VMM 2012 R2 – Common Task: Checking Integration Services

Integration Services provide a number of benefits to virtual machines and should be kept up to date. Integration Services or ‘VM Additions’ are to Hyper-V VMs what VMware tools is to VMware VMs. Sometimes updates to Hyper-V will update the version of the ‘VM Additions’ available.

The Integration Services can be checked using the VMM Console. First select the ‘VMs and Services’ tab followed by the ‘All Hosts’ tab. This will display a list of all the VMs in the environment. Find the column labelled ‘VM Additions’, if it is not visible right click in the grey area (by VM Name) and select ‘VM Additions’

From VMM Powershell you can run the following command:
Get-VM | ft Name, VMAddition

To determine the version of integration services that is installed on the Hyper-V management operating system, check the registry key that has the version of the current Hyper-V Guest Installer: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Virtualization\GuestInstaller\Version\Microsoft-Hyper-V-Guest-Installer-Win60-Package. The value in the Data column is the version number.
(Reference – Technet http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee207413(v=ws.10).aspx )

To determine the version information for a guest VM operating system, log on to the guest operating system and check the version of the drivers installed in the \System32 folder. For example, C:\Windows\System32\drivers\vmbus.sys has a file version that should match the number found in the registry key on the management operating system.
(Reference – Technet http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee207413(v=ws.10).aspx )

VMM 2012 R2 – Uninstall VMM Agent from Windows Server 2012 R2 Core

Uninstallation commands for Windows Core:

List installed software:
Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Product

Uninstall VMM DHCP Extension
(Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Product -Filter “Name=’Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager DHCP Server (x64)'” -ComputerName . ).Uninstall()

Uninstall VMM Agent
(Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Product -Filter “Name=’Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager Agent (x64)'” -ComputerName . ).Uninstall()

Technet reference: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd347651.aspx

VMM 2012 R2 – Bare-Metal Deployment Fails with Error 21161

Issue: Bare-Metal Deployments were failing. This was occurring after deep discovery had been completed and a build job had been initiated.
Exact Error Message: Error (21161) No available VHD resource was found within the host group.

The VHDs were present and builds had been working fine until recently. I checked all the logs and ran a VMM trace. The VMM trace indicated that there was a database inconsistency.

The VMM server had recently been updated to UR3.

Unfortunately the fix was to roll back to pre-UR3. This involved taking a fresh DB backup. Rolling back to the pre-UR3 backup in SQL, and uninstalling the updates from the VMM server.

Following this was the task of recreating any VMM objects that had been present, removing and adding hosts back (as the agent version was ahead-of-date).

This highlights how important regular SQL backups are for VMM servers as well as testing (as much as possible) after an Update Rollup.

EDIT: Niklas Akerlund has recently ran into the same error and has identified another fix for the issue, I can confirm that the fix outlined by Niklas works great! thanks Nicklas.

Error 21161 when doing Bare-Metal deployment on VMM 2012 R2

Review for Packt ‘Building and Managing a Virtual Environment with Hyper-V Server 2012 R2’ by Eric Siron

I recently worked my way through the video series ‘Building and Managing a Virtual Environment with Hyper-V Server 2012 R2’.

The Videos consist of short modules covering the relevant Hyper-V and Cluster topics. Each example operation is demoed using both GUI and powershell. The total time of the material is just under 3.5 hours, this results in a sufficient amount of time to get a reasonably good overview of each feature required to think about the design, and maintenance of a Hyper-V Failover cluster.

I generally much prefer books and articles than videos when I am checking up on things, videos are much better suited for people wanting an overview or introduction into subjects.

The video is made by author Eric Siron. Eric has contributed a great deal to the Hyper-V community and is known for his various publications including papers on the Altaro Hyper-V hub site  and his book ‘Microsoft Hyper-V Cluster Design‘.

 

Eric’s new video ‘Building and Managing a Virtual Environment with Hyper-V Server 2012 R2’ is available from Packt Publishing.