Monday, April 28, 2014

Change Run As Account on a Hyper-V Cluster in VMM

When you add a Hyper-V hosts to VMM, you must specify either a Run As Account (stored credentials in VMM) or manually enter the credentials. The Run As Account or the user you specify should be a local administrator on the host. If a Run As Account is provided, then it will be used while adding the host as well as for providing future access to the host during its lifetime. If credentials are entered manually, then they will only be used while adding the host. Once the host has been successfully added, the VMM service account will be added as local administrator on the host and used to provide any future access to it.

In other words, the VMM service account will end up in the group for local administrator on each host.

However, I often see customers who have deployed their own VMM server and added hosts manually with their own Domain Admin credentials. This is just fine for a demo or a lab, but should not be done in any production environment.
If this user is disabled, changes password or anything else, this will indeed break the communication between VMM and the (previously) managed hosts.

You may have noticed that once you have added your hosts – and also created a cluster, the Run As Account located on “Host Access” tab of the host properties are greyed out. This can’t be changed in the GUI and some people are doing drastically things like removing the cluster – and adding it back to VMM again with the correct Run As Account. However, if you are creating logical switches on the hosts in the right way, through VMM, you must re-deploy the switch configuration again afterwards. No good.


Lucky for us all, the solution is located in the API, using Powershell.

Here are some simple lines for you to change a Run As Account for a managed Hyper-V cluster in VMM (if the hosts are not clustered, you are able to change the Run As Account through the GUI)

$YourClusterName = Get-SCVMHostCluster -Name "YourClusterName"

$YourRunAsAccount = Get-SCRunAsAccount -Name "YourRunAsAccount"

Set-SCVmHostCluster -VMHostCluster $YourClusterName -VMHostManagementCredential $YourRunAsAccount

Monday, April 21, 2014

System Center User Group - Sweden

Hi everyone.
This is just a quick heads up for an upcoming event in Sweden this week.

On Thursday (24th), the System Center User Group in Sweden will have full day at Microsoft HQ, where you will find interesting topics from some interesting speakers.

Sign up at http://www.eventbrite.com/e/scugse-datacenter-gathering-tickets-10733587449

Agenda:

Place: Microsoft Akalla

Fee: Nope - it's free of charge.

0830-0845
Stefan Schörling / Anders Wendt – Welcome to Cloud OS
0845-0945
Kristian Nese – Cloud Fabrics
See how you really should build your cloud fabric to meet elasticity, multi-tenancy and lay the foundation for standardization and automation with Cloud OS.
1000-1100
Anders Bengtsson - Self Service and Automation for your Cloud
1115-1215
Patrik Sundqvist - Delivering Reporting and Chargeback for your Cloud
Lunch
1300-1330 Nutanix Session (Sponsor)
System Center and Nutanix
1345-1445
Christer Almlöf – What have we done with System Center
Reference on System Center
1500-1600
Mikael Nyström - Leveraging a Hybrid Cloud
Private Cloud + Microsoft Azure

Monday, April 14, 2014

Co-existence of WAP and HRM - Fixed!

Co-existence of WAP and HRM is now fixed!


Microsoft has released an Update Rollup (1) for Hyper-V Recovery Manager.
This update will eliminate the needs for the “Hyper-V Cloud Capability Profile” associated with the HW profiles on the VMs, that also must be present in the cloud in VMM.

Why do we get an Update Rollup that specifically removes this requirement?

When testing HRM and Windows Azure Pack together, we saw that the combination of this capability profile together with Gallery Items (VM Roles with SPF/VMM as resource provider in a VM Cloud) didn’t work very well together.
If you are familiar with VM roles, then you know that they are not associated with any hardware profiles, but uses only resdefpkg (imported in WAP) and resextpkg (imported in VMM). These artifacts will use their own settings and only bind to physical objects in the VMM library like VHD’s, scripts etc.

In other words: the deployment of a VM Role to a cloud with any cloud capability profile associated, would fail. Therefore, you could not have a cloud configured in VMM that could be used by both WAP and HRM.

This is now fixed and you must install the update on your VMM management server (where the HRM provider is installed) and perform a restart.


Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Hybrid Cloud with NVGRE (Cloud OS) - Updated Whitepaper

Hi everyone!

It's been quite the last weeks, right? But hopefully you should be able to understand why, after looking into our updated whitepaper.

We have published our updated whitepaper that also covers Windows Azure Pack!

You can download the whitepaper by using the same link as always, available here:

http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Hybrid-Cloud-with-NVGRE-aa6e1e9a

Looking forward to your feedback!

A big thank you to Marc, Flemming, Stan, Daniel and Damian!