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whs2011 to server2012 essentials


sspell

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Ok loved the whs 2011 running in vm on hyper v 2012r2 core. Now thinking of moving on to 2012r2 essentials as vm on the core price has come down some. I have a 2 cpu supermicro motherboard and want more memory and cpu processors than 2011 allows. So I have set the 2012 up as a gen2 and all is running great. 

 

 Here's the problem when I add any hard drive from drive pool to the new vm server 2012er2 from whs2011 the new server won't start. Ironically I can add the drives while 2012er2 is running soon as a reboot it won't start again. It will start with a drive added that was not part of the pool from 2011. The new vm server drive is set to gpt and dedicated to that vm and not mbr as all the other drives don't know if that is an issue. Would like to move on to all gpt. Is their some reason the drivepool disc will not load to 2012er2?  I'm only running one vm at a time. The disc are installed as physical drives passed thru. I have tried removing them from 2011 and that don't work either while it is shut down it really shouldn't matter anyway. Put the disc back into whs2011 and working fine. Any help appreciated hate to have to transfer all the data and reformat but that is looking like what I may have to do.

 

 Also should I bare metal the server 2012 essentials is another question? I like the versatility of the server running in vm that is my preference. Bare metal running just the hyper-v core is so stable ever minding the ease of rebuilding server software in vm makes life simple. Now just to get 2012er2 up and running it looks promising except this disc migration problem. I could bare metal 2012er2 and run the whs2011 virtually this is not really what I want. Your suggestions please.

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Well seem to have fixed the problem nothing to do with drive pool at all. Had a boot file in the first order "bootmgfw.efi" moved the hard drive with the 2012er2.vhdx up to the top in boot order now boots fine with all drives. Has anyone had a problem with the bootmgfw.efi is it needed should this be edited? Something is amiss with that boot file. Is this file for enabling booting from usb? hmmm!

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Thought I fixed it added drive to new pool in 2012 now won't boot again. Don't know what's up tried everything I know. this drive had no previous pool and after adding to the new drivepool server won't boot. Is there a problem with gen2 and drivepool?

 

 Created a new server2012 vm gen1 see how that goes.

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I had a similar problem with a gen2 machine and never could get it figured out. No problems however with a gen1 machine. In my case it definatley wasn't drive pool. Even without drive pool installed it did this. If you add the drive while machine is running it works fine, but first time you reboot it gets stuck in some sort of loop and keeps rebooting it self.

 

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Oh and it does this with win 8.x VMs as well.

 

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Yea so I'm not the only one that's encouraging. I have the gen1 vm server up and running all is great performs as expected. Added all the processors and server2012er2 nice much faster now than whs2011 happy so far.

 

Question what's up with gen2 and adding drives anyone have a working system and knowledge of what is happening here with the gen2?

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That's definitely odd.

 

I'm assuming that the boot disk was device 0 on the SCSI adapter?

 

As for the "bootmgfw.efi", this is the UEFI boot loader for Windows. It's like "bootmgr" file for BIOS systems.

The only thing I can think of is that the boot order was getting screwed up when adding the other drives.

 

And that is very weird, as I use a bunch of Gen2 VMs in HyperV (Server 2012R2), and have never seen that issue.

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Well would like to figure it out still have that gen2 vm. Right now busy getting the gen1 setup it's working good. When I have time will work on it some more see if I can find what's wrong. oh yea! the boot disk was on 0 scsi. Looks like it tries to loop boot a few times and shuts down. Take the extra disk off and boots up probably nothing to do with drivepool because as Dane said does the same with any drive. I have had it boot with an extra drive added so beats me no rhyme or reason.

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Did you find anything sspell, I tried for a long time to figure it out but could not come up with anything. Admittedly I am far from an expert with hyper-v, more of a hobby.

 

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I haven't had time to work on it. Probably something simple my luck. I not an expert either far from it. I have a LSI MegaRAID 9240-8i flashed JBOD & a 16 port expander. Think these cards are compatible so not an issue. Christopher is your main server O S bare metal. Thinking it may be something going on with the vm server on free hyper-v core mine is running on 128gb ssd so not a lot of expanding room have 100gb of that dedicated to the vm. Working like a dream on gen1. Dane I don't think there is much benefit once the gen1 is running. My understanding is faster boot times with gen2. So I could live without it. Don't think I'll give up just yet when I have a day to kill will try to fix it.

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My server is running on Server 2012R2, with a number of other roles installed as well.  

 

.

However, the issue with the Gen2 VMs... I suspect is the boot order.  THe other drives may have boot records on them, which could be mucking it up.  I'd have to see specific configurations, and research it more. However, most of my VMs are Gen1's.

