Hi There,

Whilst working on a bare-metal build for a Hyper-V host (based on HP blades with iLO 3) today using SCVMM 2012 and Host Profiles I came across the following error;

An out of band operation (IPMI) for the BMC <FQDN> failed

The obvious first line of troubleshooting is to check the IP address of the iLO connection was working (and that we had typed it right). This checked out, so the next check was to make sure the account we are using to access iLO has the necessary permissions to the host, and to check that IPMI commands are being accepted by iLO. This checked out as well and left us stumped!

After some further troubleshooting, we decided to re-create the account we had access to in iLO. We were not using the default ‘Administrator’ account, rather another delegated account that had been created for us.

We deleted this account, and re-created it using the same username/password to be greeted with an error along the lines of the username we are selecting has over 16 characters and therefore cannot be used to send IPMI commands….. however can still be created…..hmmm!

So let’s try shortening the account name, which we did, then changed the run-as account in SCVMM, re-ran the job and as if by magic our hosts started to boot

Cheers
SteveH

Hi there,

The above message pops up from time to time when attempting to remotely administer a Hyper-V server from another machine, particularly if the machine you are attempting to access is in another domain or in a workgroup.

First things first, make sure all of the config is correct on the Hyper-V server itself to allow remote administration. Use the excellent HVRemote for that

What usually catches me out after that is the fact that Hyper-V manager is not expecting a FQDN, it is hostname/shortname ONLY! Use the hosts file if you are having DNS issues.

Cheers
SteveH

Hi There,

The February 2012 update to the VDI Smackdown Whitepaper has just been released, it’s a great read if you want to weigh up to the pros and cons of the various virtual desktop technologies…

The overall goal of the white paper is share information about:

• Application and Desktop Delivery Solutions
• Explain the different Desktop Virtualization concepts
• Explain the pros and cons of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
• Describe the different Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) vendors and solutions
• Compare the features of the various VDI solutions

Read more HERE!

Cheers,
SteveH

Whilst tidying up one of our VMM 2012 environments earlier I was having trouble removing a service template that had been created, the following error was appearing when I was hitting delete;

As far as I could see I had deleted any related service deployments and could see no services or VMs on any of the host clusters. I also tried removing the Service via the Powershell command; Remove-SCService

The fix was staring me in the face on the Service Template screen – if you highlight the template, and look in the ‘General Information’ section at the bottom you will see a ‘Services:    <Service Name>‘ which is a hyperlink. Clicking this took me to one of my Host Groups and the Service was hidden away in here.

I deleted this, and was then able to remove the Service Template

The following TechNet Wiki links contains a number of very useful tools for Hyper-V, some of my favourites;

• Core Configurator 2.0 – makes configuring Server Core or Hyper-V Server much easier
• Disk2VHD – for creating VHDs from physical disks – very useful for the new Host Profile feature in VMM 2012
• Wim2VHD – in a similar vein to the above, if you have already captured your Server image to a .WIM, this tool will convert it to a VHD
• nvspcrub – useful tool to remove virtual network configuration from the management partition

Many more tools can be found at the following LINK

Cheers
SteveH