14 DAY TRIAL // Windows Server 2008 R2 customers that are leveraging the platform’s hypervisor can grab a collection of updates from Microsoft designed to resolve a range of issues. The software giant made available a Hyper-V update rollup for Windows Server 2008 R2 a while back, and posted the most recent revision at the end of the past week.
According to the Redmond company, some Windows Server 2008 R2 users with the hypervisor role installed have been experiencing problems related to operations such as the backing up or the restoration of Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs).
The promise from Microsoft is that the Hyper-V update rollup will resolve the issues.
Problems involve, receiving the 0x800423f4 error code when backing up virtual machines, failed VM backup operations, data loss and corruption.
Microsoft offered customers explanation of the causes that generate the glitches mentioned above:
“Issue 1 - When a virtual machine (VM) is being backed up, the VSS writer of the server that is running Hyper-V makes a call to the guest VM to check whether any iSCSI connections exist.
This call has a default time-out of 60 seconds. If this call does not return within the time limitation, the VSS writer of the server that is running Hyper-V incorrectly assumes that there is no iSCSI connection. Therefore, the backup operation fails.
“Issue 2 - When the virtual machines (VMs) on different nodes are backed up in parallel, every node waits to become the cluster shared volume owner to create the snapshots.
“However, the Cluster service moves the volume owner from one node to another node immediately after a snapshot is created without waiting for post-snapshot tasks to be completed.
"If another node requests the same shared volume for a backup operation before the post-snapshot tasks are completed, the Cluster service changes the volume to another node.
“Therefore, the VSS writer that is in the previous node cannot find the cluster shared volume locally when it performs post-snapshot tasks. This behavior causes the VM backup operation to fail.
“Issue 3 - The application backup operation in the virtual machine (VM) is incorrectly affected by the VM backup operation on the server that is running Hyper-V.
“Issue 4 - The snapshot files are not restored successfully when you restore the virtual machine (VM).”
The Redmond company revealed that all these fixes have been packaged into Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2.
MSDN and TechNet subscribers will be able to download Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 RTM later today.