VMM 2012 R2 + UCS 2.2.2 and VSEM

[Stan Svetec]

Hi,

We've recently updated our UCS to the latest release, which finally adds support for VM-FEX for 2012 R2.  However, the supposed official method to manage VM-FEX for Hyper-V is using the UCSM Provider in Microsoft VMM 2012 R2.

Has anyone been able to successfully get VMM 2012 R2 configured with the UCSM Provider?

Cheers

[ismith]

I've been trying do do the same thing with a VMM 2012 R2 HA server.  Keep gettting "Object Reference not set to an instance of an object" errors.  Were you ever able to resolve this?

[johncarew]

Any one at all? How do we fix or get around this issue?

[ismith]

fwiw, I opened a case with Microsoft on this.  The engineer has told me that they have isolated it to "a known issue with UCSM 2.2", but have not divulged what that issue might be.  Been waiting for 2 weeks, hoping that I hear something more definitive soon.

[johncarew]

I dug into this more, this is an issue with Cisco and not MS. The issue is within the code of their UCSM provider for SCVMM. They are attempting to find the SCVMM Connection in UCS based on the hostname or IP of the server running SCVMM. This is fine if you are running SCVMM as a standalone install. But, if you are running it in HA within a cluster, then you will get that error.

Their code uses this snippet of code to gather the IPs on the SCVMM server to match to what is configured in UCS.

var iPAddresses = Dns.GetHostAddresses(IPGlobalProperties.GetIPGlobalProperties().HostName);

The problem with that code is that it only pulls the IPs that are bound to the hostname of the server, and not the cluster. They need to update it to use the following code so that it pulls all the IPs on the servers, including the cluster IP.

var iPAddresses = NetworkInterface.GetAllNetworkInterfaces().SelectMany<NetworkInterface, UnicastIPAddressInformation>(i => i.GetIPProperties().UnicastAddresses).Select(p => p.Address)
 

A temporary work around is to change the IP or hostname that is saved in UCSM in your SCVMM Connection settings to the hostname or IP of the existing clustered SCVMM server that is the owner of the VMM Service in MS Cluster manager.

If anyone knows how to get this information pushed back to Cisco developers so that it can get fixed, please share this post with them.

[ismith]

I have tested this in my environment by changing the VMM hostname defined in UCS to the cluster node running the HA VMM server workload.  This allowed me to run a connection test successfully,  indicating that my issue is at least partially the same as yours.

However, VMM will still not add the VSEM without an error, and though it appears in the console it seems to be nonfunctional in my environment.  (refreshing the VSEM throws an error, no network elements are imported into the configuration).  So the workaround is nonfunctional for me.  I've sent this along to the MS devs, who say they are in contact with the Cisco dev team.

[johncarew]

Have you looked at the log file that the VSEM provider creates? It's located in c:\Users\<VMM Service Account>\AppData\Local\Temp\UCSMProvider\logs

[johncarew]

Anyone figure this out? Fresh install, same issue.