Search the Community

This Summer, I will be installing a new server at a large middle school which is currently transitioning into a secondary school. Can anyone offer me some advice on what I should be including in the setup? I will have two host servers to play with. Both will run Server 2012R2 with Hyper-V VMs. My initial thoughts as to how to divide the roles needed are as follows: [TABLE=class: outer_border, width: 500, align: center] [TR] [TD]Host 01[/TD] [TD]vDC 01: AD, DHCP, DNS, DFS etc[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD][/TD] [TD]vUTL 01: WDS/MDT, WSUS[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Host 02[/TD] [TD]vDC 02: Secondary Domain controller [/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD][/TD] [TD]vUTL 02: Sophos, Printers[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] Host 01 will be the new server with 64GB RAM. Host 02 will be the current server, rebuilt from 2008R2 to 2012R2 and 24GB RAM. My initial thoughts are that I should be configuring DHCP failover. Are there any other redundancy features I should be building into the system? Or even any additional features that, whilst not necessarily offering redundancy, offer extra functionality to the domain? I also have two NAS devices to hold some form of backup. I was thinking of using the free version of Veeam to backup VMs (subject to storage space) to one NAS and then use the existing Macrium Reflect software they have to backup data to the other.

I finally have a chance to build a VDI solution for our labs. We are wanting to go with a 100% Microsoft solution for cost reasons (our site license makes it considerably cheaper). I do have one issue though. I cannot get a single USB stick to show up on the virtual desktop. I have tried to get devices to redirect from both my desktop and a Dell Wyse 5010. Both my desktop and the Wyse client see the USB stick, but the VD is not picking it up for some reason. Is this even supported by Hyper-V and RDS? If so, how do I go about making it work? Current setup uses Server 2012 R2 for all roles and a Windows 10 , non persistent, collection. Current Roles: RD Web Access, RD Gateway, RD Licensing, RD Connection Broker, Hyper-V Virtualization Host, and VMM. These roles are installed on three separate servers for test purposes. I thought I knew how to do this, but I was obviously wrong. So if someone would be a hero and provide a how to, I will be ever grateful.

Hello, I am setting up a DELL R720 as a hypervisor host using Hyper-V (at least I want to) I installed Windows Server 2019 Datacentre using an ISO downloaded from VLSC, (so I assume it is the latest build). The R720 has been updated to have all the latest firmware, BIOS etc. When I initially installed Windows Server 2019, it went through without an issue. It was only after I installed Hyper-V feature onto the server that it has refused to boot. I installed Windows Server on a RAID0 config I have in the system. The RAID configs are the following: The H710P Adapter controls eight SAS drives in RAID5 mode while the H710P Mini handles two SAS drives in RAID0 mode (this is the RAID controller I want to boot from, and it is this array that Windows is installed on.) The symptoms: The system initializes the processors, all of the memory, detects all the drives and initializes the firmware interfaces. The moment that it gets to the blue Windows logo with the spinning circle it immediately reboots the server and starts initializing everything again. After numerous reboots it does eventually boot into recovery mode, but can go nowhere further from here. I have gone into the RAID configuration menu from the BIOS and set the boot device as the RAID controller I want, both controllers are handled by the BIOS. I have initialized both of the RAID arrays in the RAID configuration menu and before I restarted it for the last time I had created a partition for the RAID5 array before everything stopped working. The server had rebooted a number of times before I had installed the Hyper-V role onto it. Another thing to point is that I configured the HyperV role to store any VMs on the RAID5 drives. Could this have anything to do with it crashing on boot? Windows Server was installed via a UEFI USB burned using Rufus. I did not go though iDRAC or the lifecycle controller to install it. Can anyone point out a possible fix, or a list of best practices for installing Windows Server on a RAID0 array on an R720 if I have to reinstall it? Thanks in advance!

