Hyper-V

5nine Software Names Leading Microsoft Virtualization Expert Symon Perriman as VP of Business Development

5nine Software, the leading global Hyper-V virtualization management and security provider today announced the appointment of Symon Perriman to the position of Vice President, Business Development & Marketing. In this role, Mr. Perriman will be responsible for business development and global product marketing, helping to position the company as the industry’s leading Hyper-V management and security solutions provider.

In this new role, Mr. Perriman will develop the company’s strategic direction, business opportunities, community initiatives, partnerships, and alliance ecosystems to enable 5nine Software to enter new markets worldwide. He will bring four years of experience designing high-availability and virtualization technologies for the Windows Server engineering team, which will help the company to provide optimized solutions for Microsoft Hyper-V, Windows Server, System Center and Azure Pack. For the last four years Mr. Perriman led Microsoft’s worldwide private cloud evangelism initiatives, and in this new role he will direct 5nine’s global go-to-market strategy and strengthen the existing product positioning and messaging.

Continue at source.

 

HP BL460c Gen 9 with Windows Server 2012 R2 no network or intermittent loss of network connection

One of my customers requested me to have a look at their Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 infrastructure. They had a strange problem with the HP BL490c Gen 9 blades. The blades are equipped with a 536FLB Flex 10 network interface card based on a  QLogic 57840S chipset.

The Hyper-V hosts are deployed using the bare-metal deployment in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2.

The customer has 6 blades in a C7000 enclosure. Blade 1 could not ping to Blade 2. However blade 1 could perfectly ping to Blade 3,4,5 and 6. All blades are in the same IPv4 subnet. Another issue observed on a few other blades was that the ping would time out a few times. So ping worked, then it did not work for a couple of pings and then network was okay again.

The customer has tried many things to solve this issue:

  1. placed the blades in a different HP C7000 enclosure.
  2. placed the blades in different slots of the enclosure
  3. swapped the HP switches
  4. installed full Windows Server 2012 R2 GUI.
  5. installed Hyper-V Server 2012 instead of R2
  6. disabled checksum offloading , LSO, RSS, RSC and VMQ
  7. called HP. HP was not able to solve this issue.

This all did not solve the issue. The customer was using the latest drivers for the adapter.

HP Virtual Connect 4.31 dated 2014-10-24
HP FlexFabric 10Gb 2 port 536FLB adapter drivers 7.10.39
HP software package 4.01.12

I deciced to start troubleshooting this from scratch by manually installing Hyper-V 2012 R2. The blade which initially could not ping to Blade 2 now was able to ping. Hmm, wondering why.

Next I installed Hyper-V 2012 R2 manually (no network configuration) and then manage it using SCVMM. SCVMM configured the networking of the host. Still the host was able to ping all other hosts in the same enclosure.

So for some reason when the customer is using the bare-metal deployment from SCVMM something goes wrong with networking.We are not sure what exacty. It could be related to BIOS changes. It seems that as soon as the BIOS of the blade is changed, the next bare-metal deployment will result in network issues.

I will update this post when we know more about the cause of this issue.

 

 

HP releases drivers for Emulex 10 GbE nic solving virtual machine disconnect when VMQ is enabled

Update September 15:

Someone reported that after installing this update on a HP Gen7 the problem still exists. 

Hyper-V virtual machines running on servers with Emulex network interface cards can randomly disconnect from the network when VMQ has been enabled. This is experienced by many. The issue both occurs on Emulex cards as well as on OEM Emulex cards. HP servers and some others use those Emulex 10 GbE cards.

See my earlier post for more info.

Today HP released a new driver  which solves this issue.  The driver is included in the  Service Pack for Proliant 2014.09.

However Emulex advised odd ping may still drop but no disconnects.  In the near future Emulex will do a complete rewrite of the driver to also fix the dropped pings.

Tim Johnson was so kind to keep me informed about this update. He  told me after installing this driver update he did not experience disconnects for the last 7 days.

HP-emulex-driver

Webinar: Building a Highly Available Hyper-V Cluster Using Free Microsoft Hyper-V Server

 Webinar: Building a Highly Available Hyper-V Cluster Using Free Microsoft Hyper-V  Server

 Tuesday, September 9, 2:00 pm ET / 11:00 am PT
 Featured Speakers: Alexander Karavanov, Virtualization Security Engineer, 5nine Software
Max Kolomyeytsev, Product Manager, StarWind Software

Join virtualization experts from 5nine Software and StarWind to learn how to create a cost effective and highly available Hyper-V failover cluster.
Discover best practices on how to:

  • Benefit from highly available Hyper-V failover cluster
  • Simplify the cluster and VM management using 5nine Manager for Hyper-V
  • Cut costs, increase resilience and minimize hardware footprint with StarWind Virtual SAN
  • Adopt the needs of your environment with easy scale up and scale out

Registration page: http://redmondmag.com/webcasts/2014/08/starwind-sep9.aspx?partnerref=starwind4

 

BSOD and kernel panic in virtual machines running vSphere or Hyper-V on Intel E5-v2 & E7-v2 CPUs

There is a serious issue with virtual machines running on vSphere or Hyper-V on hosts with Intel’s Ivy Bridge, Ivy Town, and Haswell processors (E5 v2/v3 and E7 v2/v3).

Virtual machine might randomly crash showing a Blue Screen of Death BSOD (Windows clients and Windows Server) or a kernel panic for Linux systems.

This issue occors on  Intel Xeon E5-2400v2, Intel Xeon E5-2600v2, Xeon E5-4600 v2, Intel Xeon E7-4800 v2, or Intel Xeon E7-8800 v2 Processors.

This issue does NOT affect servers configured with Intel Xeon E5-2400 series, Intel Xeon E5-2600 series, or Intel Xeon E5-4600 series processors. 

Microsoft reported this issue in this blog.

Microsoft provides a microcode update for Intel processors in Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1). This update improves the reliability of x64-based versions of Windows Server that use certain Intel processors. A hotfix for Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 will be available in September, 2014.

Download the update here.

 

VMware reports the issue on this KB. Advised solution is to update the BIOS. When no BIOS update is available  change the virtual machine’s MMU mode on the affected host to Software. Instructions on changing the  virtual machine monitor mode (1036775) as described  here.

Taken from the HP site:

Intel has identified a processor issue where Virtual Machines (VMs) running on VMware ESX 5.x or Microsoft Hyper-V may experience a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) in a Windows virtual machine or a kernel panic in a Linux virtual machine when using VMware ESX 5.x or Microsoft Hyper-V. This issue affects Intel Xeon E5-2400 series v2, Intel Xeon E5-2600 series v2, Intel Xeon E5-4600 series v2, Intel Xeon E7-4800 series v2, and Intel Xeon E7-8800 series v2 processors.

Intel has released an updated microcode for impacted processors that addresses this issue. Updated revisions of HP ProLiant System ROMs for impacted servers include this microcode. This issue is NOT unique to HP ProLiant servers and could impact any system utilizing affected processors if the updated microcode is not utilized.

This issue does NOT affect servers configured with Intel Xeon E5-2400 series, Intel Xeon E5-2600 series, or Intel Xeon E5-4600 series processors.

Dell has an update available here.

Someone experienced this issue on HP DL380 Gen8 servers. Update of the BIOS resolved the issue.

ICT-Freak.nl has a blogpost on this issue.