 

 

And as for the differences, the Gen2 VMs are UEFI, support secure boot, and allow booting from the SCSI adapter (which gets better performance), and from the synthetic NIC.  And I'm sure there are some other performance tweaks as well. 

However, running the VMs from a SSD ... makes a world of difference, performance wise.  And data deduplication is nice as well (seriously, it's a 70% savings for the VMs!)

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Dane I don't think there is much benefit once the gen1 is running. My understanding is faster boot times with gen2. So I could live without it. Don't think I'll give up just yet when I have a day to kill will try to fix it.

I have a similar setup, Dell perc h310 to an Intel sas expander. I could probably live without it as well but is more of a frustrating why is this not working sort of thing. Also, I think deduplication needs gen2 (don't know much about it yet) and I would like to try it. Have 9 VMs and 6-7 I think would benefit from it.

 

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I've had a little time rebuilt a new gen2 with more os space and same issue. May be something in the boot order on the existing hard disk or security issues or what? Anyway it looks like a format and copy files to use gen2. The time this will take too long plus there is a 8 processor limit in vm anyway. So with these issues at hand wanting to take full advantage of the processors for the server decided to bare metal essentials and run whs2011 in vm. Hope this takes care of it will see soon. Let you know how the process goes.

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I have a similar setup, Dell perc h310 to an Intel sas expander. I could probably live without it as well but is more of a frustrating why is this not working sort of thing. Also, I think deduplication needs gen2 (don't know much about it yet) and I would like to try it. Have 9 VMs and 6-7 I think would benefit from it.

 

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NO, you use deduplication at the host level so it has nothing to do with the VMs themselves.

 

Carlo

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NO, you use deduplication at the host level so it has nothing to do with the VMs themselves.

 

Carlo

Yup. It's done at a volume level, and can be done with any sort of files. 

 

And I have a bunch of VMs (Windows XP, WHSv1, and up of each different architecture, as well as a "work" vm and a few linux VMs).  I get roughtly 65% savings. In fact, I couldn't host all of my VMs on my 500GB SSD if I wasn't using deduplication. 

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Very good to know, thanks for the correction. Makes me even more interested in it now. I have been thinking about replacing my current VM drive four 1tb re4 with ssd's but could not justify the cost to get even half the space with redundancy.

 

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Very good to know, thanks for the correction. Makes me even more interested in it now. I have been thinking about replacing my current VM drive four 1tb re4 with ssd's but could not justify the cost to get even half the space with redundancy.

 

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Glad to help. :)

 

And yeah, I got a 500GB SSD when it was on sale.  Specifically for HyperV (and data deduplication).  I'm pretty sure it's faster than use HDDs, even in a RAID.

 

And if you're curious for exact details:

The drive is only using 254GBs of data.  The savings is reported as 64% currently (it jumps around), and reports that it's saving 534GBs using deduplication. 

Which is ... fairly close to what Microsoft estimates. However, Since I'm using a lot of different OS's, it's not "optimized". 

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831700.aspx#BKMK_Step1

 

Additionally, if you're using a block based backup solution (such as Windows Server Backup), if you backup the entire volume, it maintains this savings in the backup as well. 

 

 

And in case it's important, you can move the drive to another system, but it needs to have the deduplication feature enabled to be able to read the disk.  

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Finished up with the install of server 2012r2e on the metal working good so far all sockets and processors and previous drives available. Stablebit drivepool working great as usual with data intact . One of the issues with vm of the server was an 8 processor limit. With whs2011 it was not an issue because it won't handle any more than 4 anyway so I have it happily running in vm with my mail sever and web sites. Seems like the way to go if you have more than 8 processors and want them all available to windows server 2012r2e it needs to be the host on bare metal. Dane if you ever get that gen2 issue figured out let me know. I'm like you stumped over why moving a existing disk over from whs2011 gen1 won't work. Our setups must have been similar.

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Well, I know that Essentials is limited to two Physical CPU. however, I believe that HyperV uses an 1:8 ratio, so any more than 8 virtual cores is treated as a second CPU....

 

But that's not quite what your seeing, I believe. 

Something to take up with Microsoft, I'd think.  

 

If you have the hardware for it ... HyperV Server 2012R2 works fantastically when running as a separate, domain joined system. None of the "HVRemote" or remote management stuff needs to be done. Just some group policy stuff to enable remote management, and then you use domain accounts. :)

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Dane if you ever get that gen2 issue figured out let me know. I'm like you stumped over why moving a existing disk over from whs2011 gen1 won't work. Our setups must have been similar.

I will let you know if I figure somthing out. A little curious about your server spec, wondering if there is somthing similar that would cause this. I am running a dual cpu Asus server board (Z9PE-D16) with 32GB of ram per cpu. Doubt it would be a hardware issue but always possible, maybe somthing that windows server doesn't like.

 

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