Upgrading a Hyper V 2008 R2 cluster to Service Pack1

Recently I was involved in a an upgrade project to upgrade a 4 cluster running Windows Hyper V 2008 R2. This involved some preparation since I wanted to pre empt any potential problems by reading as much as possible about upgrading to Service Pack 1

One thing that I had not thought of was the lack of space on the Hyper-visor partition- which incidentally was lacking space since it has a 16 GB pagefile.sys.  The only way I successfully managed to reduce the pagefile was to make a registry hack to specifiy the intial and max size of the file.

Please use this command to change the size of the pagefile

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management\PagingFiles”=”<location> <initial size> <max size>, and I beg you to not to use the wmic method which did not work for me and is unclear.

Another unexpected issue was that after all the upgrades were done, one of the cluster members was not authenticating to the cluster. So I had to evict the  node from the cluster and then re add it to the cluster, and this solved the problem.

Cluster validation and integration components upgrades went fine.

Here are some links which I really found clear and useful. 

http://workinghardinit.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/upgrading-a-hyper-v-r2-cluster-to-windows-2008-r2-sp1/

http://thelazyadmin.com/blogs/thelazyadmin/archive/2011/03/17/upgrading-hyper-v-r2-to-sp1.aspx

http://www.hyper-v.nu/blogs/hans/?p=553

How to use Sysprep

Today I needed to create a new virtual machine that had to be made unique on the network. So I had to remove all the machine specific data, such as SID info so as not to mess up things on the network.  The tools to use is sysprep, and it is important that when you run it you select the Out of Box Experience and select also the Generalize option. Check out this cool video showing the sysprep process,

How to check the version of Hyper-V integration services

This morning I needed to confirm the version of the integrated services I have installed on my Hyper V’s. The following links are the most helpful which I found. It basically very easy just check the Vm Bus Network Adapter in Device Manager, and click on the driver details.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/virtualmachinemanager/thread/776157af-a5ed-4269-8ec7-0ec681525a45

http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/windows-management-instrumentation-wmi/q-how-can-i-check-which-version-of-integration-services-a-virtual-machine-vm-is-running-