six demon bag

Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!

2017-04-01

Reset VSS Writers

VSS writers are application-specific components for Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copy Service, which ensure the consistency of application data when a shadow copy is created. That's quite useful for creating consistent backups of a system. However, some of these writers go into error states more or less frequently. And Microsoft did not deem it necessary to document how to reset writers without rebooting the entire system (or at least I didn't manage to find that piece of information).

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Posted 16:19 [permalink]

2015-09-29

Hyper-V Live Migration fails with error 0x80090303

If you have a live migration fail with an error like this:

Live migration of 'Virtual Machine VM01' failed.

Virtual machine migration operation for 'scvmm_instance' failed at migration source 'Hypervisor01'. (Virtual machine ID XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX)

The Virtual Machine Management Service failed to establish a connection for a Virtual Machine migration with host 'Hypervisor02': The specified target is unknown or unreachable (0x80090303).

The Virtual Machine Management Service failed to authenticate the connection for a Virtual Machine migration at the source host: The specified target is unknown or unreachable (0x80090303).

check that both hypervisors have the required SPNs registered.

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Posted 17:22 [permalink]

2013-01-28

Creating blank VMs for PXE boot

For a customer project I had to create a couple dozen virtual machines on our Hyper-V cluster. The machines were to be installed via a 3rd party software deployment system (the customer doesn't use SCCM), so I had to assign static MAC addresses and enable PXE boot. The respective reservations on the DHCP server had to be created from the MAC addresses in a second step, because the customer domain is separated from the infrastructure domain.

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Posted 11:09 [permalink]

2012-11-17

Importing VMs From external Hyper-V Hosts

I've been working on a project where I needed to migrate (clone actually, in order to maintain a fallback scenario) virtual machines from external (standalone) Hyper-V hosts to a Hyper-V cluster. The external hypervisors were not members of the same domain as the cluster nodes. The networks were separated by a firewall. A trust relationship between the domains was not desired.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 (SCVMM) supports this scenario, but there are several steps that must be performed to prepare for the migration.

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Posted 20:03 [permalink]