Michael Phillips Blog

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P2V fails at Copy Hard Disk

I have been trying to get a P2V of a production system to use in our DR plan.  I have limited opportunity to do this, because I am not allowed to impact performance during production hours for this system, and the definition of production hours is fairly broad.  I have been trying for a couple of months to get this figured out.

We have our regularly scheduled maintenance once a month on the third Thursday of the month.  This is pretty awesome in that we are at liberty (most months) to take everything down from 6PM until 6AM.  I look at it as giving the company an evening off.

So, that being tonight, I had it in my mind that I was going to beat the OAS boxes.  (Oracle Application Servers, part of our new JD Edwards ERP system.)  They are an interesting setup, because they are using Apache, which as great as it may be, isn’t something I have much experience with.  They have a loopback adapter for use with the load balancing setup that they are in.  The load balancing is performed using our Cisco switches, which as great as they are, I don’t know very much about.  All in all, they are pretty complicated to troubleshoot in this case, because there are so many pieces that I am not completely familiar with. 

Such is life…

Anyway,  after a lot of hunting and a lot of posting in forums, I found an event that actually led to a solution. I probably should have found this before, and maybe I did, but didn’t pay enough attention… 

This is the exact symptoms that I had, and the errors in the event log were there, but the machine that I am trying to convert is a Windows 2003 Server, not Windows XP:

The P2V process fails at 40% when you try to run the P2V process by using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 on a source computer that is running Windows XP

You use Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to run the Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) process on a source computer that is running Windows XP. However, the process fails at 40% complete, and the following error is logged in the event log on the computer that has System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 installed:

Type:		Warning
Date:		<Date>
Time:		<Time>
Event:		1706
Source:		Virtual Machine Manager
Category:	None
Computer:	<Computer Name>
Event Msg:	Job 7bfcd14a-884e-4a71-9984-3274622adeb7 (Physical-to-virtual conversion) failed to complete. 7bfcd14a-884e-4a71-9984-3274622adeb7 Physical-to-virtual conversion TaskFailed    

Additionally, you will find the following error logged in the event log on the source computer:

Type:		Error
Date:		<Date>
Time:		<Time>
Event:		15005
Source:		HTTP
Category:	None
Computer:	<Computer Name>
Event Msg:	Unable to bind to the underlying transport for 0.0.0.0:443. The IP Listen-Only list may contain a reference to an interface which may not exist on this machine.  The data field contains the error number.
Data:
 00 00 04 00 02 00 52 00 00 00 00 00 9D 3A 00 C0		 . . . . . . R . . . . . . . . À
 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00		 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 43 00 00 C0				 . . . . . . . . C . . À

The P2V process fails at 40% when you try to run the P2V process by using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 on a source computer that is running Windows XP

Hyper-V certificate expiration and resolution

If you see this:

‘VMName’ failed to initialize.
Could not initialize machine remoting system. Error: ‘Unspecified error’ (0×80004005).
Could not find a usable certificate. Error: ‘Unspecified error’ (0×80004005).

Then this could be your answer:

Symptoms and resolution:

§ You may be unable to start or connect to virtual machines running on Windows Server 2008 or Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008. This occurs when connecting using vmconnect. Connections made using remote desktop won’t be affected.  

§ KB Article 967902 has been created that details the symptoms and resolution.  This KB article provides a direct link to download the quickfix to resolve this error.

Important Notes:

§ Though this error may occur, the Hyper-V service will continue to operate.   Neither the Hyper-V host nor the running virtual machines will go offline.

§ It is not expected that this issue can be exploited for malicious purposes.

§ Customers running Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V beta won’t experience this error.

That last line it my favorite…

I guess we should be running the beta in production…  and what’s with the ‘Unspecified error’?  

Windows Server Division WebLog : Hyper-V certificate expiration and resolution

Remove DPM agent from the DPM agent console

I blogged about this last year, but when I moved my blog, I lost part of the post (the picture) so I just deleted the post.  Then I noticed that Google is still sending people here to find the answer, so…

If you have DPM Protected Computer that goes away before you uninstall the agent, it isn’t obvious how you get the agent removed from the console.  Or at least it wasn’t immediately obvious to me.

1. In the Management/Agents tab, right click on the agent (it will have a red x and “Unavailable” in the Agent Status column) and select Uninstall…
2. Verify your list of agents (you can select more than one)
3. Click on “Uninstall Agents”
4. Enter the appropriate credentials.  This must be an account that has permissions to remove the agent from the DPM server, even though the Protected computer doesn’t exist, it still has to be a valid account.
5. Select the “Manually restart the selected servers later” radio button
6. Click ok.

