Server 2012 R2

Server Core: Change NIC binding order with nvspbind

/ Daniel S / Leave a comment

My router VM in my home lab is a Server 2012 R2 set up running RRAS, but with the GUI features removed to save resources on the host.

It has two NICs – one “External”, facing my home router, and the “Internal”, facing the lab VMs. The external NIC just gets a DHCP address, and along with that, my ISP’s DNS server. I’d also set the DNS server on the Internal NIC, but it wasn’t taking precedence due to the binding order of the NICs. I needed to have the router VM query the lab DNS server so that it could join the domain.

Normally, in Server with a GUI, it would be easy to change the NIC binding order. Out of the box without the GUI, not so much. There’s a 3rd-party utility called nvspbind that can be used to make the change.

If you had a NIC named “Internal” that you wanted to bump up the order, and you already had nvspbind somewhere, you could just run the following:

C:\temp\nvspbind\nvspbind.exe /++ Internal ms_tcpip

Here’s my script that I can run on future lab machines to download nvspbind and configure the correct NIC binding order, assuming that there are NICs named “Internal” and “External”:

$nicName = 'Internal'
$downloadUri = 'https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Hyper-V-Network-VSP-Bind-cf937850/file/117120/1/Microsoft_Nvspbind_package.EXE'

New-Item -ItemType Directory -Path 'c:\temp' -Force
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $downloadUri -OutFile 'c:\temp\Microsoft_Nvspbind_package.EXE'
& 'C:\temp\Microsoft_Nvspbind_package.EXE' /T:c:\temp\nvspbind /C /Q
& 'C:\temp\nvspbind\nvspbind.exe' /++ 'Internal' ms_tcpip

Reading the Windows DHCP Server logs with PowerShell

/ Daniel S / Leave a comment

I’ve been doing a bit of work with DHCP over the last week or so – specifically with troubleshooting IP assignment from various VLANs. I threw together a quick function to read the last (x) lines out of the current day’s DHCP server log. For now, there’s no support for reading the logs remotely. This needs to be run on the server itself.

Once you’ve dot sourced the script, just call the function. By default, it will grab the last 20 lines out of the current day’s log file.

Get-DHCPServerLog

You can specify a day, and/or the number of lines to grab from the end of the log file:

Get-DHCPServerLog -Lines 5 -Day mon

You can also pipe it to Select-Object:

Get-DHCPServerLog | Select-Object Date,Time,Description,MAC*,IP* | Format-Table -AutoSize

Here’s the source:

Braindump: Moving clustered VMs from one Hyper-V cluster to another

/ Daniel S / Leave a comment

This applies to Server 2012 and newer, but these directions are from when I moved VMs from a 2012 cluster to a 2012 R2 cluster.

  1. On the new cluster, right-click on the cluster and choose More Actions -> Copy Cluster Roles
  2. Choose the roles to copy, and then complete the wizard. This will set up the roles and their dependencies on the destination cluster.
  3. Shut down the VMs on the source cluster
  4. Take the relevant storage offline in Failover Cluster Manager (FCM)
  5. Disconnect the iSCSI volumes on all source cluster nodes
  6. Re-assign the LUNs to the new cluster nodes in your SAN of choice’s management console
  7. Connect the LUNs on the destination cluster nodes, but leave the disks offline in disk management
  8. In FCM, go to storage and bring the copied disks online. You should see the volume details reflected in the bottom details pane if all is successful.
  9. Start the VMs