Sometimes it’s useful to be able to use a Standard Switch in System Center 2012 with SP1 – Virtual Machine Manager (VMM). When you look at the Hardware Configuration for a VM guest the option to select is greyed out:

To configure a Standard Switch select network adapter, and click Browse on the VM Network, and then Clear Selection:

Back on the network adapter properties page the Standard Switch selection is no longer greyed out:

Select the required Standard Switch and click OK to commit the configuration change.

In case you hadn’t seen the announcement already Update Rollup 3 (UR3) has been released. There’s a brief announcement from JC Hornbeck at Microsoft here

The update applies to the following components:

• App Controller (KB2853227 & KB2823452);
• Data Protection Manager (KB2853210);
• Operations Manager (KB2852565);
• Virtual Machine Manager (KB2858509, KB2858510 & KB2858511)

The full description is available is available under KB2836751 here

In System Center 2012 SP1: Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) there are two types of virtual switch:

1. Standard; and
2. Logical.

Rather than duplicate information that’s already available. MVP Thomas Maurer has a good description of the two switches here. For more detail on networking VMM check out Nigel Cain from Microsoft’s series of posts, starting with Networking in VMM 2012 SP1 – Logical Networks (Part I)

I tend to remove the Standard Switch’s from my Hyper-V hosts in favour of the functionality and consistency provided by Logical Switch’s.

The Challenge

When removing a Standard Switch from a Hyper-V host I received an error advising that the switch was in use by a virtual machine. With over 25 VM’s on the host I wanted a fast way to see what VM was connected to what switch.

The Solution

Executed on the Hyper-V host:

   1: Import-Module Hyper-V

   2: Get-vm | GetVmNetworkAdapter

The SwitchName column in the results below identify that I have two VM’s attached to the Dev switch.

Editing the configuration for those VM’s to a different switch removed the dependencies allowing me to remove the Dev switch from the host.

If you’ve been implementing System Center 2012 SP1: Virtual Machine Manager you might have noticed a rather unpleasant quirk. If you apply a logical switch to a physical NIC being used for host management (i..e it has a static IP address) you might experience a situation where during VMM pushing the configuration to the host the IP address information is lost.

The Configuration

The logical switch is applied to the physical NIC used for host management, the first vNIC that is added must be the management vNIC with the tick box selected as highlighted in the image below.

The issue

The issue of the management IP address information being dropped was resolved in Update Rollup 2, however there is still a scenario where the symptoms of this problem persist. I say symptoms because it isn’t actually the same issue.

If the host NIC is connected to a port that is trunked to allow connectivity for multiple VLAN’s the static IP address information is applied however the VLAN ID is not applied leaving the host partially configured.

The workaround

The VLAN used for management communication should be a native VLAN on the physical switch. The reason is that hyper-V API’s do not support VLAN configuration on vNIC’s at the time of switch creation. VMM loses connectivity to the host before it can complete the switch operation. As a workaround, can you try setting the VLAN as native VLAN on the switch port and retry the operation. This is a limitation in the current release of VMM.

Thanks to Karthik at Microsoft for explaining the root cause of the issue.

In situations where this isn’t possible I’ve used a separate NIC for host management which I’ve not managed through VMM.

As per the TechNet page on choosing the right volumen license key, each channel group activates the downstream group:

Knowing that the channel B key would activate the client OS but not Office, the question I had was:

“How would the KMS clients handle having two activation servers with different activation keys?”

I had a dicussion on a mailing list at Microsoft and was pleased to find out that the client’s autodiscovery behaved as I hoped they would which is:

This was good to confirm as there was concern that the KMS client would activate the OS agianst one server and then fail to activate Office and leave the workstation in an undesireable state.

DNS was configured using the steps outlined in the Volume Activation Deployment Guide and tested using:

nslookup
set q=srv
._VLMVS._TCP

Both KMS servers were returned.

A quick check of the respective KMS clients (on 64-bit Win7) using the following:

cscript "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\ospp.vbs" /dhistorykms
csscript "C:\Windows\System32\slmgr.vbs" /dli

confirmed that activation was working as expected.