How to safely remove old checkpoint on Hyper-V WIN2019 STD It can't be removed on Hyper-V gui. Sorry I'm new user here, so if this went wrong place

Hi, Not sure where to put this, but here goes. I'm looking at replacing our aging servers, and wanted to Migrate them to Hyper-V. I was looking at using a Dell SCv2020 with SAS connections back to a few Servers to run a Hyper-V Failover Cluster. My question is, and I apologise if its a stupid question, but everything I read just says the storage (and the connections to is) need to be iSCSI-3 capable, and that fibre channel is. However I wanted to use the 4x 12Gb SAS connections direct to the servers. Would I be able to setup a Hyper-V Failover Cluster with CSV using a SAS attached SAN? eg 4x servers with dual SAS HBA's, each connection to one of the 4 SAS ports on the SAN, (the SCv2020 SAN has dual controllers, so each server would connect to each controller) as per link or would I have to use iSCSI over Ethernet, or Fibre Channel or would you highly recommend against using SAS over any of the other two? Cheers in advance

Afternoon, I'm hoping someone will be able give me a hand at working out what backupexec license I'll need in a virtualised environment (Hyper-V). Our setup after the summer will be: 4x Virtual Server Hosts (Running 2008R2 Core - with the Hyper-V role) 3x Physical Servers - Forest Root / SIMS&SQL / Exchange Each of the Virtual Servers will host 3/4 VMs Our backup routine is and is based on BackupExec 2010 (v12.5) but there is money available to upgrade to 2012: Monday - Thursday - Deferential Backups Friday - Full Backup (then taken offsite) At the moment I have the following BackupExec Licenses: 1x Media Server License 1x Advanced Disk-Based Backup Option 8x Windows Remote Agents Would I need to purchase 4 copies of the Hyper-V agent or could i just install the existing server agents on to the virtual servers (not the hosts)?? The idea is to keep the exisitng backup schedule if possible. Any help or advice greatly appreciated. Cheers Mark @ Kingsmead

Hi I was wondering if anyone was backing hyper-v up and if they have any solutions to do it. I currently run manualish backups on the server using windows server backup but we really need a full solution that does not cost the earth. I am looking at Backup exec but the hyper-v agent is £1000 per server and we would need to 2 as we run a cluster. Anyone got any solutions they are using? Cheers

Dear all, I'm looking at virtualising our server rack, and seeing as we have an SAS SAN, using a failover cluster as well, all using current hardware. We are a split site school, fibre-optic joining the two sites, with one network / AD, approx. 3400 students and 450 staff. Current hardware: 3 x IBM x3650 (2 NICs, 1 x E5430, 4GB) 2 x IBM x3550 M2 (2 NICs, 1 x E5540, 10GB) 1 x IBM x3550 M3 (2 NICs, 1 x E5620, 16GB) 1 x IBM x3550 M3 (2 NICs, 2 x E5620, 16GB) 1 x IBM DS3512 5TB SAN with dual controllers (4 SAS ports & 2 NICs per controller) Currently the SAN is connected to one of the x3550 M3 via both controllers for redundancy. At a high level I'm thinking the following: 2 x3650 as backup DCs (1 on each site) 1 x3650 with a 12TB NAS for backups (on the other site to the main server room) 4 node fail-over Hyper-V 2012 cluster on the 2 x3550 M2 and 2 x3550 M3 The cluster will contain the main DC (inc. DNS & DHCP), MS-SQL / application server, Print server, file server, SIMS server, SharePoint server. Anyway, I think the upgrades I need are as follows: 6 extra SAS controller cards and cables for the 3 x3550 not currently connected to the SAN 4 additional twin NIC modules for the 4 x3550 (to bring each one up to 4 NICs each) More RAM to bring all x3550 to a minimum of 16GB My questions are: How does the SAN connect to all 4 nodes? I think run 1 SAS cable from each node to each SAN controller (so 2 per node for redundancy) How does the SAN connect on the network? 1 NIC per controller is currently plugged in, but I haven't traced where they go yet How do the nodes wire up together for the cluster network / failover? I think each node will connect to each other node (3 NICs per node) or use a dedicated switch (1 NIC per node, or 2 teamed) How do the nodes connect to the main network? Here I'm thinking that the 4th NIC on each node connects to the main backbone / network switch (or 2 teamed if using a node switch for Q3) How am I doing? Can anyone offer any advice on the above? Although my investigation is into a 4 node cluster, I actually suspect a 2 node cluster would suffice, on the two x3550 M3, but if I can get the budget I may as well make it a 4 node. The IT budget here is a very strange affair, so it wouldn't be as though I could use the unspent money on another project. If the 'budget' isn't approved, then I will look to the 2 node cluster and possibly stretch to an additional E5620 CPU. Many thanks for any comments!

