Hi Henrik,

We have 6.2.0 on a test server and are looking at the new VM Tasks.

1) No Help material for either VM or Hyper-V Tasks (Last Task described in Help File is Task Reporting - Crystal)

2) Hyper-V List VM's Task not operational (Add Task does not display a UI ?)

3) Hyper-V Start VM Task not seeing Hyper-V or VM's on local machine ?

OS: 2008 R2
Hyper-V Role Installed on same server as VisualCron

Hyper-V Manager Installed on VC Client Machine Also.

VM's already in place and operational / accessible via Hyper-V Manager

If you have some MS Software or other Dependencies to talk to Hyper-V / VMs can you list them please ?

Have Checked 6.2.1 also with similar results

Hi Henrik,

We have 6.2.0 on a test server and are looking at the new VM Tasks.

1) No Help material for either VM or Hyper-V Tasks (Last Task described in Help File is Task Reporting - Crystal)

2) Hyper-V List VM's Task not operational (Add Task does not display a UI ?)

3) Hyper-V Start VM Task not seeing Hyper-V or VM's on local machine ?

OS: 2008 R2
Hyper-V Role Installed on same server as VisualCron

Hyper-V Manager Installed on VC Client Machine Also.

VM's already in place and operational / accessible via Hyper-V Manager

If you have some MS Software or other Dependencies to talk to Hyper-V / VMs can you list them please ?

1. correct, we have not created the help material yet
2. right, the menu does not work for this but you can select any other Task and then change to this Task - we will fix this for next version. Right now you can also right click - it is just the tool menu that is not working
3. Do you get any errors when clicking on Refresh button

Here are some security settings:

http://www.howtogeek.com...nds-on-remote-computers/ 

The dependency here is PowerShell. You need to install Powershell 2.0 on the machine.

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Hi Henrik,

Thanks for that we will do some further testing.

FYI we are using Powershell 3 because that uses .net 4 which is what you are using with visualcron now . . . . we had issues with Powershell 2 when you moved from .net 3.51 to 4 with version 6.1.7 or 6.1.8 . . . . .will look into that when I am at work tomorrow . . . .

We get nothing at all when we click on the refresh button.

Sorry, I think 3.0 should work. At least it works on Windows 8.

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Could you use the Powershell Task locally on the Server you want to run from and run this command:

$Host.Version

After running it check the output of the Task.

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I know Hyper-V tasks are for Hyper-V, but what Hypervisor is supported with the 'Virtual Server' tasks? Sun VirtualBox, VMware Workstation, ESX, ESXi, vSphere 4x/5x, etc ? It doesn't appear to specify anywhere what 'sort' of server I can perform these tasks on.

Thanks!

Brian

I know Hyper-V tasks are for Hyper-V, but what Hypervisor is supported with the 'Virtual Server' tasks? Sun VirtualBox, VMware Workstation, ESX, ESXi, vSphere 4x/5x, etc ? It doesn't appear to specify anywhere what 'sort' of server I can perform these tasks on.

Thanks!

Brian

Ah, sorry, I think I read that a little bit first. For virtualization we currently support:

Hyper-V - from Microsoft
Virtual Server - the predecessor to Hyper-V

We will soon add support for:

VMWare workstation and server.

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Hi Henrik,

I think this works *because* you are using WMI 3.0 / Windows 8 / Windows Server 2012 / Powershell 3.0 which has the Powershell commands you are using e.g Get-VM built in ?

Our Servers are Windows Server 2008 R2 and as per the information I provided above 'Get-VM' is not an available command unless I load a module to add these commands in ?

Pre Microsoft addressing this <in powershell 3> these sorts of commands were added in by using an add-in module:

http://blogs.technet.com...-module-for-hyper-v.aspx 

I am looking at setting this up, and then establishing a default profile to load this module automatically so VisualCron can make use of these ?

Any advice on this very welcome !!

n.b. the screen print is from powershell running on the 2008 R2 Server where the Hyper-V VM's are hosted and on which VisualCron is running.

Hi Henrik,

I think this works *because* you are using WMI 3.0 / Windows 8 / Windows Server 2012 / Powershell 3.0 which has the Powershell commands you are using e.g Get-VM built in ?

Our Servers are Windows Server 2008 R2 and as per the information I provided above 'Get-VM' is not an available command unless I load a module to add these commands in ?

Pre Microsoft addressing this <in powershell 3> these sorts of commands were added in by using an add-in module:

http://blogs.technet.com...-module-for-hyper-v.aspx 

I am looking at setting this up, and then establishing a default profile to load this module automatically so VisualCron can make use of these ?

Any advice on this very welcome !!

n.b. the screen print is from powershell running on the 2008 R2 Server where the Hyper-V VM's are hosted and on which VisualCron is running.

