MS15-068: Vulnerability in Windows Hyper-V could allow remote code execution: July 14, 2015

Hi people, Hyper-V has been blessed with a very good security track record. The few security issues that did arise over the years have always been resolved quickly. Today it’s

time to act fast once again and make sure you have your security & patch process act together.

Note the following:

  • Microsoft has not identified any mitigating factors for this vulnerability.
  • Microsoft has not identified any workarounds for this vulnerability.

This security update resolves vulnerabilities in Windows that could allow remote code execution in a host context if a specially crafted application is run by an authenticated and privileged user on a guest virtual machine that is hosted by Hyper-V. An attacker must have valid logon credentials for a guest virtual machine to exploit this vulnerability.

To learn more about the vulnerability, see Microsoft Security Bulletin MS15-068

This one is critical. So do not delay long after your smoke testing of this patch.You have some time to act but don’t wait too long:

Microsoft received information about this vulnerability through coordinated vulnerability disclosure. When this security bulletin was originally issued Microsoft had not received any information to indicate that this vulnerability had been publicly used to attack customers.

Go and secure your environment wisely and effectively now.

Testing Virtual Machine Compute Resiliency in Windows Server 2016

No matter what high quality gear you use, how well you design your environment and how much redundancy you build in you will see transient failures in your environment at one point in time. In combination with the push to ever more commodity hardware and the increased use of converged deployments leveraging Ethernet transient failures have become more frequent occurrence then they used to be.

Failover clustering by tradition reacts very “assertive” to failures in order to provide high to continuous availability to our virtual machines. That’s great, we want it to do that, but this binary approach comes at a cost under certain conditions. When reacting too fast and too proactively to transient failures we actually can get  less high or continuous availability in certain scenarios than if the cluster would just have evaluated the situation a bit more cautiously. It’s for this reason that Microsoft introduced increased “Virtual Machine Compute Resiliency” to deal with intra-cluster communication failures in a Windows Server 2016 cluster.

I have helped out a number of fellow MVPs over the past 6 months with this new feature and I dove back into my lab notes to blog about this and help you out with your own testing. The early work was done with Technical Preview v1. In that release it was disabled by default (the value for cluster property “ResiliencyDefaultPeriod”  was set to 0) and the keyword “Default” was used in cluster property “resiliencylevel” for the what is now called ‘IsolateOnSpecialHeartbeat’ and is no longer the default at installation. If that doesn’t confuse you yet, I’ll find another reason to tell you to move to technical preview v2. In TPv2 Virtual Machine Compute Resiliency is enabled and configured by default but in TPv1 you had to enable and configure it yourself. I  advise you to stop testing with v1 and move to v2 and future technical preview release in order for you to test with the most recent bits and functionality.

Investigating the feature configuration

When testing new features in Windows Server Technical Preview Hyper-V you’re on your own once in a while as much is not documented yet. Playing around with PowerShell helps you discover stuff. A  Get-Cluster  | fl * teaches us all kinds of cool stuff such as these new cluster properties:

ResiliencyDefaultPeriod
QuarantineDuration
ResiliencyLevel

Here’s a screenshot of Windows Server 2016TPv1 (Please stop using this version and move to TPv2!)

image

Now when you’re running Windows Server 2016TP v2 this feature has been enabled by default (ResilienceyDefaultPeriod has been filled out as well as QuarantineDuration) and the resiliency level has been set to “AlwaysIsolate”.

image

After some lab work with this I figured out what we need to know to make VM Compute Resiliency to work in our labs:

  • Make sure your cluster functional level is running at version 9
  • Make sure your VMs are at version 6.X
  • Make sure the Operating systems of the VM is Windows Server Technical Preview v2 (Again move away from TPv1)
  • Enable Isolation/Quarantine via PowerShell:

(get-cluster).resiliencylevel
(get-cluster).resiliencylevel = ‘AlwaysIsolate’ or 2
(get-cluster).resiliencylevel
(get-cluster).resiliencylevel = ‘IsolateOnSpecialHeartbeat’  or  1
(get-cluster).resiliencylevel

Please note that all nodes need to be on line to make this change in the technical preview. I got the two accepted values by trial and error and the blog by Subhasish Bhattacharya confirms these are the only 2 ones.

