Error 2931 The connection to the VMM agent on the virtualization server was lost

Windows Server 2012, the biggest competitor of VMware vSphere. There are adequate reason to use Hyper-V 2012 instead of vSphere 5.x, but it’s still very hard to for newbie, we spend more than 30 hours to try figure out how to create cluster on SCVMM 2012 SP1, the software is easy to install, but hard to configure. I saw “failed” everywhere, it’s not a mature product in my view.

We installed Windows Server 2012 data center edition on HP BL460, storage is NetApp FAS2240 (Maybe wrong, I’m not storage guy). We got following error message when we created Hyper-V Cluster on SCVMM2012 SP1.

Error (2931)
VMM is unable to complete the request. The connection to the VMM agent on the virtualization server (xxx) was lost.
Unknown error (0x80338029)

Recommended Action
Ensure that the Windows Remote Management (WS-Management) service and the VMM agent are installed and running and that a firewall is not blocking HTTPS traffic.

This can also happen due to DNS issues. Try and see if the server (dcahyv04.amat.com) is reachable over the network and can be looked up in DNS. You can ping the virtualization server from VMM management server and make sure that the IP address returned matches the IP address locally obtained from the virtualization server.

If the error still persists, restart the virtualization server, and then try the operation again.

SCVMM job failed on Mounts storage disk on xxxx.

Initially I thought that’s something wrong with services, I checked the mentioned Windows Remote Management service, but it’s up and running. Then I noticed WINS servers was not set, but still no lucky.

Why the job always failed on mount storage? Maybe something related to disk operation? SCVMM server is remote server, it must be operates disk remotely, so I tried connect Hyper-V server by Computer Management tool remotely, it show me RPC is unavailable when I click Disk Management node. Aha…firewall problem, that’s because SCVMM server disabled firewall, but Hyper-V server enabled, the RPC ports was blocked by client side.

Sometimes cluster creating can be successful after I disabled firewall, but still Hyper-V server looks like hard to mount storage.

Since SCVMM mount/unmount storage on each Hyper-V hosts during cluster creating, it takes very long time to mount storage before the job failed, we suspected that’s something related to storage, finally, we installed NetApp Host Utilities 6.0.1 and NTAP MPIO 4.0.1 to solved the problem.

To summarize, you must enable remote management for Hyper-V host, such as Remote Register service…etc, allows required ports in Windows firewall and storage MPIO plugin should be installed as well. BTW, you should disable UAC on Windows Server 2012, it’s different with Windows Server 2008, check http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/13953.windows-server-2012-deactivating-uac.aspx.

That’s just first step to make Hyper-V successful. 🙂