Dear All, I am very much a learning network manager (although aren't we all?) and for ages I've been looking for something to help me set up an isolated Hyper-V lab. Something I can test new applications with and something I can break, that won't interfere with my main network yet has the convenience of being installed so it can access the internet. Well I've finally found a great tutorial that I've just finished with a lot of success. The website has some formatting problems, and if you want to view the images you have to open them up in a new tab and change the URL so it doesn't try to access through https but these issues are outweighed by how helpful the four step tutorial was. Here's the link - enjoy!

I have been stuck with this since last Friday and it's really starting to depress me, as I finally thought I was ready to push ahead with deploying proper new servers when I noticed this behaviour, and it's a problem that involves a great deal of waiting to see if it's fixed so I am bored of watching it now. I'm just testing a new Hyper-V cluster before pushing ahead with production, and when I live migrate my test VM, pings into the server drop for anywhere between 20-100 pings, unless I ping out from the server. So far, so similar to many other issues, and clearly ARP-related - the switch visibly has the incorrect ARP entry until I ping out from the guest. I've run Wireshark captures on both Hyper-V hosts in the cluster on the NIC with the virtual network, and captured the debug output from my HP A5800 switch for ARP packets as well, and as best I can tell, the issue is because Hyper-V never sends a gratuitous ARP out to update the routing tables. Is there anything likely to be stopping these gratuitous ARP packets being sent out by the server? I can see other gratuitious packets being sent round the network on the Wireshark logs. This is all Server 2008R2, hosts and guests, as up to date as can be (apart from this week's patches, not got round to them yet), running a cluster on an FC SAN hosting the CSV, on HP DL380 G7s with a mix of onboard Intel NICs and expansion-card Broadcom NICs. The NICs are teamed but disabling that/changing settings/running on only a single NIC does nothing to resolve the situation. I'm performing the Live Migrations from a third physical server running SCVMM. Has anyone got any clues? I've tried destroying and recreating the cluster and it's made no difference; I don't yet want to rebuild the virtual hosts from scratch because that's a fairly time consuming option. Help, my sanity is at stake

How many have taken the plunge and gone fully server 2016 and windows 10 as its coming up to the new financial year and we are looking at upgrading from server 2008 any huge headaches? smooth installs etc

Hi guys Not sure if this is a DPM issue per se, i assume it must be as this is a test restore im having an issue with, the actual server itself is up and running. So ive restored the VM, started it up, it shows the windows logo with the swirly dots, does that for about 30 seconds then i get a black screen. At random times a window will appear, sometimes its just the border, sometimes its the full window but its empty, occasionally i actually get an error message, it stays onscreen just long enough for me to read "sign in process intialization error, see event log for details" Googling just keeps pointing me to Windows 7, saying things like boot to safe mode, last known config, i cant do anything with this server, a restart hasnt helped. Ive tried two different restore dates now one from disk and one from tape, has anyone else had this problem restoring a VM using DPM Server version is 2012 r2 Vicky Tofield IT Tech Sir Christopher Hatton Academy

