Tag Archives: Hyper-V

Automating VMWare to Hyper-V Migrations using MVMC

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There are several tools for migrating VMWare VM’s to Hyper-V. The free tool from Microsoft is called the Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter which allows you to convert from VMWare to Hyper-V or Azure, and from physical to virtual via a GUI or powershell cmdlets for automation. Microsoft also has the Migration Automation Toolkit which can help automate this process. If you have NetApp, definitely check out MAT4SHIFT which is by far the fastest and easiest method for converting VMWare VM’s to Hyper-V. MVMC works fairly well, however, there are a few things the tool doesn’t handle natively when converting from VMWare to Hyper-V.

First, it requires credentials to the guest VM to remove the VMWare Tools. In a service provider environment, you may not have access to the guest OS, so this could be an issue. Second, the migration will inherently cause a change in hardware, which in turn can cause the guest OS to lose its network configuration. This script accounts for that by pulling the network configuration from the guest registry and restoring it after the migration. Lastly, MVMC may slightly alter other hardware specifications (dynamic memory, mac address) and this script aims to keep them as close as possible with the exception of disk configuration due to Gen 1 limitations in Hyper-V booting.

This script relies on several 3rd party components:

You’ll need to install MVMC, HV PS Module, and VMWare PowerCLI on your “helper” server – the server where you’ll be running this script which will perform the conversion. Devcon, the HV IS components, VMWare Tools, and NSSM will need to be extracted into the appropriate folders:

vmware-to-hyper-v-folder-structure

I’ve included a sample kick-off script (migrate.ps1) that will perform a migration:

$esxhost = "192.168.0.10"
$username = "root"
$password = ConvertTo-SecureString "p@ssWord1" -AsPlainText -Force
$cred = New-Object -Typename System.Management.Automation.PSCredential -Argumentlist "root", $password
$viserver = @{Server=$esxhost;Credential=$cred}
 
$destloc = "\\sofs.contoso.int\vm-storage1"
 
$vmhost = "HV03"
 
$vmname = "MYSERVER01"
 
cd C:\vmware-to-hyperv-convert
 
. .\vmware-to-hyperv.ps1 -viserver $viserver -VMHost $vmhost -destLoc $destloc -VerboseMode
 
$vms = VMware.VimAutomation.Core\Get-VM -Server $script:viconnection
 
$vmwarevm = $vms | ?{$_.Name -eq $vmname}
 
$vm = Get-VMDetails $vmwarevm
 
Migrate-VMWareVM $vm

Several notes about MVMC and these scripts:

  • This is an offline migration – the VM will be unavailable during the migration. The total amount of downtime depends on the size of the VMDK(s) to be migrated.
  • The script will only migrate a single server. You could wrap this into powershell tasks to migrate several servers simultaneously.
  • Hyper-V Gen1 servers only support booting from IDE. This script will search for the boot disk and attach it to IDE0, all other disks will be attached to a SCSI controller regardless of the source VM disk configuration.
  • Linux VM’s were not in scope as there are not reliable ways to gain write access to LVM volumes on Windows. Tests of CentOS6, Ubuntu12 and Ubuntu14 were successful. CentOS5 required IS components be pre-installed and modifications made to boot configuration. CentOS7 was unsuccessful due to disk configuration. The recommended way of migrating Linux VM’s is to pre-install IS, remove VMWare Tools, and modify boot configuration before migrating.
  • These scripts were tested running from a Server 2012 R2 VM migrating Server 2003 and Server 2012 R2 VM’s – other versions should work but have not been tested.
  • ESXi 5.5+ requires a connection to a vCenter server as storage SDK service is unavailable on the free version.

Server 2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V Dynamic Memory Settings

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While working on a recent project for Cytanium Windows VPS Servers, I uncovered a little documented feature that I thought was new for Windows 8 Hyper-V, but was actually implemented in 2008 R2 SP1. It has to do with the minimum and maximum values for VM’s using Dynamic Memory in Hyper-V. The GUI exposes the concept of startup memory and maximum memory, where startup is the amount exposed to the VM while booting as well as the minimum amount of RAM the hypervisor will allocate to the VM, and maximum being the limit the VM will consume.

While working through the WMI API, I stumbled across this:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc136856(v=vs.85).aspx

Limit – The maximum amount of memory that may be consumed by the virtual system. For a virtual system with dynamic memory enabled, this represents the maximum memory setting.

Reservation – Specifies the amount of memory guaranteed to be available for this VM. For a virtual system with dynamic memory enabled, this represents the minimum memory setting.

VirtualQuantity – The total amount of RAM in the virtual system, as seen by the guest operating system. For a virtual system with dynamic memory enabled, this represents the initial memory available at startup.