  • Set the timings to some not too high and not too low value to play in the lab without having to wait to long before it’s back to normal (the values I use in my current Technical Preview lab environment are not a recommendation whatsoever, they only facilitate my testing and learning, this has nothing to do with any production environment) . For lab testing I chose:

(get-cluster).ResiliencyDefaultPeriod = 60  Note that setting this to 0 reverts you back to pre Windows Server 2016 behavior and actually disables this feature. The default is 240 seconds

(get-cluster).QuarantineDuration = 300 The default is 7200 seconds, but I’m way to impatient in my lab for that so I set the quarantine duration lower as I want to see the results of my experiments fast, but beware of just messing with this duration in production without thinking about it. Just saying!

Testing the feature and its behaviour

Then you’re ready to start abusing your cluster to demo Isolation mode & quarantine. I basically crash the Cluster service on one of the nodes in the cluster.  Note that cleanly stopping the service is not good enough, it will nicely drain that node for you. which is not what we want to see. Crash it of force stop it via stop-process -name clussvc –Force.

So what do we see happen:

    • The node on which we crashed the cluster server experiences a “transient” intra-cluster communication failure. This node is placed into an Isolated state and removed from its active cluster membership.

image

  • The VMs running at version 6.2 go into Unmonitored state. The other ones just fail over. Unmonitored means you that the cluster is no longer actively managing the VM but you can still look at the condition of the VM via PowerShell or Hyper-V manager. image

image

image

Based on the type of storage you’re using for your VMs the story is different:

  1. File Storage backed (SMB3/SOFS): The VM continues to run in the Online state. This is possible because the SMB share itself has no dependency on the Hyper-V cluster. Pretty cool!
  2. Block Storage backed (FC / FCoE / iSCSI / Shared SAS / PCI RAID)): The VMs go to Running-Critical and then placed in the Paused Critical state. As you have a intra-cluster communication failure (in our case losing the cluster service) the isolated node no longer has access to the Cluster Shared Volumes in the cluster and this is the only option there is.

image

  • If the isolated node doesn’t recover from this presumed transient failure it will, after the time specified in ResiliencyDefaultPeriod (default of 4 minutes : 240 s) go into a down state. The VMs fail over to another node in the cluster. Normally during this experiment the cluster service will come back on line automatically.
  • If a node, does recover but goes into isolated 3 times within 1 hour, it is placed into a Quarantine state for the time specified in QuarantineDuration (default two hours or 7200 s) . The VMS running on this node are drained to another node in the cluster. So if you crash that service repeatedly (3 times within an hour) the Hyper-V Node will go into  “Quarantine” status for the time specified (in our lab 5 minutes as we set it to 300 s). The VMs will be live migrated off even if the node is up and running when the cluster service comes up again.

You might notice that this screenshot is a different lab cluster. Yes, it’s a TPv1 cluster as for some reason the Live Migration part on Quarantine is broken on my TPv2 lab. It’s a clean install, completely green field. Probably a bug.image

It’s the frequency of failures that determines that the node goes into quarantine for the amount of time specified. That’s a clear sign for you to investigate and make sure things are OK. The node is no longer allowed to join the cluster for a fixed time period (default: 2 hours)­. The reason for this is to prevent “flapping nodes” from negatively impacting other nodes and the overall cluster health. There is also a fixed (not configurable as far as I know) amount if nodes that can be quarantined at any give time: 20% or only one node can be quarantined (whatever comes first, in the case of a 2, 3 or for node cluster it’s one node max that can be in quarantine).

If you want to get a quarantined node out of quarantine immediately you can rejoin it to the cluster via a single PowerShell command: Start-ClusterNode –CQ  (CQ = Clear Quarantine). Handy in the lab or in real live when things have been fixed and you want that node back in action asap.

Conclusion

Now this sounds pretty good doesn’t it? And it is. Especially if you’re running you’re running your VMs on a SOFS share. Then the VMs will remain online during the Isolation / Unmonitored phase but when you have “traditional” block level storage they won’t. They’ll go in mode as the in that design you have lost access to the CSV. Now, if you ever needed yet another reason to move to a Scale Out File Server & SMB 3 to deliver storage for your VMs I have just given you one! Hey storage vendors … how is that full SMB 3 feature stack coming on your storage arrays? Or do you really just want us to abstract you away behind a Windows SOFS cluster?