Hi all, I've been playing with Xen, VMware ESX and Hyper-V for a little while and I was just wondering if there seems to be a consensus of which is most popular in a school environment? If you are using one of these virtualisation technologies in a school/education system or are likely to soon, would you mind voting in the poll to show your preference? If you look at threads like this one then you can see a huge use of VMware in more enterprise-level setups, and certainly everything I've read and seen would suggest VMware ESX is the most powerful virtualisation technology out there. However, here are my personal experiences with the three technologies: Hyper-V - Disappointing, far more complex to set up than it needs to be, and only supports Windows (and SUSE Enterprise) guest VMs. Even in it's Core form, I personally find Server 2008 to be much more work to configure and manage than setting up a ESX or Xen host. If you want to do things properly then you need SCVMM (and a MS SQL server). Costs are good as it will be mostly 'free' for those who have MS volume licensing. Xen - I considered Xen to be the underdog as it hasn't got the large deployments of VMware or the big name of Microsoft behind it, but so far it has really impressed me. It is so unbelievably easy to set up and use, the XenCenter console take two minutes to install and configure, and there's no dependence on a central management server or SQL database to control your setup. Does anyone know where the pool config is stored with Xen - presumably it's replicated across the hosts? VMware ESX - I really wanted to love this product, but so far it hasn't impressed me that much. Maybe vSphere will be better? The ESX Hardware Compatibility List seems pickier than Xen (not a problem if you're buying new servers, but it was a real pain to have to buy new NICs to fit in brand new Dell desktops for testing), it requires a dedicated VCenter Server that needs an SQL database (you can't really virtualise this box so does it not become a single point of failure?), and seems far more awkward to set up than Xen. My Xen setup was as simple as building a couple of hosts (five minute each), installing XenCenter (two minutes), configure a LUN on a SAN (two minutes), create a Pool on XenCenter, add the hosts and a Storage Repository from the SAN (five minutes), tick High Availability (two seconds) and I've got a failover-level setup... With Hyper-V and ESX doing this seems a lot more complicated, or is it just me? Many thanks, Chris

For the life of me, I am having problems creating a managed Windows 7 Vdi Pool under server 2012R2. My RDS Virtualization server is running server 2012 R2 and I can create managed Windows 8 VM's quite easily. The trouble I am having is that when I create my Windows 7 VDI pool, I keep getting the error "The provisioned machine couldn't join the domain", but I can see the machine has been created, and it is listed in Active Directory, in the correct OU. My Windows 7 template has service pack 1 installed, the template joined the domain before it was sysprepped and generalized. I also made sure that the network card had the correct field in the DNS settings. The first machine is always created, and when I look at the machine in Hyper-V, I can see that it is at the log on screen asking me to sign in with Ctrl + Alt + Delete This is my setup: EDGE1.lab.local Server 2012R2 (RD Web Access, RD Virtualization Host, Rd Connection Broker) IP: 10.0.0.2 Subnet 255.255.255.0 Primary DNS: 10.0.0.1 DC01.lab.local Server 2008 R2 (DC, DHCP, DNS) IP: 10.0.0.1 Subnet: 255.255.255.0 Primary DNS: 127.0.0.1 The other problem I am having is with my Windows 8 Pool. RD Web Access URL: https://edge1.lab.local/RDWeb/Pages/en-US/login.aspx This is the strange part. When I log on using my admin credentials in IE, or Chrome, I can see the Windows 8 Powered on VDI machine. When I click on the machine in Chrome I download the .RDP and try to run it. It just hangs. Looking at the address of the file, it is listed as Edge1.lab.local and I get the error Remote machine is not powered on etc.... If I edit the .RDP file that I downloaded to match the NIC address of the machine, (10.0.0.123) I can connect to it using RDS, but I'm thinking, this is not the way it is supposed to work. Any ideas? The strange thing is that the machine works when I boot into it using RDS. Any thoughts? Another issue I'

I've recently completed a VMM course and as a result I found out that most of my servers have been configured wrong. Don't worry it's not as bad as it sounds just a few tweaks required here and there. However, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to find the time to make the changes and migrate the VM's to new homes.(This has to be done as the cluster is set up incorrectly). So what I'm after is someone who can come in and do a Hyper-V tidy up and get all my hosts under VMM. Suggestions anyone?

A very useful video, despite being over two hours long.

I can't find Hyper-V Server 2012 standalone download anywhere, despite lots of references saying it's been available for a few months. Download.microsoft.com only has docs for Hyper-V 2012, but not the ISO. Am I being dim? Thanks.