Update Rollup 6 for System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager

Features that are added in this update rollup

• Add Azure Subscription feature: By using the Add Azure Subscription feature in Update Rollup 6, administrators of Virtual Machine Manager can add Microsoft Azure subscriptions to VMM and perform basic actions on Azure instances in those subscriptions. The feature is included in Virtual Machine Manager in Update Rollup 6 for System Center 2012 R2. For each Azure subscription that you add, you can use a console to see all role instances in all deployment groups in that subscription.
  
  What you can do with this feature
  
  If you already manage your on-premises virtual machines in Virtual Machine Manager, you can use this feature to perform some very basic actions on Azure instances without leaving the VMM console. For example, you can do the following:
  

  • Add or remove one or more Azure subscriptions by using the VMM console.

  • See a list view of details and statuses of all role instances in all deployments in that subscription.

  • Manually update the list of instances.

  • Perform the following basic actions on the instances:
    

    • Start

    • Stop

    • Shutdown

    • Restart

    • Connect through RDP

  For more information, see Adding an Azure subscription in VMM in System Center 2012 R2 with Update Rollup 6.

• Improved E2A ASR protection scenario: By having Update Rollup 6 in your Virtual Machine Manager environment, it's easier to discover and correct an issue that sometimes occurs when you configure Azure Site Recovery (ASR) protection. This issue occurs when you want to add ASR protection for on-premises virtual machines, and you have the following virtual machine properties:
  

  • No specified operating system version

  • No indication of which disk contains the operating system for the virtual machine

  These properties must be specified because they are required by Azure Site Recovery. In Update Rollup 6, a clearer set of error messages are displayed in VMM in the Jobs pane if you try to configure a virtual machine that does not meet the requirements.
  
  For information about ASR requirements, see ASR E2A Protection Scenario Improvement.

• Option to use Generation 2 VMs in Services and VMRoles: In Update Rollup 6, VMM now provides support for Generation 2 virtual machines for services and VM Roles. By using this feature, you can deploy multi-tier services and choose the virtual machine generation for individual tiers. Users can service these service instances through conventional and image-based servicing.
  
  For more information, see Understanding Generation 1 and Generation 2 Virtual Machines in VMM.

• Total Networking Usage Exposure rules in Management Pack: This change introduces two rules that target Hyper-V Hosts:
  

  • Total Incoming VNic Network traffic collection rule

  • Total Outgoing VNic Network traffic collection rule

  These rules measure the total incoming and total outgoing traffic in Kilo Bytes per VNic per virtual machine in the following method:
  
  For each VM:
  

  1. Enable Hyper-V Metering if it is not enabled.

  2. Run Measure-VM.

  3. Collect metering data for every remote address of "0.0.0.0/0" or "::/0" per VNic.

  By default, these rules run every hour. Users may opt to override this setting by overriding the IntervalSeconds property. These rules should not be run more frequently than every five minutes (300 seconds).
  
  Behavior in previous versions: VMM did not measure data consumption. It measured only throughput.

• Option to overcommit Cloud and Host Group capacity for Replica VMs: System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager lets you put your replica virtual machines on a preconfigured cloud or host group if they fit within your capacity settings. Until now, VMM assumed that all the resources that were allocated to replica VMs were in use. Therefore, VMM did not allow you to put any replica virtual machine on a cloud or host group if that would raise the aggregate load of all the replica VMs beyond the cloud or host group capacity.
  
  Although this behavior made sure that all the replica VMs could simultaneously start, it could cause a non-optimal use of replica clouds and host groups. This would occur if you (an Enterprise or Hoster) tried to put additional VMs within a cloud or a host group. That is, if you overcommited the replica cloud or host group. In Update Rollup 6, you can overcommit clouds and host groups in your VMM environment by configuring the following registry key on the VMM Server:
  

  Registry location:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager Server\Settings\Placement
  DWORD name: IgnoreMemoryForStoppedReplicaVM
  DWORD value: 1
  Note If the Placement subkey does not exist, create it.
  
  For more information, see Option to overcommit Cloud and HG for Replica VMs.

• Support for VMWare VCenter 5.5 basic scenarios.
  
  Update Rollup 6 introduces the following support scenarios:
  

  • Add VCenter 5.5 to VMM 2012 R2 UR6 management

  • Add ESX Host with 5.5 version and bring under management

  • Create VMWare VM template and deploy VMs with the template

  • Create templates with basic networking (these include domain-joined scenarios), and deploy virtual machines

  • Perform various VM lifecycle operations (for example, start, stop, shut down, repair, refresh, and checkpoint on a virtual machine).

  • Connect to virtual machine by using console, and verify accessibility

  • Deprovision virtual machines

  • Create a resource pool, and bring the resource pool under VMM management

  These are limited scenarios. However, they represent the first and most important step toward supporting newer versions of VCenter. We continue to build on our supportability matrix for VMWare VCenter and will provide updates to address this in future rollup packages.

