Question

How to Reboot Hyper-V Host w/ Failover Clustering

Asked by: CCLProTech

I have an HP Blade system running Windows Server 2008 Core on each blade. The blades house their VMs on shared storage on an HP MSA - Fibre Channel SAN.

I run Windows Updates once a week and set each blade to reboot an hour apart from each other so that, in theory, the blade can reboot and have its VMs failover to a different blade. The failover portion works fine when you test it manually. However, I find that after the blades reboot due to installing updates from Windows Update, when you RDC into a VM, it complains of the "previous shutdown was unexpected."

What's the best way to handle rebooting the host OS without the guest OSs complaining of being shutdown improperly?

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Asked On
2009-09-07 at 10:10:36ID24713026
Topics

Hyper-V

,

Windows Server 2008

Participating Experts
1
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Comments
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Answers

 

by: plimpiasPosted on 2009-09-07 at 10:45:17ID: 25276405

When the VMs failover, it is the equivelent of cutting the power on the server. You can either modify the on shutdown settings of the VM to either put it in a saved state and start up when it comes up or shut it down. If it is not working correctly then something is wrong with the integration tools. you can also schedule the restart of the HOST server and running a script to shutdown all of the vms that are on before it restarts.

You have several options you can do.

 

by: CCLProTechPosted on 2009-09-07 at 10:51:50ID: 25276430

The VMs are set to "Save". What's weird is that it works very well if I go into Failover Cluster Manager and shut down the cluster service on one of the blades; all VMs failover to another blade and when I RDC to them, it doesn't complain of being shut down unexpectedly.

I would think that when the host OS shuts down, it would shut down or save it's guest VMs. What options are there with the Integration Tools? You pretty much just install them and go, right?

I'd like to get this working "automatically" rather than having to use scripts to shutdown the VMs before the host reboots.

 

by: CCLProTechPosted on 2009-09-10 at 20:27:59ID: 25306510

Installed SP2 on Core hosts and Win 2k8 VMs.
Reinstalled Integration Services.

Now, when a Core host is rebooted, the VMs failover to another blade. When RDP'ing to that VM after failover, I don't get messages while logging on or in Event Viewer about the last shutdown being unexpected.

 

by: plimpiasPosted on 2009-09-10 at 20:55:20ID: 25306612

Several impovements have been made in regards to failover in Sp2. Nice job.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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