So far, that isn’t any different than any other client uninstall.   At this point, you will have the option to close the window, and go on about your business.  And if the protected computer was still available, that would be perfectly fine to do.  But since the protected computer isn’t still available, you have to wait for the error to pop up.  First you will see that the uninstall failed and then you get this message:

Basically, it says, I couldn’t find that computer to remove the agent, you want me to just forget that it existed?  You click on “Yes” and then the entry for that computer is removed from the DPM database.  Now wasn’t that obvious?

New Features in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2

Of the new features coming in the R2 versions of Windows Server 2008 and SCVMM, I think these two are the obvious winners:

Support for Live Migration: With Windows 2008 R2 adding support for Live migration, it’s now added as a new migration option in VMM R2. Live migration requires the source and destination host to be part of a failover cluster and that the VM is on a shared storage. Live migration means that there is no user perceived downtime; since the VM’s memory pages are being transferred, the hosts’ processors need to be the same (manufacturer and processor architecture). Our competition claims that Vmotion doesn’t require clustering but this only works for planned downtime and not for unplanned downtime. By combining Live migration and clustering, Hyper-V addresses both planned and unplanned downtime.

Multiple VMs per LUN: VMM 2008 didn’t allow placing multiple VMs per LUN even though Hyper-V allowed it and the reason was that the LUN ownership was on a per host basis. This meant that migrating any VM on that shared LUN would result in all other VMs being migrated as well which can result in a confusing user experience (I’ve blogged about this at length). With CSV (Clustered Shared Volumes) in Windows 2008 R2, a single LUN is accessible by all hosts within a cluster. This enables a VM that’s on a shared LUN to be migrated without affecting other VMs on that LUN. As a result, with VMM R2, we’ll allow multiple VMs to be placed on the same LUN if CSV is enabled on the cluster.

http://blogs.technet.com/rakeshm/archive/2009/03/16/scvmm-2008-r2-beta-is-available-now.aspx

That is from the beta release announcement for SCVMM.  I have downloaded the beta, but haven’t had time lately to get it setup.  I am hoping to work on that this coming week… 

HyperV Integration Services: Fatal error during installation

I managed to convince the “powers that be” that we didn’t need to have a dual quad-core server with the capacity for 32GB of RAM to and connectivity to our SAN sitting around doing nothing until they occasionally use it for upgrade testing…  So I did a P2V (Physical to Virtual conversion) and shut down the physical machine.  But when I tried to install the Integration components…  I got “An error has occurred: Fatal error during installation.”  A quick google gave me the below post, and believe it or not.. it worked.  (I didn’t reboot before I installed.)

HyperV Integration Services: Fatal error during installation

Problem:
Installing Integration Services on HyperV I got the following problem:
"An error has occured: Fatal error during installation."
Solution:
Delete (or rename) two file on the guest machine
C:\WINDOWS\system32\DRIVERS\wdf01000.sys
C:\WINDOWS\system32\DRIVERS\wdfldr.sys
Reboot and reinstall the integration services.

Vittorio Pavesi: HyperV Integration Services: Fatal error during installation

Replica disk threshold exceeded, or Recovery Point Volume threshold exceeded

Great!   Now what?

Well, if you have a new DPM server and not a lot of protection groups created, and you haven’t been protecting anything much, you can just click on the link in the warning message that says “Allocate more disk space for replica…”  That pulls up a pretty window that looks like the one below:

So you go ahead an make the number in the “Replica Volume” field a little bigger, hit ok and go on about your business.  Unless..

Sometimes you may need to go and use DISKPART to manually add space to the volume.  If you try the above method, and you get a failed message instead of success, you are either out of disk space, or it could be that you have more than one disk on your DPM server and one of the disks becomes full.  In order to extend the volume onto another disk, you have to use DISKPART.  DPM (at this version) won’t do it for you.

1. Open a command prompt (run as administrator if you are using a 2008 Server for your DPM server) and type “diskpart”. 
2. Type “List Volume” at the prompt.
3. Right click and “select all” then enter to copy the output to the clipboard
4. Paste it in notepad so you can do a search and search for the Data Source
   1. You should see a line similar to this:

      Volume 534       DPM-Prolo  NTFS   Simple      2050 MB  Healthy
        C:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Volumes\Replica\SQL2.domain.com\ SqlServerWriter\PrologPilot\
      Volume 535       DPM-Prolo  NTFS   Simple      2050 MB  Healthy
        C:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Volumes\DiffArea\SQL2.domain.com\ SqlServerWriter\PrologPilot\
      Volume 536       DPM-Non VSS  NTFS   Simple      1540 MB  Healthy
        C:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Volumes\Replica\quick1.domain.com\Non VSS Datasource Writer\Computer\SystemState\SystemState

   1. The volume number  comes before what it is describing and there are 2 for each protected object.  A Replica volume and a DiffArea.  The replica volume is a copy of the data as it is on the protected member.  The DiffArea is where the recovery points are stored.  The “Non VSS Datasource Writer” is system state in the example.
5. At the DISKPART> prompt type “select volume” and the volume number i.e. : select volume 534
6. If you want to see the details about the disk, you can type detail volume and it gives an output similar to:
   