Subhasish Bhattacharya Has blogged about this as well here. It’s a feature we’ll test at length to get a grip on the behavior so we know how the cluster nodes will behave under certain conditions. Trust, but verify is my mantra and it’s way better to figure out how a feature behaves in the lab than having to figure it out when you see it for the very first time in production based on assumptions. Just saying.

Updating Hyper-V Integration Services: An error has occurred: One of the update processes returned error code 1603

So you migrate over 200 VMs from a previous version of Hyper-V to Windows Server 2012 R2 fully patched and life looks great, full of possibilities etc. However one thing get’s back to your e-mail inbox consistently: a couple of Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 (x64) and Windows XP SP3 (x86) virtual machines. The VEEAM backups consistently fail. Digging into that the cause is pretty obvious … it tells you where to problem lies.

image

Ah they forgot the upgrade the IS components you might conclude. Let’s see if we try an upgrade. Yes they are offered and you run them … looks to be going well too. But then you’re greeted by "An error has occurred: One of the update processes returned error code 1603”.

Darn! Now you can go and do all kinds of stuff to find out what part of the integrations services are messed up as most day to day operations work fine (registry, explore, versions, security settings …) or be smart a leverage the power of PowerShell. It’s easy to find out what is not right via a simple commandlet  Get-VMIntegrationService

image

We’ll that’s obvious. So how to fix this. I uninstalled the IS components, rebooted the VM, reinstalled the IS components  … which requires another reboot. While the VM is rebooting you can take a peak at the integration services status with Get-VMIntegrationService

image

That’s it, all is well again and backups run just fine. Lessons learned here are that SCOM was completely happy with the bad situation … that isn’t good Smile.

So there’s the solution for you but it’s kind of “omen” like that it happened to three Windows 2003 virtual machines (both x64 and x86). You really need to get off these obsolete operating systems. Staying will never improve things but I guarantee you they will get worse.

See you at a next blog Winking smile

In Defense of Switch Independent Teaming With Hyper-V

For many old timers (heck, that includes me) NIC teaming with LACP mode was the best of the best, at least when it comes to teaming options. Other modes often led to passive/active, less than optimal receiving network traffic aggregation. Basically, and perhaps over simplified, I could say the other options were only used if you had no other choice to get things to work. Which we did a lot … I used Intel’s different teaming modes for various reasons in the past (before we had MLAG, VLT, VPC, …). Trying to use LACP where possible was a good approach in the past in physical deployments and early virtualized environments when 1Gbps networking dominated the datacenter realm and Windows did not have native support for LBFO.

But even LACP, even in those days, had some drawbacks. It’s the most demanding form of teaming. For one it required switch stacking. This demands the same brand and type of switches and that means you have no redundancy during firmware upgrades. That’s bad, as the only way to work around that is to move all workload to another rack unit … if you even had the capability to do that! So even in days past we chose different models if teaming out of need or because of the above limitations for high availability. But the superiority of NIC teaming with LACP still stands for many and as modern switches support MLAG, VLT, etc. the drawback of stacking can be avoided. So does that mean LACP for NIC teaming is always the superior choice today?

Some argue it is and now they have found support in the documentation about Microsoft CPS system documentation about Microsoft CPS system. Look, even if Microsoft chose to use LACP in their solutions it’s based on their particular design and the needs of that design I do not concur that this is the best overall. It is however a valid & probably the choice for their specific setup. While I applaud the use of MLAG (when available to you a no or very low cost) to have all bases covered but it does not mean that LACP is the best choice for the majority of use cases with Hyper-V deployments. Microsoft actually agrees with me on this in their Windows Server 2012 R2 NIC Teaming (LBFO) Deployment and Management guide. They state that Switch Independent configuration / Dynamic distribution (or Hyper-V Port if on Hyper-V and if not on W2K12R2)  is the best possible default choice is for teaming in both native and Hyper-V environments. I concur, even if perhaps not that strong for native workloads (it depends). Exceptions to this:

  • Teaming is being performed in a VM (which should be rare),
  • Switch dependent teaming (e.g., LACP) is required by policy, or
  • Operation of a two-member Active/Standby team is required by policy.

