Following an issue with the storage used by our Hyper-V cluster, one node in our five node cluster became partially unresponsive. The virtual machines (VMs) running on the unresponsive node were automatically moved to other cluster nodes and service was resumed withing a couple of minutes. At first everything appeared to be fine, but within [...]
An important point when deleting a Hyper-V snapshot is that the corresponding AVHD file isn’t merged into the main VHD file until you power down the server. This means that the disk space used by the snapshot isn’t immediately available when you delete a snapshot. As far as I’m aware there’s no way to monitor the [...]
Our five node Hyper-V cluster is connected to a Dell MD3000i, which provides virtual machine storage using Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV). The MD3000i has dual storage controllers for redundancy, but recently both storage controllers rebooted within a minute of each other. Looking at the Storage section of Failover Cluster Manager showed that half the CSV [...]
Following a power down of our Hyper-V cluster, about half the virtual machines (VMs) would not start. Looking in Failover Cluster Manager showed the VMs couldn’t start because the machine files were missing. I looked at the Storage summary, but the cluster shared volumes were present and had a status of online: This was odd, [...]
Two virtual disks failed on the storage used by our Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V cluster. I wasn’t able to recover the virtual disks, so I needed to remove them from the cluster. I had to use a different method for each disk. The cluster uses Cluster Shared Volumes, so using Failover Cluster Manager, I opened Cluster [...]
PXE boot is not available in Hyper-V 2008 R2 when using a Synthetic Network Adapter. In order to PXE boot a virtual machine (VM), you need to turn off the VM and add a Legacy Network Adapter. If the VM is an existing machine with a bootable hard disk, you’ll also need to change the [...]
Dynamically expanding disks enable you to thin provision virtual machines (VMs) storage. This means you can pack more VMs onto a given amount of disk, but you need to ensure that if you provision more storage than is physically available, you don’t run out of space on the host. The PowerShell script below produces a csv file [...]
In this post I’ll walk you through the process of adding storage to a Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Cluster for use with Hyper-V. Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) is only supported with Hyper-V and enables multiple cluster nodes to read and write to the same volume at the same time. Hyper-V supports the Live [...]
Following an issue with our five node Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V cluster I was left with two entries for one virtual machine (VM) in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 (SCVMM). One entry listed the VM as running, the other as failed, despite the fact that there was nothing wrong with the VM. I was unable to [...]
I was recently trying to backup a server using Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (BESR) 2010. Unfortunately, BESR was refusing to create a backup. A support call to Symantec pointed us to the PartInfo.exe tool, located in C:\Program Files\Symantec\Backup Exec System Recovery\Utility. Running this tool creates a text file called partinfo.txt in the same folder. [...]
