How To Configure Virtual Machine In Windows Server 2012

Do you have a large number of virtualized workloads in your cluster? Take you been looking for a solution that allows yous to detect if any of the virtualized workloads in your cluster are behaving abnormally? Would you similar the cluster service to have recovery actions when these workloads are in an unhealthy land? In Windows Server 2012, in that location is a great new feature, in Failover Clustering chosen "VM Monitoring", which does exactly that – it allows you monitor the health state of applications that are running within a virtual machine and then reports that to the host level so that it can take recovery actions. You lot can monitor any Windows service (such as SQL or IIS) in your virtual car or Any ETW consequence occurring in your virtual automobile. When the condition you are monitoring gets triggered, the Cluster Service logs an event in the mistake channel on the host and takes recovery actions.

In this blog, I volition provide a footstep past step guide of how you can configure VM Monitoring using the Failover Cluster Manager in Windows Server 2012 or later on.

Notation: There are multiple means to configure VM Monitoring. In this blog, I will cover the near common method. In a futurity blog, I will cover the many dissimilar flexible options for configuring VM Monitoring.

Pre-requisites
Before you can configure monitoring from the Failover Cluster Managing director on a Management Console the following pre-steps are required:

1. Configure the guest operating arrangement running inside the virtual machine
   1. The guest operating organisation running within the virtual machine must be running Windows Server 2012 or after
   2. Ensure that the guest OS is a member of a domain which is same every bit the host or a domain with a trust relationship with the host domain.

2. Grant the cluster administrator permissions to manage the guest

   1. The administrator running Failover Cluster Manager must be a member of the local administrators group in the guest

3. Enable the "Virtual Machine Monitoring" firewall rule on the guest

   1. Open the Windows Firewall console

   2. Select "Permit an app or characteristic through Windows Firewall"

c)       Click on " change settings " and enable the " Virtual Machine Monitoring " dominion.

Note:  You can also enable the "Virtual Machine Monitoring" firewall rule using the Windows PowerShell® cmdlet Set-NetFirewallRule :
Set-NetFirewallRule -DisplayGroup "Virtual Machine Monitoring" -Enabled True
Configuration
VM Monitoring tin exist easily configured using the Failover Cluster Manager through the following steps:

1. Correct click on the Virtual Machine role on which yous want to configure monitoring
2. Select " More than Actions " and so the " Configure Monitoring " options

three)      You will and then encounter a listing of services that can be configured for monitoring using the Failover Cluster Manager.

Note:

You volition only see services listed that run on their ain process e.g. SQL, Substitution. The IIS and Impress Spooler services are exempt from this rule. Yous can all the same setup monitoring for whatever NT service using Windows PowerShell® using the Add-ClusterVMMonitoredItem cmdlet – with no restrictions:
Add together-ClusterVMMonitoredItem –VirtualMachine TestVM -Service spooler

When a monitored service encounters an unexpected failure, the sequence of recovery actions is determined by the Recovery actions on failure for the service. These recovery actions tin can be viewed and configured using Service Control Manager within the guest. In the instance beneath, on the beginning and second service failures, the service control director will restart the service. On the third failure, the service control manager will take no action and defer recovery actions to the cluster service running in the host.

The cluster service monitors the status of clustered virtual machines through periodic health checks. When the cluster services determines that a virtual machine is in a "critical" state i.e. an application or service inside the virtual machine is in an unhealthy state, the cluster service takes the following recovery actions:

1)      Issue ID 1250 is logged on the host

a.       This event can be monitored with tools such as Organisation Center Operations Manager to trigger further customized actions

2)      The virtual automobile status in Failover Cluster Manager will indicate that the virtual machine is in an "Awarding Disquisitional" state.

• Verbose information is logged to the Cluster debug log for postal service-mortem analysis of failures.

• The StatusInformation resource common property for a virtual car in "Application Critical" country has the value 2 equally compared to a value of 0 during normal operation. The Windows PowerShell® cmdlet Get-ClusterResource tin exist used to query this property.

Become-ClusterResource "TestVM" | fl StatusInformation
3)      Recovery activeness is taken on the virtual machine in "Application Critical" state

a.       The virtual machine is offset restarted on the same node

Note: The restart of the virtual machine is forced but svelte

b.      On the second failure, the virtual automobile restarted and failed over to some other node in the cluster.

Note: The decision on whether to failover or restart on the same node is configurable and adamant by the failover backdrop for the virtual machine.

That's the VM Monitoring feature in a nutshell!

Subhasish Bhattacharya
Senior Program Director
Clustering & High Availability
Microsoft

Source: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/failover-clustering/how-to-configure-vm-monitoring-in-windows-server-2012/ba-p/371745

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