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udaykumar-blr
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dr ip customization

has anyone tried using dr ip customizser to automate the MSCS cluster servers for a failover and attaching to create customizations for vms.

I have searched all over to automate IP and DNS mapping for Microsoft cluster VM servers where in, it has 2 or more NICS. however in vain. This did not work. Anyone has an idea?.

If anyone require a working script for Vms with one vNIC, i am happy to help and also setting up SRM with hp storage.

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Smoggy
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this is working as designed.

to enforce recovery side resource limits you can use the resource pools at the recovery site and SRM inventory mapping to ensure your recovered VM's are placed into the correct pools. Note you need to set the pools at the recovery site manually outside of SRM. If you want to enforce a specific limit on a recovered VM this can be done manually by setting the reservation/limit on the placeholder VM. These settings will then be inherited by the real VM during recovery. Word of caution, when working with limits/reservations etc check your cluster capacity/settings at the recovery sites. In many cases customers don't have "like for like" setups in terms of cluster/host size at both site. Also any workloads that may already be required and are already running at the recovery site should be taken into account. Most customers will usually just map the recovery VM's to appropriately configured resources pools, leave the per-vm settings alone and then use DRS for load balancing keeping the recovery site design simpler.

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Smoggy
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Hi,

It is not really clear what you want to achieve here. Are you asking if the SRM re-ip tool can be used to alter all of the ipaddresses in a MSCS cluster including the PUBLIC address? I have to be honest I have not tried this but I would imagine altering the public address of an MSCS cluster by any other method than the cluster services manager gui is probably not going to be supported by MSFT but I am not enough of an MSCS expert to say that definitively. Some quick googling seems to back some of that up though.

If I have missed the point of what you are trying to do please update with more detail and we can see what's possible.

best regards,

Lee

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udaykumar-blr
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Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

We have multiple MSCS VM clusters. each cluster Vm will have 2 or more NICS.

I have tried to customize the IP to get chnaged when the failover occurs.

This worked fine for a Vm where it has one NIC.

For Vms with 2 or more NICs sometimes the IP did not change, even though the applied customization is proper.

I have tried specifically mentioing the 1st and 2nd NICs mac in the file where issue. Hope this is working upto certain extent now.

We have one more problem with Win 2008 servers, which usually did not change. I am trying with few more options for Win 2008 servers. Hope may/may not work for Win 2008.

Any poniters for this..

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Smoggy
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sounds to me like your CSV file is incorrect. It is absolutely possible to customize VM's with > 1 nic, here are some pointers on using the tool:

Use the generate parameter to pull info down in the form of a CSV file.

Use the create parameter to push up info after you tweak the file. If the file has already been used only new info will be executed.

Only new customization info is implemented in a Create.

The recreate parameter deletes then creates.

For each line, the Adapter 0 reference is for all of the potential network cards that may bein a VM. The only information to add to this line is the domain suffix in column M.

Make sure that each line for each VM has the VM name, VM ID, and the Adapter id in it!

VM Name Column Must be Populated When Using Batch IP Customization Tool If you use the batch IP customization tool to customize IP properties, you must copy the VM Name (column 2 of the row for Adapter ID 0) into column 2 of each row that you add for a virtual machine. You would add additional rows for example when a VM has > 1 adapter and each adapter needs to be customized separately. So for a VM with 2 nics you would have three rows Adapter 0, Adapter 1, Adapter 2

for windows 2008 customization see my recent blog post: http://blogs.vmware.com/uptime/2009/10/srm-40-and-windows-2008-support.html

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udaykumar-blr
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Thank you very much for the elaborate info.

I have spent almost 4-5 hours to find out why the DNS entries were not populating.

Finally just to try I have updated vm name everywhere.. viola all worked as expected.

I would saved that 4-5 hrs, if I would have received this replay at earlier (:.

Another strange issue is related to Win 2008 x64. If you have one vnic, even though the customizations applied, it will not apply.

Unless you update the customization with MAC address. Any specifics reasons.

Any other known issues with SRM regarding managing the DRS rules. All the DRS rules are breaking/removed for every failover/failback for those VMs.

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Smoggy
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what build of windows x64 are you using? R2?

for the DRS rules, SRM does NOT maintain any DRS rule info during failover or failback.

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udaykumar-blr
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Win 2003 x64 works well R1 and R2.

Issue with Win 2008 - R1 SP2

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udaykumar-blr
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If we do multiple failover/failback of Datacenters and if the SRM always looses all DRS rules (rules attached to failedover/failedback Vms only), isn’t it a bug

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Smoggy
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No its not a bug it would be a feature request that hasn't been added yet....I know that sounds like a get out Smiley Happy

Basically its something we've thought about adding but enough people need to ask for features so that we can prioritise engineering work on doing the things people want. Basically noones really asked for this.

In a lot of failover / failback scenarios that customers have maintaining things like DRS affinity rules has not been anywhere near their list of "must have's" so the feature has not really been high on any list.

Other considerations are that SRM's main focus is to recover VM's so there is no guarantee that the recovery site inventory would even support the same DRS config as the protected site.

If this feature is something you think you would want then definitely raise it with your local vmware account team to have a feature request logged.

udaykumar-blr
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Another clarification will be, is it a known behavior in SRM that:

When the VM fails over the through SRM, they are also loosing reservation of memory and cpu shares set.

Memory reservation is very important for us, reason being the we may end up without any space left in the datastore when failed over.

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Smoggy
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this is working as designed.

to enforce recovery side resource limits you can use the resource pools at the recovery site and SRM inventory mapping to ensure your recovered VM's are placed into the correct pools. Note you need to set the pools at the recovery site manually outside of SRM. If you want to enforce a specific limit on a recovered VM this can be done manually by setting the reservation/limit on the placeholder VM. These settings will then be inherited by the real VM during recovery. Word of caution, when working with limits/reservations etc check your cluster capacity/settings at the recovery sites. In many cases customers don't have "like for like" setups in terms of cluster/host size at both site. Also any workloads that may already be required and are already running at the recovery site should be taken into account. Most customers will usually just map the recovery VM's to appropriately configured resources pools, leave the per-vm settings alone and then use DRS for load balancing keeping the recovery site design simpler.

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