It sounds like you have not added the Hyper-V role to that machine because if you had those commands should be available.

http://www.petri.co.il/i...ndows-server-2008-r2.htm 

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It sounds like you have not added the Hyper-V role to that machine because if you had those commands should be available.

http://www.petri.co.il/i...ndows-server-2008-r2.htm 

I'm betting his concerns are more along the lines of my thoughts on this. It doesn't say that the Hyper-V role is required in order to connect to another system thats actually running Hyper-V.

We don't use Hyper-V, but lets pretend I do. I have a server that I do most of our scheduling from. Whether that be gathering info and writing a web report, moving files, etc... some tasks could (if VMware ESX/vSphere were supported) be done via VisualCron to gather storage usage, number of VM's, etc...

For VMware stuff, because VC doesn't support it, I do powershell tasks that use the VMware Power CLI (Powershell cmdlets for VMware ESX/vSphere).

Now, I know that VC doesn't do VMWARE stuff so I installed the required components to allow me to do what I need as an addon. In this case, however, these are the first (that i'm aware of) options that get made available within VC that have a component required beyond .NET and/or Powershell.


It might be good to document somewhere (or notify the client to check that the server running the VisualCron service has it) that the Hyper-V roles are required when adding a task.

This is especially important when installing VisualCron on Server 2003, XP, etc.... and assuming you'd be able to remotely do VM tasks on a server that actually has Hyper-V. Just food for thought.

Brian

Agreed, thanks Brian for your comments.

. . . . . and I have those roles/features so something else is missing . . . . .

I accept it may be a local issue, i just don't know.

I have attached a screen print showing the Hyper-V role and features installed on the 2008 R2 server.

And just to be clear, this is also where the VisualCron Server is running, so all of this management is Local.

We don't use Server 2012 yet, but also attached is a 2012 VM with the Hyper-V Role install option (this time I get the Module for Windows Powershell which I think you are relying on ?) <Sorry can't complete the Role Add for Hyper-V as its already a VM on Hyper-V>

So to summarise:
- Windows 2008 R2 OS Physical Server
- VisualCron Server (now 6.2.2)
- Powershell 3.0
- Hyper-V Role
- Hyper-V Tools Feature (Role Administration Tools)
- Attempting Management of Local VM's on Hyper-V on the Local Server
- Powershell (on this machine) does *not* have the commands being utilised by VisualCron e.g. Get-VM

Can you confirm you have this working on 2008 R2, What version of Powershell you are running, and what Powershell modules you have.

Based on the 2012 information attached, I don't think I would have any issues if we were Windows 8 Clients / Windows Server 2012 but we don't have that stack yet and won't for a while (Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2).

I have also attached the Powershell script, available from the web that we are using to manage this from VisualCron at present, using powershell. We are very interested in using the Hyper-V tasks in VisualCron to more simply and logically manage these using standard VisualCron features.

It is *slightly* modified to include an extra parameter as we call it from VisualCron using a .cmd wrapper, and we write additional Output to appear against the Task in VisualCron

Thanks for the information. We do not have that test environment at the moment but we did a quick search on the problem. I am not sure if this is related:

http://stackoverflow.com...nd-on-windows-powershell 

We will try to get hold of that test environment as soon as possible.

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Hi Henrik,

That would be great.

Couple of Points for you to ponder:

1) That link you provided is to add System Center Virtual Machine Manager module to Powershell. This is a separately licensed MS product ?
I don't think you can assume folks have that (we are using Hyper-V without System Center).

2) Hyper-V 2008 (& 2008 R2) <> Hyper-V 2012. They are different versions of Hyper-V ? Please see screen print attached <that source of all truth Wikipedia :D>.

http://en.wikipedia.org/...latform_virtual_machines 

3) The best fit *free* Hyper-V add in module for powershell I can find for 2008 R2 <link above and included here again> is not an *official* MS Module and is not completely Command Compatible with what is included in Hyper-V 2012 / Powershell Module ?
*note this may not matter as many of the key commands align to what MS provide in 2012*

http://blogs.technet.com...-module-for-hyper-v.aspx 

4) If you have a look at that powershell script I forwarded we are using at present in Production to control Hyper-V VM's from VisualCron you will see it is doing all of the Hyper-V VM controlling via standard WMI calls, not Powershell 3 / 2012 built in commands.

I *suspect* this method may be more compatible/consistent across :

Different Windows Server OS's
Different Powershell Versions
Local vs Remote ?

. . . regardless you would need to try any solution against :
Server OS
2008 R2
2012

Powershell
2 on 2008 R2
3 on 2008 R2 (This is our setup)
3 on 2012 (inbuilt commands MS provide in powershell seem to differ ?)

Happy to be Crash test dummy on our Test VisualCron Server 2008 R2.
Sorry don't have the physical kit for a proper 2012 Hyper-V test (only have a VM).