#Winning ;-)

The games run from April 26th through to May 7th. There are two categories, VBScript or PowerShell, and two levels of difficulty: Beginner and Advanced.

Next Steps:
1. Sign up for the games
2. Take a look at the Study Guide if you want to prepare.
3. Checkout the extra prizes that you can win if you sign up to the Australian Team
4. Grab the Badge
5. Spread the word and join in using the Twitter hash tag #2010sg and if you feel lke it use the Twibbon
6. Script and have some fun!!

There’s also a FAQ and a forum to hang out in.

Good luck everyone :-)

I also want to raise the visibility on the first Perth Infrastructure Group (PIGAU) for 2010 tomorrow night (Thursday 11th). We have Jeff Alexander in town, and he’ll be presenting on Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services

What we will cover:
– RemoteApp and Remote Desktop
– Remote Desktop Services (RDS) Improvements
– Using RDS to Connect to Virtual Machines
Demonstrations in this Session:
– Using Remote Desktop Services Remote Programs
– Using Remote Desktop Services Web Access
– Configuring Remote Desktop Services Gateway
– Connecting RemoteApp Through Remote Desktop Connection Broker to a Hyper-V VM

So if you’re in Perth, and free Thursday night come along!

This is to take advantage of PowerShell MVP, and all round scripting good guy Don Jones being in town. Don is on holiday on the east coast and he has kindly agreed to be hi-jacked on Thursday night to present a session for the User Group.

So, our agenda currently looks like this:

17:30 17:40 Introduction
17:40 – 18:00 Jeff Alexander – Windows PowerShell integration with Group policy in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2
18:00 – 18:20 Adam Bell – Managing MDT 2010 with PowerShell
18:20 – 18:40 Don Jones – What You Should Care About in PowerShell v2
18:40 – 19:00 Q&A and informal chat amongst the group

Jeff, is actually in Canberra on Thursday so he’ll be taking advantage of Live Meeting to join us (details to follow).

Keep an eye on the UG website for details and please join us either online or in person if you’re in Sydney!

Jeremy has managed to get something for everybody with Information worker, Developer and IT Pro sessions available. Tickets are going fast, at last check there were TEN (10) left!

The full information is available from the Sharepoint Saturday Perth website and there will even be a PowerShell session available, where I’ll run through a fast paced Introduction to PowerShell.

I hope to see you there, but if not, I will post the my session here on the day. :-)

Unfortunately, due to a scheduling conflict at Microsoft Perth, we had moved our meeting from the end of November, to the beginning of December which inadvertantly caused a conflict with the .NET Community of Practice UG. This was a shame as there were a few members from the .NET UG who were keen to attend. In future we’re aiming for week 3 each month, which should prevent this happening.

Anyway, what made this a fun evening was that we had three presenters, all from different locations: Jame’s O’Neill (Microsoft Evangelist UK) from the UK, Shane Hoey (PowerShell User Group Australia), from Brisbane, and myself from Perth.

We had a modest turn out in the Microsoft Office’s in Perth as well as a few people logged into Live Meeting. We had a few technical issues, which is to be expected from a UG still finding it’s feet! Though nothing like the running battles Richard Siddaway used to have when I was in the UK!

Apparently editing the Live Meeting media file to clean it up results in an exponential increase in the files size. Seeing as it’s being made availble over the net it would seem like a good idea to keep it as small as possible, so I’ve take Marco Shaw’s advise and will make it available live, raw and unedited.

PowerShell User Group Australia – November 2009 Session

A summary of the session:

Adam Bell – Introductions (0m – 1m)
Adam Bell – 10 useful PowerShell Tricks (5m 5s – 26m)
James O’Neill – Managing Hyper-V (35m 50s -1h 32m)
Shane Hoey – Windows 7 PowerPack (1h 09m 25s – 1h 30m 05s)

Okay. We experienced a few issues, learnt a few things (like my wireless mike sleeping when not being used!) so the recording is a little raw. Hopefully, you’ll be able to see past that and find something in there that was interesting.

I’ve had a couple of requests so I’ll post my presentation up as a session in a few days and detail my demo’s.