So you’ve created your VM and know you would like to create a template so this VM can be distributed onto multiple VM’s.

SCVMM will take care of this for you, so there is no need to sysprep your machine as the template procedure does all this for you.

Please Beware that creating a template destroys the VM !!!

Creating a Template

1, Press the Virtual Machine Tab and go to your VM.

2, Turn off the VM and then single click the VM

3, Now the New Template option on the right hand window should be accessible, so press this.

4, If you then complete the wizard and hit create this should then start creating your template.

5, The Job pane will then pop up on your screen and start completing the steps that are shown below, once this has completed you’ve successfully made a template.

You may come across an issue when trying to backup a Windows 2008 System State, where the backup keeps failing with a 30214 error.

“DPM failed to create the system state backup. If you are trying to create the system state of a Windows 2008 Server operating system, verify that the Windows Server Backup (WSB) is installed, and that there is enough free disk space on the protected server to store the system state. (ID 30214 Details: Internal error code: 0x809909FB).”

This issue occurs because Windows Server backup needs to be installed on the Windows 2008 server for you to be able to perform a system state backup.

 Installing Windows Server Backup

1, Open Server Manager and press features.

2, Now go to add features

3, Finally select the following features and install them.

Now your System State backup should complete successfully.

With Windows 2008 SYSPREP is actually included in the installation of the OS. The SYSPREP procedure on Windows 2008 is really simple.

First navigate to “<system root>\System32\sysprep”

If you run sysprep.exe a wizard should pop up.

If you select the above options and make sure to tick generalise, to make sure all SID’s get regenerated. Once the machine has shutdown, you will be ok to copy the SYSPREPED VM’s VHD onto multiple VM’s and not face any SID issues.

Daniel Davies

You may have an issue where you are struggling to remove a hyper-v host for a reason such as you, re-installed the OS on the machine and not removing the SCVMM agent first and when you go to remove it from the SCVMM console it just fails as it can’t communicate with the hyper-v host.

To Forcefully remove the Hyper-V Host you first have to open SCVMM’s Powershell.

Then run the following command “Get-vmhost changetoservername | remove-vmhost –force” .

The Hyper-V host will now be gone.

Daniel Davies

I came across an issue on Exchange 2007 a while back now. Basically we received a few alerts on SCOM regarding the Hub Transport Service being stopped on an Exchange Server.

So i jumped onto the server in question and came across the following events in the event log.

“Event Type: Error
Event Source: ESE
Event Category: Transaction Manager
Event ID: 623
Date: 
Time:
User:  N/A
Computer:
Description:
edgetransport (5612) Transport Mail Database: The version store for this
instance (0) has reached its maximum size of 249Mb. It is likely that a
long-running transaction is preventing cleanup of the version store and
causing it to build up in size. Updates will be rejected until the
long-running transaction has been completely committed or rolled back.
Possible long-running transaction:
SessionId: 0×0000000005217400
Session-context: 0×00000000
Session-context ThreadId: 0x00000000000014F8
Cleanup: 1

Event Type: Error
Event Source: MSExchangeTransport
Event Category: Storage
Event ID: 17017
Date:  
Time: 
User:  N/A
Computer:
Description:
Transport Mail Database: Quota exceeded while performing a database
operation. The Microsoft Exchange Transport service is shutting down.
Exception details:
Microsoft.Exchange.Isam.IsamVersionStoreOutOfMemoryException: Version store
out of memory (cleanup already attempted) (-1069)
at Microsoft.Exchange.Isam.?A0x051b51e0.HandleError(Int32 err)
at Microsoft.Exchange.Isam.Interop.MJetSetColumn(MJET_TABLEID tableid,
MJET_COLUMNID columnid, Byte[] data, MJET_GRBIT grbit, MJET_SETINFO setinfo)
at
Microsoft.Exchange.Transport.Storage.DataStreamImmediateWriter.Write(Int64
position, Byte[] data) ”

So i started the Hub transport service again and then had a quick look at the mail queue via queue viewer. In The queue viewer i spotted a 250mb e-mail and consequently was just too big for the hub transport to handle and causing the service to stop.

To get his issue fixed i had to get rid of this mail out of the queue, first i tried removing the mail with no NDR, this got rid of the mail, however 20 seconds later it reappeared again.

So what i had to do was recreate the queue, so it basically got rid of all mail that was currently in the queue. The downside to this is that other mail still queuing up on the Hub Transport server will be lost to.

Resolution

1, Make sure the MS Exchange Transport service is stopped.

2, Rename the following directory “<drive>\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\TransportRoles\data\Queue” to “<drive>\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\TransportRoles\data\Queue_old”

3, Start the MS Exchange Transport service

4, This Should Recreate the Queue folder and the “MS Exchange Transport” will no longer stop.

This Should Resolve Your Issue.

