2012 R2

Windows Azure Pack Support

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Since the announcements and public previews of Microsoft Azure Stack (MAS), everybody including myself  is talking about and testing with MAS. But the reality is that a lot of companies have invested in Windows Azure Pack and were a little surprised that Microsoft announced before this summer that Windows Azure Pack on Windows Server 2012 R2 is supported until July 2017.

azurepacksupport

Several weeks ago Microsoft made another announcement that they are continue to invest and support in Windows Azure Pack (WAP) next to Azure Stack for 11 years! But to use the extended support you need to bring your Azure Pack environment to Windows Server 2016. MAS release is aimed for the summer of 2017 so very likely there will be a gab between end of support of WAP on Server 2012 R2 and any public available MAS appliances from HP, Dell or Lenovo…

From several customers i received questions about the support statement and what needs to be updated. Turns out it’s not that well documented and known. As you can see in the screenshot above, it states Windows Azure Pack (on Windows Server 2012 R2) and Windows Azure Pack (on Windows Server 2016). But as we all know, Windows Azure Pack is a solution based on lots of components from the Windows and the System Center family.

What to upgrade

As i said before Windows Azure Pack leans on a lot of Windows features like a Active Directory domain, IIS and Hyper-V but also on System Center components like VMM and SPF.

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ADFS HTTP 400 Bad Request with SSO/Windows Integrated Authentication

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Another challenging ADFS issue came to me this week. Here the problem was that internal user were not able to authenticate. They receive a login prompt and after providing credentials they received a “HTTP 400 bad request” error message. When users were external and use FBA they were able to login successfully. Also wen internal and the users used a different browser then Internet Explorer the were also presented with FBA and were able to login. Clearly only the login with Windows Integrated Authentication failed. And of course al was working just fine and stopped working about a week ago.

In this environment the ADFS and resource servers were in a different domain than the user accounts were. For more detail see the picture below. Beware it’s only a part of the authentication process to illustrate the topology.

After some research i ruled out serveral known issue’s like:

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SCVMM 2012 R2 UR5 Bare metal deploy downloading wrong Operating System VHDX

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Last week I ran into an issue with SCVMM and Bare metal deploying Hyper-V hosts. During testing I was deploying several HP blades with the same Physical Computer Profile. But some hosts had the Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 OS, which was the one I configured in the Physical Computer Profile and others had the Windows Server 2012 R2 OS.
After recreating the .vhdx file the problem seemed to be gone, but it returned. During the deployment of de host in the WinPE mode I pressed Shift+F10 to open a command prompt and opened the VMMAgentPE.exe.log file to view any error’s. There I discovered it was downloading the wrong VHDX file.

Localized VMM 2012 R2 UR6 Console crash when changing/creating Hardware Profiles

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Not very often I see server software in a different language than English but last week I was working with a customer that wants the dutch language on every server and software. There are several good arguments not to… but as the say in the Netherlands “a customer is king” 😉 So the Dutch language it is!

I installed VMM 2012 R2 in a cluster with UR6. After working with it for a while I got the error message below. After a restart I got it again when I wanted to create a hardware profile. Also when deploying a VM and got to the hardware part the console crashes. So no matter what, when I access hardware settings in VMM, the console crashes.

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