So, there’s actually three settings where VirtualQuantity and Limit map to the startup and maximum values in the GUI. But what about Reservation? This is actually the minimum amount of memory the hypervisor will allocate for a VM. When you configure startup memory in the GUI or via SCVMM, it’s actually setting VirtualQuantity and Reservation to the same values. The reasoning behind this is simple – Microsoft wants to protect you from yourself. By setting the VirtualQuantity to something larger than the Reservation, you could potentially encounter a scenario where a VM reboots, and the host does not have enough memory to satisfy the VM, and has to power down the VM. This is a non-issue in Windows 8 because of Smart Paging.

On the flip side, the value specified in VirtualQuantity is also the amount of memory reported in the VM during boot. So this can cause confusion for some users because the VM may only report the VirtualQuantity on startup, and will always only report the high watermark of RAM allocated – which is typically less than the maximum available to the VM. To prevent this, we can set the VirtualQuantity value to the same as the Limit, and then set the reservation value to the minimum required to run the Operating System. This ensures that the VM always reports the maximum amount of memory available to it, while still allowing the hypervisor to dynamically allocate only what’s necessary to run the workload.

Ben Armstrong has a great post outlining how this can be done via WMI:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2010/09/15/scripting-dynamic-memory-part-5-changing-minimum-memory.aspx

Once you change these values, the GUI actually recognizes the change and warns that modifying the settings will revert to default behavior:

But the actual values behind the scenes:

Limit:                  2048
Reservation:       512
VirtualQuantity:  2048

Shortly after booting, Hyper-V recoups the unused RAM:

But the VM still reports the high watermark:

One potential downside to doing this is that the amount of in-use RAM could be reported incorrectly inside the VM. However, based on my testing, this occurs when using Dynamic Memory via traditional methods as well. The problem is that Windows calculates in use RAM by subtracting available RAM from total RAM. So, for the above VM, the amount of in use RAM is report as ~1.8GB, rather than the ~600MB that’s actually in use by the VM at startup. Do note however, that this occurs anytime a VM is using Dynamic Memory and bursts above the startup value. The VM always reports the high watermark and encounters the same miscalculation of available memory if the memory demand decreases.

Error 0x800423f3 backing up Hyper-V VM with DPM 2007

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One error you may receive while backing up a Hyper-V VM with DPM 2007 is the generic “DPM encountered a retryable VSS error. (ID 30112 Details: Unknown error (0x800423f3) (0x800423F3)).” There are a couple of different things that could cause this error. The two most common are:

1. You are running a Windows Server 2008 SP1 Hyper-V host and do not have the appropriate pre-requisites installed. Specifically, the hotfix described in KB959962.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd347840.aspx

2. There is a VSS error of some kind inside the VM causing the Hyper-V VSS writer to fail.

One of the most common VSS errors inside a Server 2008 VM I have seen, is event id 8193:

Log Name:      Application
Source:        VSS
Date:          <DateTime>
Event ID:      8193
Task Category: None
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Computer:      <ComputerName>
Description:
Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Unexpected error calling routine ConvertStringSidToSid.  hr = 0x80070539.

Operation:
OnIdentify event
Gathering Writer Data
Context:
Execution Context: Shadow Copy Optimization Writer
Writer Class Id: {4dc3bdd4-ab48-4d07-adb0-3bee2926fd7f}
Writer Name: Shadow Copy Optimization Writer
Writer Instance ID: {3586f039-f2f9-4dcb-a46e-3aaa20f1a2fa}
This error can be solved by following the instructions in this blog post. Specifically, perform these steps outline in KB947242:
  • Delete unresolvable SIDs in the ‘Administrators’ group on the VM.
  • Open regedit and locate ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList’
  • Under the ProfileList subkey, delete any subkey that is named SID.bak

This has resolved the issue in most cases where I have seen that DPM error occur. Some other suggested troubleshooting tips that have solved this problem for me in the past:

  • Re-install the Integration Components and reboot the VM
  • Resolve issues for any VSS writers not listed as stable from the “vssadmin list writers” command on the host or inside the VM. You can restart the following services to resolve some problems
    • System Writer – Cryptographic Services service (doesn’t affect the system)
    • IIS Metabse Writer – IIS Administrative service (will reset all of IIS)
    • SqlServerWriter – SQL VSS service (doesn’t affect SQL)
    • WMI Writer – Windows Management Instrumentation service (WMI will be unavailable during the
      service restart)
    • BITS Writer – BITS service (BITS will be unavailable during the service restart)
  • Re-register VSS components as described in KB940032
  • Ensure there is sufficient space inside the VM for shadow copies