Daniel Davies

I have come across an issue recently where Servers with a SCOM Agent installed are running at 100% CPU, and when you look at task manager on the server you can see multiple CSCRIPT.exe processes running.

CSCRIPT.exe is what SCOM uses to run scripts on the SCOM agents.

The simple fix for this is to upgrade WSH to version 5.7 and the issue with the CPU just simply goes away.

Daniel Davies

I came across this issue while trying to perform a consistency check on a Windows Server 2008’s system state. You will see the below alerts in the DPM Console.

“The replica of System State Computer\SystemState on is inconsistent with the protected data source. All protection activities for data source will fail until the replica is synchronized with consistency check. You can recover data from existing recovery points, but new recovery points cannot be created until the replica is consistent (ID 3106).

“DPM failed to create the system state backup. If you are trying to create the system state of a Windows 2008 Server operating system, verify that the Windows Server Backup (WSB) is installed, and that there is enough free disk space on the protected server to store the system state. (ID 30214 Details: Internal error code: 0x809909FB).”

The reason we need space on the machine that is getting backed up, is because DPM creates the system state file on the local machine and then backs up the file it created.

If you only have one drive on the protected server then your only option is to clear down space on the drive. However if you have an additional drive, then we can make the System State file  be created on another drive which has enough free space.

To do this follow the below steps.

To change the location of the system state backup file

1. On the protected computer, open PSDatasourceConfig.xml in Notepad. (File located in “<Drive Letter>:\Program Files\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\DPM\Datasources”.
2. Change the <FilesToProtect> value from %systemdrive% to the desired location.
3. Save the file.
4. On the DPM server, if there is a protection group protecting the system state of the protected computer in step 1, run a consistency check.
5. The consistency check will fail and generate an alert. Perform the recommended actions in the alert as follows:
   1. In the alert details, click the Modify protection group link, and then step through the wizard. This may fail again but continue to the next step.
   2. Perform a consistency check.

Then create a recovery point to disk and then it should start to synchronize.

Daniel Davies

You may see this issue if you are running Hyper-V hosts, this issue occurs when you have set your VHD to dynamically expand, and over time the VHD has actually increased to the size of the drive it is held on. When this occurs the offending machine will be stuck in a paused-critical state.

A way to fix this issue is to compact the VHD and in my experience it tends to get back quite a lot of space. Compacting the VHD basically claws back any space that isn’t being used by the VHD. To do this there must actually be Free Space on the drives inside the VM otherwise this will have no effect.

To look at a way of clearing up some space to compact the VHD as temporary measure is to have a look at my previous article”http://support.risualblogs.com/blog/2009/10/14/running-low-on-disk-space-on-a-drive/”.

Fixing this should probably be only a temporary measure as you are having this issue because the drive that hold’s the effected VM’s VHD is stored on does not have to space. And the real solution is to move the vhd to a bigger disk. That said if you must get the VM back up quick read on!!

To Compact a VHD 

First of all if we connect to the Virtual server host, that holds problematic VM.

Now we  need to shut down the effected VM, as the VM is in a paused-critical it can be quite a pain, you can keep hitting resume on the VM and try shutting it down through the Guest OS. Or You can just right click and turn off the machine, which is basically the same as just pulling the plug out of the server.

Now we need to compact the VHD , so if we right click the VM again and choose settings

Now you will see all the VM’s Settings, but what we are after is the VHD which is causing the issue, so if you look at the left hand side of the Settings windows and you’ll be able to see the VHD. So if you Just single click on the VHD in question.

Now you will see and Edit option, if you just press that and then a “edit virtual hard disk wizard” will appear and if we simply choose the compact option and follow the wizard through and then we are done.

The Process should take 10-15 minutes and then you can just turn the VM back on and it will run successfully.

Daniel Davies

Hi Guys,

Sometimes you may come across an issue on your servers where you find a drive running low on space and you are struggling to find any files to delete. 

There are a number of commands that you can run from the command line to help you claw back some space by removing files which are completely safe to remove. This applies to all server OS’s such as Windows 2000, Windows 2003 ,Windows 2008 etc.

First of all open command prompt as an Administrator of the machine.

Next if you get to the root of the desired drive by typing “cd \”.

Now if you run the following commands you should be able to get some free space back.

del *.tmp /s

del *.dmp /s

del *.mdmp /s

Now you should have gained back a bit of space, but if you are still in need of getting some more space back then not to worry, i have something else you can try.

Now if we go to the system drive (Typically C:\ ) via my computer.

Now if we open the “Windows” Folder and then open the “Software Distribution Folder.

And then finally if we open the “Download” folder.

  The files in this folder are basically windows updates that have been previously downloaded, so we can safely delete all files inside this folder, It is best if we shift delete these files, just to save us having to remove them again from the recycle bin.

Daniel Davies

further to my previous post the OCS product group has now caught up with this issue, see below:

http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2009/10/14/632.aspx

Current message is don’t install this update on anything with OCS/LCS till further notice.