HP ML 370 G6, Network Problem with Hyper-V Guests

This is a new problem that  faced with HP Proliant ML 370 G6 . After Installing Windows 2008 SP2 and install Hyper-V finish all the configuration everything looks fine.

I start creating some Guest machines with Hyper-V console and joining the domain. We start see unexpected behavior like some missing PING packets and time out for DNS lookup. this looks strange as I tried a lot of HP servers and it worked fine. I made sure that HP Network Configuration is uninstalled but still facing the problem.

 I start suspecting the NIC as I saw problems like this due to NIC , After disabling IPv4 Checksum Offload J It worked fine.

 In most cases I can see that Guest machines are suffering in case of IPv4 Checksum Offload.

 Update:

While I was searching online I found the same problem there and he recommend to disable all those:

 IPv4 Checksum Offload

TCP Checksum Offload IPv4

UCP Checksum Offload IPv4

TCP Checksum Offload IPv6

UCP Checksum Offload IPv6

VMM Disaster recovery and High Availability

System Center virtual machine Manager become a very important part of the virtual environment.  Although that down time for this service is acceptable as it will not interrupt the current services or the running VMs. Maybe we will lose some functionality during any downtime like SSP or the integration with SCOM (PRO) but that maybe acceptable for some companies.

But considering the high availability in designing new VMM deployment will be a great thing. So to design VMM in highly available environment we must first think about VMM component:

1. VMM Server
2. VMM Database
3. Library Servers
4. Self Service Portal

VMM Server:

Clustering of the VMM application, which enables failover of VMM itself, has not been tested and is not supported. So basically there is not a direct high availability for the services .

The workaround for that as mentioned by Microsoft is to Run the VMM server inside a highly available virtual machine which is supported.

The only recommendation for this is not to do Quick migration for this HAVM using VMM as this may cause interruption for the service.

Another workaround is to use multiple VMM environment. This is a good solution to scale out your VMM deployment by adding more virtual machine hosts and library servers as your virtual environment grows. The whole idea behind this is not to keep all your eggs in one basket.

VMM Database:

VMM is using SQL as database to store all VMM configuration information, which you can access and modify by using the VMM Administrator Console.

The VMM database requires a supported version of Microsoft SQL Server. You can either specify a local or remote instance of an existing Microsoft SQL Server database or have the Setup Wizard install SQL Server 2005 Express Edition SP2 on the VMM server.

To make the VMM database highly available, you can deploy the SQL Server instance on a failover cluster created in either Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2003.

VMM library:

VMM 2008 supports using highly available file servers and shares hosted by a failover cluster created in Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition or Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition as highly available library servers and library shares. VMM 2008 is not aware of failover clusters created in Windows Server 2003.

Self Service Portal:

For Self-Service Portals  it is recommended that you maintain multiple portals on multiple Web servers. Virtual Machine Manager does not support Network Load Balancing (NLB) clusters in Windows Server 2008, which are required in order to distribute the network traffic among self-service users on multiple Web sites.

Disaster Recovery for VMM:

The Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) database is a SQL Server database that contains all VMM configuration information.

To backup VMM SQL database

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc956045.aspx

SCOM 2007 installation error “Invalid Management Group name”

Just a small tip.. I was trying to install SCOM 2007 SP1 for PRO integration. I used an old server which used to be SCOM server before we uninstall it.

When I tried to install System Center Operations Manager 2007 I saw the following error when I enter the management group name.

“Invalid Management Group name”

 This problem occurs when the Management Group name is:

 -Empty of Null

-Leading or Trailing spaces

 -Already exists on this computer

-Contains special characters.   The Management Group name should not contain following special characters:
^@)~(:!`#%\*+$|,&&=’["]/<.{;?>}

To continue setup, go back and change the Management Group name.

Actually the uninstall process was fine and did not reflect any errors in the system. I am not SCOM expert but from the error looks like the OS still keeping some information about the old SCOM servers in somewhere. I searched in the registry for the servers and I found some keys still not removed from the old installation.

To solve this problem Just delete the following registry path HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft Operations Manager

Double check if still there any files under your Program Files for the old installation.. if there remove it and restart the server.