Issues that are fixed in this update rollup

• Issue 1
  
  An 801 error occurs when VMM objects are removed. VMM sometimes encounters an issue in which a VMM object such as a virtual machine cannot be removed either from the UI or Windows Powershell because some of its child objects are missing in the database. This frequently causes users to search for remedial scripts to remove the affected objects. In Update Rollup 6, VMM has improved three Powershell cmdlets to minimize 801-related errors. These cmdlets are Remove-SCServiceTemplate, Remove-SCLibraryServer, and Remove-SCLibraryShare. Users do not have to use the –Force flag together with these cmdlets in order to avoid 801 errors. The cmdlets provide the ability to resolve dependencies that lead to 801 errors.
  

• Issue 2
  
  The VMM service crashes and generates an access violation error in System.Xml when it respons to an Integration Services event.
  

• Issue 3
  
  Critical Exception in the WCF error handler -- ObjectDisposedException -- Microsoft.VirtualManager.Engine.Remoting.ClientConnection.HandleError. When VMM shuts down the WCF service host, it is calling Abort which can cause any unprocessed messages to be ungracefully terminated, and this can result in ObjectDisposedExceptions being thrown. VMM's top-level WCF error handler sees these exceptions before the process has terminated and reports them as critical exceptions. So here VMM reports harmless errors as critical errors possibly adding to the user confusion.
  

• Issue 4
  
  Option for MAC Address greyed out in UI when vnic is not connected. This prevents users from marking the nic as static. After you upgrade to VMM in System Center 2012 R2, customer cannot choose the option of Static Mac Address in the VM templates he creates, if the virtual machine is not connected to a network. The MAC Address and IP options are greyed out when the virtual machine is “not connected”. Therefore, he cannot assign a static MAC Address to the virtual machine before the deployment.
  

• Issue 5
  
  Vvirtual machine customization can fail and generate a critical exception when Hyper-V does not return a floppy drive object. During customization of a virtual machine, there is a chance that Hyper-V will return the Floppy Drive object as null and VMM will try to add a drive. However, adding the floppy drive is not implemented at Hyper-V. This throws an exception that causes job failure and leaves the virtual machine in creation failed state. The user can repair the virtual machine to be functional. This may occur if the Floppy Drive Config (on the remote share) is not available to Hyper-V or if Hyper-V is busy or stressed.
  

• Issue 6
  
  Cannot deploy VMs with static IP when multiple IP Pools for one VM Subnet are configured. Customer tries to create a virtual machine by using a Template which has static IP settings. If there are multiple IP pools in a Subnet and customer provides an IP address from a different pool than the default one (that is, the auto-populated pool that is shown in the UI), then the VM Wizard finishes without any errors but the virtual machine creation fails and returns an "IP Address Out of range" error.
  

• Issue 7
  
  VmmService crash occurs during handling of removed virtual machine Subnets on IP change events sent by Hyper-v. In a NVGRE setup, if there is an event sent by Hyper-V for IP Change but the VM Subnet no longer exists in VMM, it causes a VMM service crash.
  

• Issue 8
  
  VMS are reported missing as the VmMovedRefresherEvent is not received. When a virtual machine move event occurs while a host is not in Eventing mode and the virtual machine is in migration state and when the event refresher hooks up there might be a window where no one is listening and the update operation right before listening mode does not receive the change. Therefore VMM will not receive these changes until the next Full Refresher which can be up to 24 hours.
  
  To make sure that such missed events are synced through the light virtual machine refresher when in Eventing mode, you can create and configure the following registry key to run the light virtual machine refresher at regular intervals. This refresher will run in addition to any event-based refreshers.
  

  Registry location:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager Server\Settings
  Registry key:
  VMPropertiesEventAssitedUpdateInterval
  
  Registry type: DWORD
  
  Min value: 0 seconds
  
  Max Value: 20 days

  Values have to be specified in seconds.
  DWORD name: VMPropertiesEventAssitedUpdateInterval
  
  DWORD value:value_in_seconds
  
  Note The value_in_seconds placeholder can be a value of 0 seconds to 20 days (also in seconds).
  

• Issue 9
  
  Require explicit flags to indicate a missing virtual machine or a Service virtual machine removal during Remove-Host to the user. Currently, VMM does not check for the existence of VMs on host while removing host from VMM. A host can contain Service virtual machines, virtual machines that are deployed to the cloud, virtual machines that have custom properties that are defined for them. If a user accidentally removes such a host, all these associations are broken. This fix avoids such scenarios by prompting users for a confirmation message before such hosts are actually removed from VMM.
  

