Installing Highly Available System Centre 2012-Virtual Machine Manager

Due to the improvement and efficiency of virtualization technology and its unavoidable return of investment to the business, Virtual Machine Manager has become a critical part of the datacenter or private cloud infrastructure. At present, we see more and more VMM servers used as mission critical servers in customer environments by tying their workflow provisioning intelligent workload placement, rapid provisioning and integrating to orchestrator run book etc..

The Previous versions of VMM Server could be unavailable if it is crashed. The only workaround was to install VMM in highly Available Virtual Machine. Problem with this approach is that it doesn’t consider the issues that could occur due to corruption on the VMM service itself or problems with the operating system that the VMM is running on. If something goes wrong in these cases, the VMM service will be unavailable.

System Centre 2012 Virtual Machine Manager is cluster aware, deployment of SCVMM 2012 on windows failover cluster is very easy and straight forward. When you start the installation on an existing cluster node, the installation process will detect the underlying failover cluster service availability and prompt you for confirmation.

A detailed  Step by step guide for installing highly available System Centre 2012 Virtual Machine Manager Management server is available here:

Step by step guide for installing highly available System Centre 2012 Virtual Machine Manager server

Network Adapter Teaming in windows 8

The networking features in Windows 8 are exciting stuff. Microsoft has addressed a variety of redundancy and performance features with this release and overviewed them at build.

Windows 8 comes with native Network Adapter Teaming, which means you do not need to pre-install or configure any software provided by the network adapter vendor for the NIC Teaming. Now you can team two or more network adapters even if they are from different vendors and configure them as team members. You can expose the teamed network adapter to Virtual Switch Manager in Hyper-V and connect directly to workloads.

With this feature, we can now eliminate possible issue which we always encounter when use teaming for Hyper-V deployment

Network Adapter Teaming – Load Balancing Failover (LBFO)

We all spent a fair amount of time troubleshooting third party vendor network adapter teaming suites. Thankfully, those days will be the past, as Windows 8 now delivers an out of box network adapter teaming capability. The highlights are:

• It is manageable through both PowerShell and the GUI
• Supported on various NIC types, or even different NIC types      in the same team
• Up to 32 NICs
• Unlimited virtual interfaces
• Multiple teaming modes

How to configure it?

Let us start from the server manager interface Click on the Server Manager icon available by default on task bar

The Server Manager lists the servers, events, services, roles and features etc..

Right click on the server to initiate the network adaptor teaming configuration wizard.

NIC teaming windows opens with the available list of servers, their network adaptors and their teams if already configured earlier

Click on the TASKS in TEAMS and select New Team

Name your team and select the team members from the listed network adapters

Click on additional properties to configure Teaming mode and Load distribution mode.

Click Apply and OK, your team is ready.

Notice a nice little network adapter appeared under the Network connections.

You can use this teamed network adapter to configure hyper-V workloads.

From Hyper-V console, click on Virtual Switch Manager, create an External network and select Microsoft Network Adapter Multiplexer driver.