all these keys can be used within a template or via unattented installation config files.

Conferences, Presenting & Learning Q4 2016

Posted on by
Reply

After MS ignite 2016 we’re prepping our Windows 2016 rollout that will start the day we have the Volume license bits. All this in combination with a continued public cloud development and deployment. We’ve seen success with native born in the loud apps and are now working on moving some existing workloads over there. The reason for the latter is that some of the IAAS private hosters at our disposal are unable to deliver the quality and level of services required to server the needs of some real time services. Not to mention that some of them make public cloud look cheap on top of the fact that ordering a VM takes weeks and the solutions can barely be called “cloud”. Well you can, but that doesn’t make it so. Basically is only fit for workloads you don’t really care about but for those they are way too expensive. So it’s Public Cloud for the win here.

But between these efforts I’ll be learning and sharing experiences with my pears until it’s time to take a few weeks of at the end of the year.

On October the 26th I’ll be attending and presenting at the Windows Server 2016 Launch Event In Ireland #WSL16 which is being organized by MicroWarehouse IT distributor.

image

Aidan Finn works there with great drive and success as their technical evangelist. He’s tapped in to his network of global experts to line up some great and diverse content on both Windows Server 2016 and Azure for cloud deployments.

Soon after that I’ll be flying over the big pond (go west young man, go west!) to attend the Microsoft MVP Global Summit 2016 and engage in some serious feedback, planning with Or Microsoft PMs and discuss the roadmaps and vision for the next year.

On November the 22nd I’ll be attending Experts Live in the Netherlands where I’ll also be presenting. The title of my session is Get your work/life balance in check with Hyper-V 24/7/365 High Availability. And the aim is to show you how clustering and Hyper-V have evolved to deliver better high availability, higher resiliency to failure, operational optimizations and better trouble shooting capabilities. Experts live is really one of the best and larger community events in Western Europe, and I always look forward to attending.

image

That will conclude my conference and presenting schedule for the year.  Well unless another opportunity to attend and share knowledge appears that’s to good to be turned down. The remainder of the year will be spent on moving to Windows 2016 and diving deeper into Azure ARM & automation.