• Issue 10
  
  If you have a Logical Network that has multiple network sites, and the network sites are visible to the host network adapter, PAs from those different network sites will be allocated and the routing information must be set also. (Network sites are sometimes called "logical network definitions.") In a multiple host scenario with VM1 on Host1 being connected to PA1, there is a case if a VM2 is connected to an hnv LN and has a PA1 for NetwkSite1 and then it is disconnected and later reconnected and has a PA2 for NetwkSite2 (randomly or because of PA exhaustion), then for some time, we might not populate the PA routing information between NetwkSite1 and NetwkSite2. This occurs because of the way that the internal route representation is keyed for insertion in a hash table.
  

• Issue 11
  
  When a host is refreshed, it establishes a WinRM network connection (to each host refreshed) that constantly streams data.
  

• Issue 12
  
  When multiple host virtual network adapters are created, random failures are observed. When customers create multiple virtual network adapters in one shot as part of a logical switch, one or more virtual network adapter IP configuration may fail.
  

• Issue 13
  
  User hits a duplicate key insertion in HostWSManGetter.UpdateRASDCache when doing a host update.
  

• Issue 14
  
  When the user tries to clone a virtual machine with checkpoints, after the cloning operation is complete, VMM incorrectly recognizes the newly created clone virtual machine as original virtual machine, and incorrectly infers that the virtual machine has migrated. It then tries to handle this change. Therefore, an additional virtual machine on another host with 'missing' state is created. VMM thinks that the virtual machine is using a different host, and this virtual machine is not visible to TFS until the next virtual machine update.
  

• Issue 15
  
  When VSEM provider is upgraded, the provider's capability to receive notifications is not indicated to the notification engine.
  

• Issue 16
  
  Networking placement crashes during dynamic host optimization. Some placement operations were supposed to be run as task. When it is executed in refresher task, context is null. This causes a placement crash.
  

• Issue 17
  
  When Delegated Administrators start the VMM console it takes 4+ minutes to open the VMM console. In large environments VMM console start is delayed for Delegated Administrators when it is compared to Administrators.
  

• Issue 18
  
  Storage provider update fails after replacing disk on sofs.
  

• Issue 19
  
  VMM cannot update replica/primary virtual machine without ASR, also Migration of Recovery VM in IR Pending state does not perform live migration.
  

• Issue 20
  
  When a virtual machine is deleted, the checkpoints are merged before being deleted. When the user tries to delete a virtual machine that has checkpoints, the deletion takes a long time (up to an hour) to finish.
  

• Issue 21
  
  A Run DO operation sometimes receives a critical exception: DBCorruptionException.
  

• Issue 22
  
  Some users use large VIPAddress Sets instead of IP Ranges to make it easier to add/remove individual IPs. VMM Management Pack schema currently limits this field to 256 chars (default). However, the users may have values ~500 characters long. And therefore Discovery was breaking VMM-OM integration because of an unexpected exception from SCOM.
  

• Issue 23
  
  Target RG and target LUNs are not associated after enableRG task if the RG/LUNs are precreated.
  

• Issue 24
  
  Have to update MAC Address entries for an F5 Gateway device when it fails and is replaced. If an F5 Device is RMA'd and replaced with a new device with a new MAC address, VMM does not have a way to update the MAC address for the new device.
  

• Issue 25
  
  Let user stamping on replica virtual machine to let you stamp user identity. Users have to update UserRole and Owner attributes on their ReplicaVMs but currently any operation on the replica virtual machine is blocked. So, they cannot update these two parameters on Replica VMs.
  

• Issue 26
  
  Registerred SMB share is not displaying as target path option when you deploy a new HA virtual machineto a cluster.
  

• Issue 27
  
  Critical Exception in the Storage Refresher when discovering the replication service -- ArgumentNullException -- SetCustomOptions.
  

• Issue 28
  
  During the Host refresher VMM queries the team Information (switch team Or LBFO team). Whereas querying switch teams VMM hits the WSMan exception which causes the vswitch to disappear from the console.
  

• Issue 29
  
  HTTPS protocol is not supported in Probe, then VMM cannot created monitor rule to monitor HTTPS site. VMM supports HTTP and HTTPs in the LB port configuration section but HTTPS is not supported in the LB probe protocol section.
  

• Issue 30
  
  Resource owner (SSU User) not authorized to access 'GrantedTo' list of a resource and therefore not able to see who all have acess to the resource. When the user granting access is also a self-service user, then they cannot see the changes they have made until they restart the console. An admin user can see the change, but for a self-service user, the GrantedToList continues to return cached results, until they restart the console.
  

• Issue 31
  
  Unable to move parent disks that have the built-in migration process of VMM. User has several hundreds of VMs, with all diff disks pointing to a single parent. Moving all these VMs to a new storage solution is being blocked by VMM. For diff disks, if any ancestor disk in the hierarchy (parent/child relation) is shared by another diff disk, the storage migration of the diff disk is blocked by VMM. However, it is enabled through Hyper-V Manager.
  

