Hyper-V 2012 : VLAN Trunking

During one of our Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 deployment (without GUI) on HP 160 G5, we have come across a very interesting finding of the built-in capabilities where you can now TRUNK VLAN without HP Network Configuration Utility (HPCU)

It was both the shock an excitement that night when both myself and Hafiz found that by adding a DWORD to the registry and a clean restart... VOILA ! the VLAN trunking works as expected.

This is the location to find for the registry key that you have to add.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{4d36e972-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}\00xx

xx could be any number so you must open each key and look for your network adapter. If you are using NIC Teaming you probably need to do this for both adapters or all adapters that set up your team, in case you have more than two.

So, what is so great about this ?

Remember back in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, you need to install HPCU (Not an option). After the installation, you have to use HPCU to create VLAN(802.1q) with the NIC port of you choice. 

And the next complication was that for each VLAN that you trunk, there will be additional Network Adapter create for that particular VLAN

Imaging you have 2 NIC ports and you have 5 VLANs that you need to trunk them for the VMs. This will gives you 10 extra Network Adapters show in Network Connections window. MESSY !!!

Now that we can do this without HPCU, you only need to specify the VLAN in the Virtual Network of the VM that want to connect to.

SCSM 2012 : Work Item Running Number

One counter for all types of work items:

For instance:

• New Incident = IR1

• New Change Request = CR2

• Change Request contains 2 activities = RA3 and MA4

• New Incident = IR5

and so on

All work items are sharing the same counter for ID. Only the prefix is added to this ID based on the work item class (IR, CR, PR, SR, MA, RA).

For this reason the ID is not increment uniformly for each type of work item.

This behavior can't be changed. 

However, you can set the starting number by changing a value in the database.

Basically there is this table in the ServiceManager database called the AutoIncrementAvailableRange table.  This value stores the next available number for a particular class property.  If the last work item ID that was handed out was 1234 this table would show 1235 and then once 1235 was used it would say 1236.  You get the idea.  So, by changing this number we can change the base number that we start from.  Let’s say for example that we always want our incident IDs to be in the 10,000+ range.  We could change thus number to 10000 and start from there.  Definitely don’t set it lower than the current number though!  That will most likely be very bad.

Use the SQL command below to set the new number you want

update AutoIncrementAvailableRange

set FirstAvailableValue = 10000 

where ManagedTypeId = 'F59821E2-0364-ED2C-19E3-752EFBB1ECE9' and ManagedTypePropertyId = '28B1C58F-AEFA-A449-7496-4805186BD94F'

Use the command below to check if the value changed to the one you set using command above

select

MT.TypeName,

MT.ManagedTypeId,

MTP.ManagedTypePropertyName,

MTP.ManagedTypePropertyID,

AIAR.FirstAvailableValue

from ManagedType as MT, ManagedTypeProperty as MTP, AutoIncrementAvailableRange as AIAR 

where MT.ManagedTypeId = AIAR.ManagedTypeId and MTP.ManagedTypePropertyId = AIAR.ManagedTypePropertyId

Notice that at the end of the role "System.WorkItem", at the "FirstAvailableValue" column, the number is the number you have set.

Update Rollup 2 for SCSM 2012 released

It is available now for download. For those of you who having the following issues, please find yourself this update with this Rollup 2 release :-

• The URL links to incidents or activities in the Notification Templates are incorrect. For more information about this issue, go to the following Microsoft TechNet website:
• Including Links to Incidents or Activities in Notification Templates (SCSM 2012)
• The time stamp for incidents that are created by using the SMTP connector are incorrect.
• If you change the SharePoint site language in the Service Manager portal, an incorrect language may be displayed.
• Service Manager does not generate an incident for alerts that are created by Operations Manager rules.

More information can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2706783.