Tag: windows azure pack

My first book is published! (VMM 2016 Cookbook)

My first book that I have been working day and night on for the last four months is published and globally available! The System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2016 Cookbook (English, 575 pages) includes multiple tips, tricks and techniques to help you make the perfect VMM fabric (see What this book covers  section at the bottom of this post for details)

I have done a complete makeover of the previous edition and,therefore, we have the  chapters written from the scratch, plenty of new recipes and revised old ones to meet changes in VMM 2016.  This book is essentially intended to system engineers, solution architects, administrators and anyone who want to learn and master Virtual Machine Manager 2016 (however, since we have two channels (LTSB/SAC), you will also find references to the latest VMM 1801 release in the semi-annual channel).

The book is available in paperback and ebook formats at Amazon and Packt

Please don’t forget to write your feedback/review on Amazon.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all of those with whom I have had the pleasure to work during this project. This book would not be possible without Packt team who found me and offered to take up the writing. I say thank you to Devika Battike, Manish Shanbhag, Heramb Bhavsar and Prateek Bharadwaj for supporting and helping me along the way.

A special thank goes to Edvaldo Alessandro Cardoso, an author of two previous editions, for an active participation and for being a technical reviewer together with Tomica Kaniski. I could not have finished this edition without your help.

In addition, I wish to mention the Microsoft team for helping to make this book as accurate as possible, in particular: Steven Ekren, Elden Christensen Sai Prasanna Vudataneni, Krupesh Dhruva and Sonal Agarwal. I am pretty sure our long discussions and your feedbacks will be appreciated by readers.

I have worked nonstop on the book for the last months and truly couldn’t survive without my family. Nobody has been more important to me than you. Thank you very much for your support, inspiration and love.

What this book covers
  • Chapter 1, VMM 2016 Architecture, provides an understanding of the VMM modular architecture, which is useful when designing VMM and troubleshooting deployment. This chapter also covers all requirements that must be satisfied to make a private cloud.
  • Chapter 2, Upgrading from Previous Versions, walks through all the necessary steps to upgrade the previous version of Virtual Machine Manager to the new VMM 2016, covering its database, highly available configurations and post-upgrade tasks.
  • Chapter 3, Installing VMM 2016, focus on deploying VMM and it’s dependencies. It gives also a plenty of tips and tricks to install and automate VMM and SQL Server deployments in both Windows Server Core and Full environments.
  • Chapter 4, Installing a High Available VMM Server, dives into more advanced VMM configuration, and provides an understanding how VMM has become a critical part of the private cloud infrastructure. You will also learn how to make a highly available library server and VMM configuration database.
  • Chapter 5, Configuring Fabric Resources, discusses building a new fabric in VMM by configuring compute, storage and networking resources. It starts by adding hosts group and ends by creating a hyper-converged cluster with Storage Spaces Direct and Hyper-V. It also covers a deployment of a Network Controller providing a good start point for network virtualization implementation.
  • Chapter 6, Configuring Guarded Fabric, walks you through the recipes to help protect confidential data by deploying new shielded VMs as a part of Guarded Fabric consisting of Guarded Hosts and Host Guardian Service. It also discusses how to convert existing VMs to shielded and manage them through VMM.
  • Chapter 7, Deploying Virtual Machines and Services, provides information to help the administrator to create,deploy and manage private clouds, virtual machines, templates, and services in VMM 2016; it provides recipes to assist you in getting the most our of deployment.
  • Chapter 8, Managing VMware ESXi Hosts, shows you how to manage and make VMware recources available to private cloud deployments. It also covers converting VMware machines to Hyper-V (V2V), deploying virtual machines and templates, all from the VMM console.
  • Chapter 9, Managing Clouds, Fabric Updates, Resources, Clusters and the New Features of 2016, covers other new features of VMM 2016 such as Cluster OS Rolling upgrade and Production Checkpoints. You will also learn how to integrate VMM 2016 with Windows Azure Pack for VM Clouds management.
  • Chapter 10, Integration with System Center Operations Manager 2016, guides you through the steps required to complete integration of SCOM 2016 with VMM in order to enable monitoring of the private cloud infrastructure.

VMM 2016 Cookbook

Code Files

 

Update Rollup 10 For System Center 2012 R2

New rollup for System Center 2012 R2 is available. It brings improvements and fixes for VMM, DPM , SPF and Azure Pack. You can install them by Windows Update or download manually using the links below (see each component article to obtain specific installation instructions)

Name LINK
Data Protection Manager https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3143871
Orchestrator –
Operations Manager –
Service Manager –
Service Provider Foundation https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3147172
Virtual Machine Manager https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3147167
WAP https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3158609
WAP Web Sites –

The following issues are fixed in Windows Azure Pack:

  • Windows Server 2016 only: Support for Encryption Supported VMs. Windows Server 2016, Virtual Machine Manager and Service Provider Foundation provide support for Encrypted Supported VMs, now WAP provides support for the three type of VMs in Windows Server 2016: regular VMs, Shielded VMs, and Encryption Supported VMs.
  • Windows Server 2016 only: Fix to incorrect Format of volume Signature in PDK File downloaded through WAP.
  • When a tenant updates a VM Size, the Hardware Profile ID is passed along to the SPF/VMM Virtual Machine Update event, allowing custom runbooks to change other properties as necessary.
  • Fix to Virtual Network property labels in the Quota page. The quotas for “Site-to-Site VPN” and “External IP addresses” labels in the Admin Portal VM Resource Provider are misleading because they read “per network.” They actually are “per subscription.”
  • Fix: When you update the VM Cloud Resource Provider, a duplicate Port setting is added leading ManagementOData to fail and return an error message that reads, “An item with the same key has already been added.”
  • Ability for the tenant user to add a network adapter to a VM while the VM is running. In UR 9.1 and previous versions, new NICs could be added only after the VM was stopped.
  • Ability for the WAP Admin to include a SQL Server into multiple availability groups for HA configurations.
  • Ability for the WAP Admin to include a server that’s running Microsoft SQL Server into multiple availability groups for HA configurations.
  • Ability for the WAP user to enable the “Always On” feature of WAP websites.

For VMM please see the “Known issues from previous update rollups” and do workarounds if some mentioned issues take place