• Issue 32
  
  Field expectedDSColumn throws critical exception while tracing the message for columns mismatch causing Server crash when it runs get-scvmhost. After the Server DB is updated to Threshold, R2 server cannot work with it in certain cases. This codepath is used by some networking objects and ADHC objects.
  

• Issue 33
  
  When you scale out an existing service template, duplicate Hyper-V virtual machines that have the same name are created on VMM in System Center 2012 R2 Update Rollup 5.
  

• Issue 34
  
  If your guest virtual machines have Windows security update 3035131 or 3031432 installed, the VMM guest agent does not run Generic Command Execution (GCE) scripts that are requested by VMM as part of VM deployment. This may cause failure in multiple scenarios in which you use GCE scripts for deployment and servicing. For example, when you try to service a VMM Service Template through GCE scripts, error code 22029 is returned.
  
  Note After you install Update Rollup 6 (or later update rollups) for System Center Virtual Machine Manger 2012 R2, you now have to grant Logon as batch job rights to the specified Run As account. Without these rights, the guest agent cannot run the GCE scripts through a Run As account.
  

• Issue 35
  
  Live migration of the virtual machine fails when you use clustered storage space as CSV and the virtual machine storage is located on CSV. Hyper-V Cluster Live Migration does not work after VMM in System Center 2012 R2 Update Rollup 5.
  

• Issue 36
  
  Base disk placement should rotate between valid placement shares.
  

• Issue 37
  
  The VMM Console may use an existing Release string during service template copy. Sometimes, users cannot copy a service template by using the "Copy" command for a service template. Reason is that Administrator console generates an already existing string for the release.
  

• Issue 38
  
  The Capacity Overview Tile is missing in VMM in System Center 2012 R2. In VMM in System Center 2012 SP1, under the VMs and services pane, when you select a host and then click overview on the top menu, the console provides Summary and Capacity information about the selected host. The details about Processor cores, memory (GB) and Storage (GB) became unavailable in System Center 2012 R2.
  

• Issue 39
  
  VMM Service Crashing because of duplicate VSID. In rare cases (synchronization/race-condition and random number collision), different HNV virtual machine subnets can obtain the same VMSubnetIdentifier (a.k.a VSID). This leads to unexpected behavior when you use these HNV virtual machine subnets. For example, for VMs connected to this subnet, the VMs may not obtain the expected connectivity and will be unable to talk to VMs on the same subnet. Or when their IP address changes it will cause VMM Service crash.
  

• Issue 40
  
  Deploying a virtual machine behind a Load Balancer causes a Critical Excepion on Placement:
  

  Microsoft.VirtualManager.Engine.Placement.Conversion.HostConversionHelper.GetLoadBalancerAddressPoolResources

• Issue 41
  
  Start Page that was introduced in Update Rollup 5, is removed in Update Rollup 6.
  

• Issue 42
  
  A virtual machine is not associated with a replication group and could not be moved to a location that is protected by replication group.
  

• Issue 43
  
  Guest IP on HNV Network is not marked as Dynamic/DedicatedGuestIP even if settings are enabled for it. CA Failover broken. For any IP address added/moved in a virtual machine connected to NVGRE Network (HNV Guest Cluster/Guest IP Failover scenario), the IP address is *not* marked as dynamic (type = DedicatedGuestIP in VMM) even if the virtual machine has the settings EnableGuestIPNetworkVirtualizationUpdates=true. When the first time that the IP address is added/moved it will work, but later failovers of the IP (moving from one VM to other) will not be detected automatically. Therefore, the IP address will not be reachable and the VM will lose connectivity.
  

• Issue 44
  
  Older embedded storage provider from Hitachi integration broken with UR5. The storage provider cannot be refreshed. This prevents management of the provider.
  

• Issue 45
  
  The VMM client crashes when you set power optimization time range.
  

• Issue 46
  
  A race condition exists in the disposal of the WnvEventEntrySubscriptionObserver when the connection of the host fails.
  

• Issue 47
  
  CentOS 7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 fail to set network interface configuration when DHCP is used.
  
  This applies to all CentOS 7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 virtual machines that are configured to use DHCP by System Center Virtual Machine Manager. CentOS 7 and RHEL 7 servers that used DHCP would encounter absent network configuration data for each ethernet interface that is used by the Linux server. This issue occurs because CentOS 7 and RHEL 7 do not have the Linux tool ifconfig installed by default, unlike previous iterations. The configuration scripts for DHCP networking were updated to use the ip tool instead of ifconfig if the ip tool is installed.

How to obtain and install Update Rollup 6 for System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager