Applied UR3 for VMM? Update your VMM DHCP Server Extension now!

Update your SCVMM DHCP Server Extension now!

From the KB:

“When using System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM 2012 R2), you may discover that some virtual machines that are deployed on Hyper-V Network Virtualization networks with dynamic IP address allocation may not get an IP address for a few minutes after a reboot of the VM. Eventually the VM gets the IP address and otherwise functions normally.

The behavior can occur if the host has an older version of the VMM DHCP server extension. In order to verify this, find the version of “Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager DHCP Server (x64)” installed on the host by running the following Powershell command:

Get-WmiObject –Class win32_product –filter ‘Name = “Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager DHCP Server (x64)”’

The resolution is to first uninstall the old version of the DHCP extension manually, and then install the updated version from VMM installation folder\SwExtn\DHCPExtn.msi

Default path is: C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center 2012 R2\Virtual Machine Manager\SwExtn\DHCPExtn.msi

Once this is done, the VMs should no longer experience a delay in acquiring an IP address after a reboot.

Reference: http://blogs.technet.com/b/scvmm/archive/2014/07/31/support-tip-vms-deployed-to-hyper-v-networks-experience-delays-acquiring-an-ip-address-after-reboot.aspx

Background:

Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V introduced several enhancements related to NVGRE.

One of these things are “Dynamic IP address learning”.

What is Dynamic IP address learning?

Feedback from customers told Microsoft that it was important to enable highly available services to run in a VM network. To support that, dynamic IP address learning was brought to the table.

In other words, services such as DHCP, DNS and AD is supported in a NVGRE based network on Hyper-V.

“First for broadcast or multicast packets in a VM network, we will use a PA multicast IP address if configured. However, the typical data center operator does not enable multicast in their environments. As a result, when a PA multicast address is not available we use intelligent PA unicast replication. What this means is that we unicast packets only to PA addresses that are configured for the particular virtual subnet the packet is on. In addition, we only send one unicast packet per host no matter how many relevant VMs are on the host. Finally, once a host learns a new IP address it notifies SCVMM. At this point, the learned IP address becomes part of the centralized policy that SCVMM pushes out. This allows for both rapid dissemination of HNV routing policy and limits the network overhead for disseminating this HNV routing policy.”

Second, what is the SCVMM DHCP Extension?

In order to leverage NVGRE, you would have to manage your hosts entirely with powershell, if you didn't have VMM in place.

When VMM is in place (and really should be in place, when using NVGRE), VMM act as the complete management layer, also for the NVGRE part. Since NVGRE basically is a policy driven technology, VMM need to keep track of every IP address used with NVGRE. During deployment of virtual machines connected to a VM Network with NVGRE (often referred to as Customer Addresses), VMM is able to configure static IP addresses on to these VMs, using the agent you are mentioning. This was introduced in VMM 2012 SP1, and is present in the R2 Release. 

Therefore, to summarize, it is a Hyper-V Switch Extension that is required on all Windows Server with Hyper-V to have DHCP to work correctly.

Great. But can I deploy the updated agents to all my Hyper-V hosts in a single operation?

From your VMM server, you can run the following script (please let it match your computer names in the fabric before you run it):

$setup = "\\vmm01\c$\Program Files\Microsoft System Center 2012 R2\Virtual Machine Manager\SwExtn\DHCPExtn.msi"

Invoke-Command -ComputerName hv03, hv04, hv01, hv02, hvfm01, hvfm02, hvgw01, hvgw02 -Command { $setup }