   DISKPART> detail volume

     Disk ###  Status      Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
     ——–  ———-  ——-  ——-  —  —
   * Disk 2    Online      2560 GB   356 GB   *    *

   Read-only              : No
   Hidden                 : No
   No Default Drive Letter: Yes
   Shadow Copy            : No
   Dismounted             : No
   BitLocker Encrypted    : No

   Volume Capacity        : 1030 MB
   Volume Free Space      :  186 MB

7. In order to increase the space for the Replica volume you would type: EXTEND SIZE=1024 DISK=2.  This would extend the selected volume by 1 GB (1024 MB) on DISK 2. 
8. Now you have to go back in and tell DPM that you extended the volume.  (I believe it may figure it out on its own eventually, but I prefer to get the warning cleared up sooner rather than later, so I go update DPM.

Note:  Each time you use DISKPART, you are likely to see different numbers for the volumes.  I haven’t looked into what that is, but I do know that the system volume is always one of the last in the list.  For that reason I recommend that you always view detail volume after you select it, to make sure you are seeing the volume you intend to work with.

The stub received bad data – DPM backup of a SQL DB

My DPM Server:
Server 2008 x64
DPM 2007 SP1
SQL 2005 SP3 (local to DPM)

Protecting:
Server 2003 SP2 x64
SQL 2005 SP3

I have about 30 databases being backed up from the one client machine.  All of them backup just fine except one.  Every time I try to do a synchronization or a full backup I get the following error:

Triggering synchronization on *myserver\mydatabase* failed: Error 46: DPM failed to perform the operation because too many objects have been selected. Select fewer objects and then retry this operation.

Error details: The stub received bad data (0x800706F7)

Recommended action: Select fewer objects. 1) If you are trying to protect a large number of data sources on a volume, consider protecting the whole volume instead of individual data sources. 2)If you are trying to recover a large number of folders or files from a volume, consider recovering the parent folder, or divide the recovery into multiple operations.

This happens even if I just select the one database.  All the other databases backup correctly.

After posting in the news group, I got a question from a Microsoft person whether full text indexing was enabled, and if so how many catalogs.  Upon investigation, it appears that this is one of the only databases that i have that has full text indexing enabled.  It has 32 indexes. 

So with the suggestion of a colleague, I did a rebuild of the indexes:

1. In SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) expand the database/Storage/Full Text Catalogs
2. Right click on the Full Text Catalogs folder and select Rebuild All

Then I went back to my DPM server, to the protection group and selected the database in question.  I did a “Create recovery point – Disk”, “Create a recovery point by using express full backup”.

That worked, so maybe that means the problem is fixed…

Error installing update for Microsoft Forefront

I have a server that is Server 2008 x64.  It has the client for Microsoft Forefront Client Security installed.  It has been showing that it needed to update the client, but every time I told it to run, it would fail.

I found this in the Application log:

Application ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft Forefront\Client Security\Client\Antimalware\MSASCui.exe’ (pid 3304) cannot be restarted – Application SID does not match Conductor SID..

And this in the update history:

Update for Microsoft Forefront Client Security (KB956280)
Installation date: ‎3/‎25/‎2009 2:23 PM
Installation status: Failed
Error details: Code 643
Update type: Important
This patch  updates the Microsoft Forefront Client Security Anti-Malware Agent.

I started to do a little bit of searching on the “Application SID does not match Conductor SID..” and saw that it comes from the restart manager.  With that nugget of info, I went and stopped all the Forefront services, and ran the update again:

Update for Microsoft Forefront Client Security (KB956280)
Installation date: ‎3/‎25/‎2009 2:33 PM
Installation status: Successful
Update type: Important
This patch  updates the Microsoft Forefront Client Security Anti-Malware Agent.

Preinstall DPM Client

If you deploy servers from an image, and you would like to install DPM prior to imaging, you can’t just use the install option from the DPM server.  You CAN install the agent manually, and then configure it later. 

1. Copy the latest agent files from C:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Agents\RA and put them somewhere you can get to them. 
2. Run the DPMAgentInstaller from the appropriate directory,  amd64\1033 or i386\1033 depending on if you have a x64 or x86 system.
3. On the Production server (the machine you want to protect) run %PROGRAMFILES%Microsoft data protection manager\dpm\bin\setdpmserver -dpmservername <DPM server name>
4. On the DPM server, open the DPM Management Shell (the PowerShell interface for DPM) and run attach-productionserver.ps1.  This will ask you for the DPMServer, PSName (the production machine that you want to protect), UserName (an administrator on the client machine), Password, and Domain.
5. Refresh the view in the DPM administrator console.

You should see your production servers listed in the Managemt\Agents view.