• IT Systems Engineering

    Bypass WSUS to install Windows updates

    While trying to setup a Windows 2012 cluster (to be used by Hyper-V) I ran into an issue where the cluster validation tool failed. it said that the MPIO software versions were different on the nodes. Upon searching the net, I found the solution was to install all Windows updates. Unfortunately our WSUS server was not working properly. Every time I would run “Download and install Updates” manually on the Hyper-V Server 2012 (core) using the server configuration screen (no GUI) I would get a message that all updates are already installed. I had to bypass WSUS by running these commands: REG ADD “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU” /v UseWUServer /t REG_DWORD /d 0…

  • IT Systems Engineering

    Accounts for managing hosts in SCVMM 2012

    I just learnt (the hard way) the correct way to add Hyper-V hosts to SCVMM. You… should not use the service account used to run SCVMM admin service. should not use your own domain admin or admin level credentials. Instead you should… Create a VMM host management account in AD. Add that AD account to the local admin group on all your Hyper-V hosts. Add that AD account to your VMM as a “Run As Account”. Then while adding a new host to VMM, specify that run as account as the account to be used to add that hyper- host. Until I did it this way, I was having trouble…

  • IT Systems Engineering

    SC VMM does not see dynamic GPT volumes

    Ok so I found this one out the hard way…hit and trial No matter what I did, one volume on a Hyper-V 2012 server did not show up in my SC VMM. I finally figured it out. I had to delete and recreate that volume as a basic disk (not dynamic), which is by default anyway. ONLY then the VMM was able to see the volume. I hope this helps someone out there.

  • IT Systems Engineering

    Convert a Hyper-V 2012’s vhdx to VMware’s vmdk

    I have been searching for ways to convert a Hyper-V VM to VMware. I have not having good luck with this. We (at work) are not trying to migrate from Hyper-V to VMware… it is just that sometimes we have to send out one of our virtual servers to another datacenter who run VMware there. Of course, there is a simple way to install a client and do a P2V kind of conversion which spits out a VMDK created out of a running VM. I was not interested in that type of conversion. I had a VHDX, lets just convert it to VMDK!