In other words in 2 out of 3 cases the reason is a policy, not a technical superior solution …

Note that there are differences between Address Hash, Hyper-V Port mode & the new dynamic distribution modes and the latter has made things better in W2K12R2 in regards to bandwidth but you’ll need the read the white papers. Use dynamic as default, it is the best. Also note that LACP/Switch Dependent doesn’t mean you can send & receive to and from a VM over the aggregated bandwidth of all team members. Life is more complicated than that. So if that’s you’re main reason for switch dependent, and think you’re done => be ware Winking smile.

Switch Independent is also way better for optimization of VMQ. You have more queues available (sum-of-queues) and the IO path is very predictable & optimized.

If you don’t control the switches there’s a lot more cross team communication involved to set up teaming for your hosts. There’s more complexity in these configurations so more possibilities for errors or bugs. Operational ease is also a factor.

The biggest draw back could be that for receiving traffic you cannot get more than the bandwidth a single team member can deliver. That’s true but optimizing receiving traffic has it’s own demands and might not always be that great if the switch configuration isn’t that smart & capable. Do I ever miss the potential ability to aggregate incoming traffic. In real life I do not (yet) but in some configurations it could do a great job to optimize that when needed.

When using 10Gbps or higher you’ll rarely be in a situation where receiving traffic is higher than 10Gbps or higher and if you want to get that amount of traffic you really need to leverage DVMQ. And a as said switch independent teaming with port of dynamic mode gives you the most bang for the buck. as you have more queues available. This drawback is mitigated a bit by the fact that modern NICs have way larger number of queues available than they used to have. But if you have more than one VM that is eating close to 10Gbps in a non lab environment and you planning to have more than 2 of those on a host you need to start thinking about 40Gbps instead of aggregating a fistful of 10Gbps cables. Remember the golden rules a single bigger pipe is always better than a bunch of small pipes.

When using 1Gbps you’ll be at that point sooner and as 1Gbps isn’t a great fit for (Dynamic) VMQ anyway I’d say, sure give LACP a spin to try and get a bit more bandwidth but will it really matter? In native workloads it might but with a vSwith?  Modern CPUs eat 1Gbps NICs for breakfast, so I would not bother with VMQ. But when you’re tied to 1Gbps it’s probably due to budget constraints and you might not even have stackable, MLAG, VLT or other capable switches. But the arguments can be made, it depends (see Don’t tell me “It depends”! But it does!). But in any case I start saving for 10Gbps Smile

Today as the PC8100 series and the N4000 Series (budget 10Gbps switches, yes I know “budget” is relative but in the 10Gbps world, but they offer outstanding value for money), I tend to set up MLAG with two of these per rack. This means we have all options and needs covered at no extra cost and without sacrificing redundancy under any condition. However look at the needs of your VMs and the capability of your NICs before using LACP for teaming by default. The fact that switch independent works with any combination of budget switches to get redundancy doesn’t mean it’s only to be used in such scenarios. That’s a perk for those without more advanced gear, not a consolation price.

My best advise: do not over engineer it. Engineer it for the best possible solution for the environment at hand. When choosing a default it’s not about the best possible redundancy and bandwidth under certain conditions. It’s about the best possible redundancy and bandwidth under most conditions. It’s there that switch independent comes into it’s own, today more than ever!

There is one other very good, but luckily also a very rare case where LACP/Switch dependent will save you and switch independent won’t: dead switch ports, where the port becomes dysfunctional. So while switch independent protects against NIC, Switch, cable failures, here it doesn’t help you as it doesn’t know (it’s about link failures, not logical issues on a port).

For the majority of my Hyper-V deployments I do not use switch dependent / LACP. The situation where I did had to do with Windows NLB in combination with ICMP Multicast.

Note: You can do VLT, MLAG, stacking and still leverage switch independent teaming, LACP or static switch dependent is NOT mandatory even when possible.