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Windows Azure Pack Update Rollup 5

This morning Microsoft pushed out update KB3023209 out to the Updates channel. This update is meant for systems running Windows Azure Pack in their private cloud.

The full text of the update is as follows:

This update contains functionality fixes. Among them are: 1) Support for SQL Resource Governor in the SQL Server Resource Provider. 2) Admin support for disabling native Virtual Network Extension to allow for 3rd Party Network Providers. 3) Provide detail on VM Memory type, Memory Startup and Maximum values in the Tenant Portal. 4) Fix to the Get-MgmtSvcRelyingPartySettings PowerShell cmdlet. 5) Fix to the issue of failing to establish an RDC (Remote Desktop Connection) to VMs placed behind a NAT. 6) Fix to the “Attached Network” dialog in the Virtual Machines Extension where the network entries in the list were disabled. 7) Support for increasing capacity of SQL hosting server in WAP.

For clouds that also run Windows Azure Pack Web Sites v2, sorry there aren’t any updates on that for this rollup release.

As always when it comes to applying this update – You gotta bring down all of the machines that serve out Windows Azure Pack before installing the update – you don’t want your tenants messing up things while you’re applying updates.

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CentOS 6.6 Updates and Fixes for Hyper-V Guests

CentOS 6.6 was recently released. As expected, there are a few fixes and updates for Hyper-V guests.

The changes I can remember off the top of my head for Hyper-V guests are:

  • Updated KVP and VSS user-space daemons
  • CentOS 6.6 is now fully supports virtual NUMA topology presented by the host. In the past, if you have a guest that had processors and memory that spanned across more than 1 NUMA node, the guest would crash due to a bug in the kernel.
  • The hv_balloon driver should now not cause a constant 1.00 load average due to the way how the driver reported the memory pressure back to the host.

Unfortunately, the documentation says that there is experimental support for CentOS 6.6 running as a Generation 2 guest. The installer runs fine, but since there is no hyperv-keyboard driver included in the initramfs image of the installer. You will need to install CentOS 6.6 via automated means by using a kickstart file. Unfortunately, when you first boot into the system, you will notice the guest crashes with a kernel panic. This makes Generation 2 support with CentOS 6.6 somewhat pointless at this time.

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Ubuntu 14.04 Generation 2 VM Template Boot Issue Workaround

Recently Ubuntu 14.04 has native support for booting under a Hyper-V Generation 2 VM. Unfortunately, the VM will not boot if the VHD has been copied over to a new VM. This is a known issue and it has been reported on Ubuntu’s Launchpad bug reporting system by a Project Manager inside Microsoft who is responsible for making Linux run under Hyper-V.

Continue reading “Ubuntu 14.04 Generation 2 VM Template Boot Issue Workaround”

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Adding a New Linux Distribution on System Center VMM 2012 R2’s list of Operating Systems

For hosters who use Windows Azure Pack along with System Center VMM 2012 R2, they might find that sometimes they need to support a XYZ Linux distribution for their customers. However they’ll quickly find they can’t get that distribution to display correctly on the Azure Portal as the only option to choose is “Other Linux”. Here’s a SQL query that anybody can use to inject a custom Operating System into VMM’s database:

USE [VirtualManagerDB]
GO

INSERT INTO [dbo].[tbl_IL_OS]
([OSId]
,[Name]
,[Description]
,[Architecture]
,[OSFlags]
,[VMWareGuestId]
,[OSType])
VALUES
('EBAB54C0-A9FA-4A3F-A21C-94775B96A6E5' /* Generate UUID */
,'Debian GNU/Linux 6 (64-bit)' /* Limited to 64 Chars */
,'Debian GNU/Linux 6 (64-bit)' /* Longer description of Linux Distro */
,'amd64' /* Use x86 for i386, amd64 for x86_64 */
,'28' /* This remains constant */
,'otherLinux64Guest' /* This is meant for VMware, go lookup the VMX spec files for this value */
,'1') /* Leave this at one, that's what the other OSes looked like */
GO

If you installed VMM 2012 R2 with a different SQL database name, adjust the USE statement accordingly.