“The Update is Not Applicable to Your Computer” When Install KB3046101

  HPE 3PAR upgrading team usually sends a per-requisites before upgrading. One thing in the guide incorrect is the Windows 2012 required patch KB3046101.     You may see error below when you install the path on Windows 2012 server.    
The update is not applicable to your computer
      The reason is the version of mpio.sys and msdsm.sys on your server is higher than 6.3.9600.17809. Usually, because the server installed KB3121261 already. You can ignore KB3046101.

How To Migrate Parent Disk on Hyper-V 2012

If you are using Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 and “Differencing Disk” you may get trouble when you want to move whole VMs to another location due to “Parent Disk” migration is not so easy. Following is the steps to move parent disk on Hyper-V server.

Preparation

I assume you want to move bunch of virtual machines. First of all you need to get disk list of virtual machines. Following is a script to grab all parent and differencing disks on a Hyper-V server.

$VMs = Get-VM 
Foreach ($VM in $VMs)
{
  $VHDs = Get-VHD -Path $VM.harddrives.path
  foreach ($VHD in $VHDs)
  {
     [pscustomobject]@{
         Name = $VM.name
         VHDType = $VHD.VhdType
         VHD = $VHD.Path
         ParentVHD = $VHD.ParentPath
     }
  }
}

Save it to “Get-vhdParent.ps1”. Launch PowerShell by administrator right. Run following command to get parent disk table.

.Get-vhdParent.ps1 | format-table -autosize

Now you have disk list in hand.

Move parent disks to new location

Parent disk moving is simple. Just copy the parent disk to new location. I suggest make multiple copies if you have large number of virtual machines linked to a parent disk. The reason is if the parent disk failed, at lease it’s not impact to all linked virtual machines. You can also distribute the duplicated parent disks to multiple location to avoid single location failure.

Re-configure parent disks for virtual machine

To be safe, I suggest grab parent disk information again by following command:

Get-VHD -Path VHDPath

Replace “VHDPath” with real differencing disk path of the virtual machine.

The output shows what’s the linked parent disk. Then run the command below to reconfigure parent disk to new location.

Set-VHD -Path VHDPath -ParentPath ParentVHDPath

You should get nothing return if it’s successfully.

If you manage Hyper-V virtual machines by System Center Virtual Machine Manager. The new parent disk is reflected after you right click the virtual machine and do a “Refresh” in System Center Virtual Machine Manager console.

 

 

 

NetApp Management Package for vRealize Operation Manager 6

vRealize Operation Manager 6 (aka vROps) is new generation of vCenter Operation Manager. I started to use vCenter Operation Manager since version 1.0. I like the idea of self-learning and dynamic threshold. But the product only monitors virtualization layer. It would be perfect if it’s able to monitor under layer storage. In large vSphere environment, virtual machines share IO capacity of datastores. If few virtual machines running high disk IO it may lead to other virtual machines get performance degrading in same storage. Think about you have 100 datastores come from a NetApp filer, and 300 virtual machines running on its. One user says their virtual machine is slow but no workload from applications end. It hard to say where the latency comes from because multiple virtual machines may share same datastore, multiple LUNs share same aggregate, and maybe same physical disks. vCenter Operation Manager provided NetApp Adapter for 5.x few years ago. But the problem was it’s too hard to associate storage objects with vSphere datastore objects.

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How to find corresponded physical disk for Hyper-V CSV volumes

CSV (Cluster Shared Volume) is fundamental of Microsoft Hyper-V. You must have it to leverage Live Migration and High Availability features. But it’s very confuse when you want to reclaim CSV since CSV is using different name with physical disks. For example, CSV name usually is “Cluster Disk x”, path usually is “C:ClusterStorageVolumeX”. But real disk name is “Disk x” in Disk Manager. You have to very carefully when delete the disk.

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