Technology Roller Coaster

On day where I’m still recovering from a long day, long night, and an early morning support call with Microsoft – I needed a fun reminder as to how neat this technology can be.

Working with a client this morning, we wanted to test our System Center Virtual Machine Manager installation.

On the technical side of the equation, this environment is a three node Windows 2008 R2 Hyper V failover cluster connected to a backend SAN.  A separate Windows 2008 R2 server is acting as the virtual machine management console.

We took turns, one by one, putting the virtual host machines into Maintenance Mode.  This automatically moves any virtual machines on that particular host another host in the cluster.  This move is “live”, so end users don’t know anything is happening while the move takes place or that the server their using is now running from a different virtual host machine.

While the machine is in maintenance mode, we installed Windows Updates and rebooted.  Once the reboot was complete, we stopped maintenance mode on the virtual host machine.  System Center Virtual Machine Manager then reallocates the virtual machines running on the other virtual hosts back to the reinstated virtual host.

Sometimes technology is just cool.