Hyper-V Replica
For the past few months I’ve been using an in house script to manage the rebooting of Virtual Machines on Hyper-V hosts following Windows Updates. These Virtual Machines also take part in Hyper-V Replica Replication to a DR host. On occasion I’ve spotted that when shutting down (as part of the reboot sequence) the Hyper-V Replica state will go into a Error ‘Critical’ state.
As it transpires this happens when the machine is shutting down and Hyper-V replica is attempting to create a reference point to send replica data over to the DR host.
The best fix I have at the moment for this issue is to suspend replication (you can use the Suspend-VMReplication PowerShell Cmdlet as documented here – https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/itpro/powershell/windows/hyper-v/suspend-vmreplication to accomplish this) before shutting down the machine and then resuming replication (Resume-VMReplication and https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/itpro/powershell/windows/hyper-v/resume-vmreplication) once shutdown is complete.
You will also note this issue noted under Hyper-V-VMMS in Event Viewer with Event IDs along the lines of 19060, 33680, 32546 and 32026.
While working on my most recent Hyper-V Replica PowerShell script when attempting to reverse replication from a source Hyper-V host to the a target host using Certificate authentication I was getting the error message…
Hyper-V failed to establish a connection with the Replica server ‘<target hostname>’ on port ‘443’. Error: The connection with the server was terminated abnormally (0x00002EFE).
As it turns out I had recently deleted and created a new certificate for the target host and as such there was no certificate listed in Hyper-V Settings > Replication Configuration. The fix was to set the replacement certificate in the box provided. See the screenshots below for a little more…
Time for a new series of posts! In this series I will be looking at the end to end deployment of a pair of Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 hosts along with supporting services including networking and backup. This kind of deployment is an excellent option for anyone who is looking to run Virtualisation but without the cost of VMWare or a SAN (Storage Area Network). In this first post I’ll outline the goals of this project along with the hardware I’ll be using.
Goals
- To configure iDRAC 8 Express for out of band management
- To install Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2
- To configure network settings and enable remote management
A few points to note…
- Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 is completely free! (allowing you to access the latest Hyper-V technology regardless of your licencing level)
- You must still have a valid licence for any guest operating systems (in this case I am using two Server 2008 R2 Datacentre licences as there will be no VMs using anything higher than Server 2008 R2)
- Datacentre licencing allows you to run an unlimited number of VMs on that host at that OS level or lower (subject to extra licencing concerns over additional CPU sockets)
- Hyper-V Server is effectively a super cut down version of Windows Server Core – there are no different drivers and the management tools are just the same
- You can find out more about Hyper-V Server on TechNet here – https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh833684.aspx
Hardware
Dell T430 Hosts
Purchased specifically for this project these two hosts have been configured identically with the aim of N+1 redundancy in the environment.
- 1x Intel Xeon E5-2620 v3 2.4Ghz 6 core CPU
- 6x8GB DDR3 2133mhz RAM (48GB total)
- Dell PERC H730 RAID Controller 1GB Cache
- 6x600GB 10K SAS Drives
- Dual Hot Plug Power Supplies
- 3 Dual Port 1Gbit NICs
- iDRAC8 Express
These Dell servers really have a lot going for them – as well as being UEFI enabled they come with iDRAC (for out of band management and simple OS installs) as well as plenty of RAM slots, pull out tags on the front with the service tag number, USB 3.0 and hot plug power supplies. Finally I’m really quite impressed with how quiet they run – although they will be housed in a dedicated air conditioned server room I could certainly see one of these as being ok in a well ventilated cupboard somewhere in a branch office like environment.
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