Windows Server 2012 R2 - Virtual hard disk sharing limitations

There is quite a lot written about how good the new "virtual harddisk sharing" feature is in Windows Server 2012 R2, and I agree that it is very good feature but there is not as much written about the limitations. When you enable the function it says "Some virtual machine and virtual hard disk features will be disabled when this setting is enabled". Already known limititations and already published on other blogs are:

• You cannot do host-level backups of the guest cluster.  This is the same as it always was.  You will have to install backup agents in the guest cluster nodes and back them up as if they were physical machines.
• You cannot perform a hot-resize of the shared VHDX.  But you can hot-add more shared VHDX files to the clustered VMs.
• You cannot Storage Live Migrate the shared VHDX file.  You can move the other VM files and perform normal Live Migration

There are also some limitations for virtual machines managed by VMM:

• You cannot create a checkpoint on a virtual machine that has shared virtual hard disks.

• You cannot change properties of a virtual machine with shared virtual hard disks.

However you can change properties of a virtual machine managed by VMM with powershell.

KMS server "STATUS_SUCCESS" error

The error message below has to be one of the most funnier in a long time ...

So did I succeed or not? It says "Success" but at the same time it's an error. Confusing is surely the least one can say ;)

So what was I doing then? Well, I was about to move / re-install a KMS server on Windows Server 2012 R2 and when I got to the last page and clicked "commit", I got the error message.

The cause of the error and also visible in the picture below is that the wizard does not enter the right "KMS TCP listening port" automatically. The port should be 1688 and if you enter this the wizard goes through.

Empty "Add Storage Devices Wizard" in SCVMM 2012 R2

The other day, I would configure an SMI-S connection from SCVMM 2012 R2 to the customer's HP P2000 G3 MSA SAN. I could run through the "Add Storage Devices Wizard" and added the SAN without any problem but it could not find neither vDisk's or any LUN's. I verified the following:

• SMI-S was enabled in the SAN
• The Run As account had SMI-S access to the SAN

The solution: To connect using Telnet to the SAN and run the command "reset SMIS-configuration" for both controllers. Next, the wizard could find vDisk's and LUN's in the SAN.