Hi There,

Update Rollup 1 has been released for System Center 2012. This update addresses a number of issues with VMM, App Controller and OpsMgr

See HERE

Thanks
SteveH

Hi There,

Whilst working on a bare-metal build for a Hyper-V host (based on HP blades with iLO 3) today using SCVMM 2012 and Host Profiles I came across the following error;

An out of band operation (IPMI) for the BMC <FQDN> failed

The obvious first line of troubleshooting is to check the IP address of the iLO connection was working (and that we had typed it right). This checked out, so the next check was to make sure the account we are using to access iLO has the necessary permissions to the host, and to check that IPMI commands are being accepted by iLO. This checked out as well and left us stumped!

After some further troubleshooting, we decided to re-create the account we had access to in iLO. We were not using the default ‘Administrator’ account, rather another delegated account that had been created for us.

We deleted this account, and re-created it using the same username/password to be greeted with an error along the lines of the username we are selecting has over 16 characters and therefore cannot be used to send IPMI commands….. however can still be created…..hmmm!

So let’s try shortening the account name, which we did, then changed the run-as account in SCVMM, re-ran the job and as if by magic our hosts started to boot

Cheers
SteveH

Hi there,

The above message pops up from time to time when attempting to remotely administer a Hyper-V server from another machine, particularly if the machine you are attempting to access is in another domain or in a workgroup.

First things first, make sure all of the config is correct on the Hyper-V server itself to allow remote administration. Use the excellent HVRemote for that

What usually catches me out after that is the fact that Hyper-V manager is not expecting a FQDN, it is hostname/shortname ONLY! Use the hosts file if you are having DNS issues.

Cheers
SteveH

Whilst tidying up one of our VMM 2012 environments earlier I was having trouble removing a service template that had been created, the following error was appearing when I was hitting delete;

As far as I could see I had deleted any related service deployments and could see no services or VMs on any of the host clusters. I also tried removing the Service via the Powershell command; Remove-SCService

The fix was staring me in the face on the Service Template screen – if you highlight the template, and look in the ‘General Information’ section at the bottom you will see a ‘Services:    <Service Name>‘ which is a hyperlink. Clicking this took me to one of my Host Groups and the Service was hidden away in here.

I deleted this, and was then able to remove the Service Template

The following TechNet Wiki links contains a number of very useful tools for Hyper-V, some of my favourites;

• Core Configurator 2.0 – makes configuring Server Core or Hyper-V Server much easier
• Disk2VHD – for creating VHDs from physical disks – very useful for the new Host Profile feature in VMM 2012
• Wim2VHD – in a similar vein to the above, if you have already captured your Server image to a .WIM, this tool will convert it to a VHD
• nvspcrub – useful tool to remove virtual network configuration from the management partition

Many more tools can be found at the following LINK

Cheers
SteveH

So you’ve created your VM and know you would like to create a template so this VM can be distributed onto multiple VM’s.

SCVMM will take care of this for you, so there is no need to sysprep your machine as the template procedure does all this for you.

Please Beware that creating a template destroys the VM !!!

Creating a Template

1, Press the Virtual Machine Tab and go to your VM.

2, Turn off the VM and then single click the VM

3, Now the New Template option on the right hand window should be accessible, so press this.

4, If you then complete the wizard and hit create this should then start creating your template.

5, The Job pane will then pop up on your screen and start completing the steps that are shown below, once this has completed you’ve successfully made a template.

You may have an issue where you are struggling to remove a hyper-v host for a reason such as you, re-installed the OS on the machine and not removing the SCVMM agent first and when you go to remove it from the SCVMM console it just fails as it can’t communicate with the hyper-v host.

To Forcefully remove the Hyper-V Host you first have to open SCVMM’s Powershell.

Then run the following command “Get-vmhost changetoservername | remove-vmhost –force” .

The Hyper-V host will now be gone.

Daniel Davies